The common recommendation is Linux Mint, but there are lots of Ubuntu derivatives out there. Another common recommendation is Debian or a Debian derivative, and those will generally be similar to Ubuntu since Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu.

You can feel free to ignore it if you aren’t open to other options, but my personal distro recommendation for a Gnome-based desktop is Fedora. It has a much quicker update cycle, so you’ll actually get feature updates on your packages (which is great if you use neovim plugins, since the neovim packages in the Ubuntu repos are ancient at this point, or you know, any other package that benefits from being updated). Of course it obviously isn’t as bleeding edge as Arch, though I personally see that as a benefit because I found Arch to be unstable (haven’t really experienced any instability with Fedora in the past few years though). But don’t be mistaken, I’m not saying Fedora is similar to Ubuntu, just providing an alternative perspective since you seem to be open to switching to a different distro (though the differences may be more minor than you think from an end-user perspective).

BTW, Linux Mint isn’t just a “beginner distro”, it’s perfectly fine for anyone to use, and it fixes a lot of the Canonical BS from Ubuntu. I feel like some people get caught up in the thought that Mint is the distro that you ditch for another one when you become more comfortable with Linux, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Going through the GitHub page for the bot, it seems that this is intended behavior by the dev. In their own words:

I think it still serves its purpose of people not having to leave the community to see what the article is about.

I agree with this, personally, as I don’t like having to follow links to read articles. It’s nice having a comment with a TL;DR, or for very short articles having the whole article in the comments. Plus, it’s not like one (relatively short) comment really adds bloat to the comments section, it’s something that can be easily scrolled past.

Perhaps I was a bit vague with the word “performance”, but given that this user only seems to be interested in running ROS, there is absolutely no reason they need anything above the FPS cap (hence my recommendation of virt-manager, as it is quite user friendly). The “performance” aspect of it boils down to CPU utilization and efficiency more than anything.

I don’t have much to comment on native installs that hasn’t already been said, but if you go with a VM, please don’t use VirtualBox. It’s a pile of hot garbage that pales in comparison to the already existing, kernel-level virtualization offered by KVM/QEMU. Use a package like virt-manager for KVM/QEMU based VMs and your experience and performance will be infinitely better. The Linux kernel has KVM built in for a reason, so take advantage of that.

Otherwise, Distrobox is a great recommendation, as are many of the other install methods listed in these comments.

My personal recommendation is Fedora, but the community recommendation will likely be Linux Mint, which is also a perfectly good recommendation. Either of them are “just works” distros. I prefer the update cycle of Fedora, and would certainly want to distance myself from Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives (even Mint), and Debian’s update cycle is painfully slow. Fedora manages what is seemingly a perfect balance of quick and stable updates.

Fedora comes with Gnome by default, but it has spins for other DEs like KDE Plasma if that’s more of your thing (I’ll be switching to Plasma when Fedora 40 releases with Plasma 6).

The most compatible archive type is probably zip. Your friend is probably using WinRAR (why on Earth someone would use WinRAR in 2024 is beyond me), and it can handle standard .zip files just fine.

Just do

zip .zip    ...

As an added bonus, you can list all the files in an unrar file (with unrar -l .rar), extract them to a specific directory, add them all into a zip file with the above command, and then empty the unzipped directory for the next .rar.

I have been using Fedora Workstation for years now, and I plan to switch to the KDE spin when Fedora 40 is released. I will absolutely never miss the rolling release model, and Fedora has been stable enough that I basically never have any issues. You get updates quickly, but even with the speed it manages to be very stable, at least compared to bleeding edge distros like Arch. There are still MANY things you can use the Arch wiki for in Fedora, so it’s still my first place to check for most things. But there are also forums for Fedora, and lots of community members that have answered questions in those forums, just not to the extent of something like Ubuntu. It is mainstream enough that you can find most things with Linux releases packaged for it, so I haven’t had an issue with compatibility, either. It’s overall a very solid choice, and I would recommend it.

Yeah, snap packages have a tendency to break everything, so avoid them like the plague. You should be able to choose what repo you install from in the Ubuntu app store by clicking the dropdown in the top right of the app’s page (which defaults to snap if one is available), and selecting something else. I can’t remember what the options are, but for a native install you’re looking for something like “.deb”, or “Ubuntu repository”, or “apt”, something of the like. You could also install flatpak and set up flathub so you can get apps packaged as flatpaks (which are kind of like snaps, except they actually function and generally work well for most applications). Not sure if you can get flatpak working with the Ubuntu app store, but it works with Gnome software stores for any other distro out of the box (like Fedora and Nobara). Ubuntu is owned by Canonical, who manages snaps, so they have financial motivation to shove them down their user’s throats (which has been met with much dismay by the Linux community).

Snaps and flatpaks are essentially meant to be portable formats that are packaged with all of their dependencies inside their own sandbox so that they function the exact same when installed on different distros. This has great applications for compatibility (you can install the same package on any distro instead of compiling your package for multiple package managers and distros), and security (the sandboxing serves as a layer of isolation from other apps. Flatpak does this pretty well, but snap has tons of problems.

