Well, he ain’t wrong.
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Excellent work so far.
However, during installation, the installer failed every time (3x on the K55A, 1x on the X555UA) when using automatic partitioning. My solution was to go with manual partitioning, creating a 300 MB FAT32 partition for (/boot/EFI) and another for the root (/).
I am not certain as to why this is, but I suspect it may be unique to ASUS laptops.
Experienced Linux users will eventually figure out this part on their own if they are willing to be persistent and not too worried about casualties on the SSD.
Inexperienced Linux (Windows/macOS) users will be heading towards giving up unless they are given step-by-step instructions for manual partitioning using the KDE Partition Manager. Perhaps a section on manual partitioning requirements in the tips? With a link to how to use the KDE Partition Manager on the KDE website (https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/partitionmanager/partitionmanager/partitionmanager.pdf)?
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What to do if there is a problem installing OMLx
Tips for manual partitioning with Calamares installer
Those are here:
Resources Index
It may be more to the point to investigate why automatic partitioning failed for you. This is something plenty of users and us testers use regularly.
Both laptops are no longer running factory supplied hard drives. Those were replaced several years ago. Based on my limited experience, using a SSD with hardware designed for a hard drive should not make any difference. Both originally had Windows. My impression is once you delete the current partition table and create a new one, Windows is gone. Since wiping out Windows on both, Kubuntu, Fedora, Pop_OS, Mint Cinnamon, a few other distros, and openSUSE Tumbleweed were on one at assorted different times, Kubuntu on the other.
I do not understand your point? I am missing something?
Edit: I have replaced hd’s with ssd’s myself and it never presented any problem. For operating systems I did fresh installs. For data I copied from old hd to flash drive and cp’d that to the new ssd. But I do not use Windows so that is not a factor for me.
I am just telling you what I did to the hardware, not sure if it meant anything. I no longer use Windows. Back when I was working, I did. Now that I am no longer working and Windows died on one and was almost dead on the other, I deleted Windows and started over. I doubt any of these changes made any difference. But I learned an old saying: “Never say never. Just when you believe it can never happen, it does.”
I am not looking for why I had to do a manual partition. Back when I used Windows, it seems manual partitioning was the rule, not the exception. At least for myself.
Perhaps I started going down a rabbit hole that isn’t worth an investment of time. My original points were to relay what I did to get everything working, and I am led to believe that the overwhelming majority of Windows/macOS users coming here probably will need additional detailed documentation when things go sideways because most of them are quick to jump to conclusions unless detailed step-by-step instructions are provided.
Stamping out “Linux sucks” is always a worthy goal, in my opinion.
Now, regarding “Linux sucks.”
Yesterday afternoon I encountered an “IT expert” who I listened to for half an hour explaining why Linux sucks because he couldn’t get the distro installed, followed by why Linux sucks because it doesn’t work on current hardware and doesn’t work with software XYZ. So I showed him on the software website that yes, software XYZ does run on Linux, so long as the user has Java (yuck) installed. But then, Windows and macOS have the same requirement. I came away concluding that he was a Linus Tech Tips type of individual who really didn’t try to bother to learn first, didn’t watch a few YouTube videos on the subject of how to install Linux and applications, or didn’t go digging around the Internet web pages for those answers as I did a few years ago (ex: what is grep?). And yes, I offered to install Linux for no charge for my time if he was willing to stick around and watch how I do it.
Edit: This is sort of a thinking out loud post…
I can not write a how to for users that want to dual boot OMLx and Windows, or those that ditch Windows, because I do not have Windows. I keep asking for someone to write this. I guess I am saying that I can’t write from the perspective of a Windows user and that is what this needs.
I would agree we need better explanation of this specifically oriented to users coming from Windows. But it really needs to be someone that knows and uses Windows that writes this. If someone wants to write something here in forum you create a topic I suppose in Other forum category and I and others can review. What we ideally want is for a few users with Windows to test what is the Guide article. I think this would be a positive for OpenMandriva Lx.
Edit: Writing a general guide to partitioning that goes beyond the article in Resources Index is very difficult because there are so many variables in how users do this. So maybe ultimately we need a “Guide to Partitioning in OMLx installer” with a section for Windows users. Anyway maybe we collectively can get something started on this.
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I have not run Windows since I retired in 2021 and don’t have it running on this PC. I can’t do this either.
The programs and libraries in the repository are much smaller than in other distributions. To install some marginal program or library, you should know how to use Distrobox or build from source and then package it in RPM or AppImage (optional, but much nicer), but that’s a bit tricky. You can try to make a package request, but it’s not certain that there will be a decent maintainer who will devote the time and effort to maintain it decently.
By default in the live images and in the installed system, if you have an nVidia GPU, you may have the nouveau driver enabled, it doesn’t work well with modern graphics cards and you should know how to disable it on boot in GRUB. I don’t know if there is such an option in live, but just in case, I’d recommend familiarizing yourself with the nomodeset option if it’s not there. And you should install a proprietary driver in the installed system via console mode, which is a good thing. About all this, I think you should make articles in your wiki, like Void or Arch.
The problem will soon become irrelevant and should have been mentioned much earlier, but I will write about it anyway. DNF is a very, well, let’s just say very slow package manager. I don’t know why the developers chose this particular one, probably because they were looking for it on purpose and supplied it to people. Its speed can definitely be annoying, especially if you are using HDD (but nowadays, this is not very common).
There are not so many GUI programs that are auxiliary and convenient to configure some important part of the system or related to a feature of the distribution itself like in Mint, OpenSUSE, Manjaro or Ubuntu or anywhere else. But I don’t think it’s a serious problem either. For the most part it is a skill issue of the users themselves.
There is no option to vanilla configure KDE Plasma or not install the desktop environment and additional GUI programs from the distributive.
Repositories with proprietary software, or even free software that uses proprietary technologies, are disabled by default. This will cause some inconvenience to the user. But this is solved quite simply.
So far, these are all the specific characteristics of the distributive that I’ve noticed and they should definitely be mentioned to a new user beforehand.