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.
Hi. I’m new to OMLx (ROCK znver1 20250420). And I work/play on Microsoft OS since my 16 years (and I’m 63 now 
). French is my mother’s language, so forgive me for what I miss.
I tested different Linux distros beside of Windows (because I’m must use Windows at work : no equivalent software running on Linux). I tested Debian and Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse and Mageia. So I begin to know the best way for doing it correctly when installing Linux on a Windows running machine. And be sure of one thing : I allways do these installations whithout reading the release notes and without doing any save before 
(that wouldn’t be fun otherwise). Never lost anything; strange, no ?
And let’s say : if partitioning is an important point (because one could destruct his datas), there are other annoyous points on modern hardware (like secure boot, CSM, ultrafast boot, bitlocker…).
I probably could do a little “topo” about it. There is lot of points to check, before plugging your boot-key in the USB port. And “Linux for newbies”, hmmm, how to say… Newbies already cry under Windows or MacOS. If they’d be not to cry with Linux, then Linux had to be very-very simple to install, with not trick, no error-inducing software (like Discover being able to break things, that is a superb newbie-trap 
) and well functionning “out of the box” (with a ROCK version at least). When you get errors doing your 1st system update from OM Welcome, that isn’t fair; with ROME perhaps, but not with ROCK.
Say me what you expect.
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Welcome! We are glad to see you here and hope you decide to make this your home.
Welcome.
Very true.
Where many of us have been with friends and neighbors:
“My Windows computer broke! All my photos disappeared! They are my only ones! You must fix it! 
”
“My MacBook lost all my family pictures! They are my only ones! You must fix it! ”
The funny part is I don’t even use macOS and have never used Windows 11. But this does prove that common sense is not so common and can’t be taught.
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There is this:
It should be possible to take that and write and Installation Guide for OMLx Calamares Installer.
We also could use a Preinstall User Guide that covers ISO selection, downloading installation image, and copying that image to USB flash drive. And whatever else users might suggest. For instance for dual booting with Windows most users would need to shrink a Windows partition to have space for an OMLx system. And many Windows users might want to use their ntfs storage partiton in OMLx as well.
OMLx is a Community distribution of Linux. This means if something needs to be done someone in the Community will have to do it. And this is one where I can participate but I can not do this myself.
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I seem to recall that both Mint and Ubuntu had the option to shrink the Windows partition for the first time Linux user. No idea how they made this happen. I am definitely not a programmer and wouldn’t know where to start. I knew enough to go into Windows first, shrink the partition, and then start installing Kubuntu.
However, this doesn’t eliminate the major pain of Windows destroying the ability to boot back into Linux every time Windows does a Microsoft-forced update. The ultimate way around this is, as WilsonPhillips recommended, installing a second drive if space permits and go into the UEFI at POST to choose which OS. But some of us can’t do that with our antique laptops (wish I could). One more reason why I am glad I hosed off Windows ASAP.
My experience with using NTFS drives with Linux shows that while it can be done once the user is familiar with editing the /etc/fstab file.
I think I just dug a deeper hole.
Back in the last half of 2020 to early 2021 when I was checking out Linux, I learned how to deal with NTFS the hard way. Searching the Internet for web pages that explained fstab and how to configure it for NTFS. Once I was committed to Linux, goodbye NTFS partitions. Because every external drive was a primary and backup, I reformatted them to ext4 and copied the data to the new format. Then I cleaned up the fstab file by deleting the NTFS entries. For storage over a long time frame, I don’t trust FAT32.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel for NTFS and fstab. Just point the user to an existing web page that documents how to configure the fstab file for NTFS. One big advantage OM has in my opinion is Kate, an easy-to-use editor when compared to VIM’s lack of a GUI.
For Windows users for the short term or for non-critical data, if they want to swap back and forth between Windows and Linux with the same data storage partition or drive, my advice is to reformat to FAT32 and let Dolphin deal with it, as this is the easiest way if they don’t want to get their fingers dirty inside fstab. I know how most Windows users don’t want to learn anything that even remotely looks like programming.
However, if not swapping between operating systems, a reformat to ext4 or other Linux supported format is the best bet.
Just me rambling about what I did when starting with Linux four years ago. Don’t take me too seriously. My computer education is somewhere between zero and nonexistent.
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Start by running LibreOffice in Windows and saving all your documents in open document format. Simpler ones as .RTF will suffice. These can be opened on either platform and make your life a LOT easier.
One thing that most users know nothing of is line endings. Windows and Unix end lines differently. I will let Indiana University explain it.
Convert between Unix and Windows text files - IUKB
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My experience with LibreOffice is with my brother creating documents on the Windows version (he loves Spyware 11 despite my warnings), saving them in the native LibreOffice format, putting them into a .7z file with a password, emailing them to me, and I am able to decompress with Ark and LibreOffice loads them in the native file format. No problems. If I make changes, I just did the opposite in reverse, except I would force Ark to compress using 7z instead of the defaults. One time I used Ark’s default. Talk about confusion on his end. 7z was able to decompress it once I convinced him that it was a compressed file.
Thank you very much. You just made me realize how much stuff I forgot from my days composting and debugging CNC G-code programs decades ago. It was required to get the end of line format correct for what each machine tool’s CNC controller demanded. I need to start composting, so I don’t end up senile or something.
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I have been looking at the Calamares guide, and, wrt partitioning, it says the automated options are:
“1. Shrink an existing partition and install alongside any other OS already available on your system, using a filesystem selected as default by your distribution.
2. Choose an existing partition to be replaced with a new installation using the same filesystem type already present on the partition.
3. Use the entire disk and will create one partition where all will be installed under root, all other partitions will be removed and the filesystem used will be the default set by your distribution.”
In my case, I have 3 partitions, a small 200MB EFI partition, a 395 GB NTFS partition (that currently has Win 10 on it), and a smaller 70GB partition on which I have stored some docs, phots, music, etc.
I don’t want a dual boot system, I just want to install OML Rock 6 on the 395GB partition, but is seems that I would need to use the manual partition function of Calamares to make it an ext4 partition.
Is this correct?
Also:
“Once the partition table is set, you need to partition the drive, minimum needed, one partition for / (root). There are some advantages to using a separate partition for /home, and you might like to have a swap partition for sleep/hibernate.”
I figure I’ll use a separate / and /home partition to make it easier to install Rock 7 when it comes out.
So, given that My Win10 install with all my SW installed is about 38GB, I figure a 40GB / partition should be much more than enough, as OML should have less bloat, so I’ll have room for more. 8.2 GB swap for hibernation. That leaves me about 347GB for my files in the /home partition.
I looked here
https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/how-to-have-root-home-and-swap-partitions-created-during-openmandriva-lx-installation/1839/6
I want to have all my ducks in a row before doing the install, as I haven’t done this in over 15 years, and things have changed . This is my first time going into a UEFI bios, in which I set to boot sequence to start with the USB.
Did I miss anything?