If you’re ever at the point where you want/need to install a new OS, I’d recommend switching away from Ubuntu to avoid the headaches. Linux Mint is a common recommendation if you want to stick to a system that’s similar to Ubuntu (it’s based on Ubuntu), but my personal recommendation is something Fedora-based like Fedora Workstation or Nobara. You can find tons of info in this community on what different distros are like, and you’ll see that there is no one “best” distro.

If you ever run into any other problems though, this is a great place to ask for help. One of the many great things about Linux is that much of the community is very knowledgeable about how to do/fix practically anything; and many of those people are just happy to help someone so they can enjoy their switch to Linux. There’s also AskUbuntu, the Arch Wiki, Fedora forums, etc. that are available for whichever distro they are tailored to.

No, it wouldn’t since the steam snap isn’t installed anymore. But you can clear out the left over snapshot of it manually. Just use sudo snap saved, find the entry that says steam, and sudo snap forget

If there is no steam entry listed, then there’s nothing else you have to do.

Yeah, enabling i386 won’t hurt anything. Has your issue been resolved, or are there still errors?

Just to clarify, the error you are seeing in the firmware updater and privacy settings are because your motherboard does not support UEFI, and instead uses legacy BIOS. There is no way to fix that without upgrading your hardware, and it shouldn’t be related to your issue, but it may be an issue for anticheat in certain games.

On an unrelated note, you should really upgrade your motherboard and CPU if you have the chance, as those will be massive bottlenecks to performance. Your GPU is way overpowered for those components, so you aren’t getting the most out of it. But that likely isn’t related to the issue you are currently facing, I just wanted to mention it if you have grievances with the performance of your current computer.

I spun up an Ubuntu VM, and while it won’t have Nvidia drivers listed (since it doesn’t have GPU passthrough), this should be similar to what you should have seen when installing:

Pretty much all those are i386 packages (32-bit), so you shouldn’t need to enable the architecture in your version of Ubuntu, it should automatically happen (I didn’t need to use sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386). Of course I did this on Ubuntu 22.04 because it’s a VM I already had, but it should be very similar to 23.10

By the way, if you still have issues after the native Steam install and it gives you the same 32-bit driver warning, you should be able to resolve it with the following:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-libs:i386

That is of course assuming that the error message you pasted in another thread gave the correct package name, which is not a guarantee. It should have automatically been installed as a dependency to Steam if it was installed through apt though, so I don’t feel like that will necessarily be a solution.

Unless it errors out, it should eventually finish. But if you cancelled it, then just purge remove the snap like the following:

sudo snap remove --purge steam

That should skip the data backup when removing. I’ve seen reports of other users that this backup process sometimes takes 10-20 minutes with the default remove command, even with small programs. Blame Canonical for that one.

If you were to open the Software & Updates app and go to Additional Drivers, does the driver package you tested say it comes from Nvidia and it is “(proprietary, tested)”? If so, then your drivers should be fine. nvidia-driver-libs:i386 is 32-bit, so I don’t know why you would need that installed unless DayZ is only compatible with 32-bit drivers for some reason. I have Steam installed on my Fedora install, and I don’t have any 32-bit Nvidia drivers installed but everything works perfectly. That’s a separate issue altogether, and I don’t recommend running 32-bit drivers unless your system is 32-bit. Can you copy the “System Details” window in the About tab of the Settings app? It should have Hardware and Software information like the CPU, GPU, windowing system, etc. There are a few things that could cause issues that I might be able to glean from that.

I’m on Fedora, but since it’s running Gnome it should theoretically look the same. You access the system details here:

Here’s what mine looks like for reference:

System Details Report

Report details

• Date generated: 2024-01-10 07:58:06

Hardware Information:

• Hardware Model: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ASUS TUF Dash F15 FX516PM_FX516PM
• Memory: 16.0 GiB
• Processor: 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11370H × 8
• Graphics: Intel® Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)
• Graphics 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3060 Laptop GPU
• Disk Capacity: 1.0 TB

Software Information:

• Firmware Version: FX516PM.329
• OS Name: Fedora Linux 39 (Workstation Edition)
• OS Build: (null)
• OS Type: 64-bit
• GNOME Version: 45.2
• Windowing System: X11
• Kernel Version: Linux 6.6.9-200.fc39.x86_64

To uninstall the steam snap, you should be able to open up a terminal and type the following:

sudo snap remove steam

And assuming that works, to install the native version of Steam (which should be what’s installed anyway, but Canonical is pushing their proprietary snap BS that has never worked well), this should apparently work (I don’t have an Ubuntu install to test on though):

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
sudo apt update
sudo apt install steam

If it prompts you for anything, you can just confirm by typing “y”. I’d recommend you check that it isn’t installing the snap version, but I don’t know how to guide you to do that, really. I haven’t used a distro with the Aptitude package manager in over 5 years.

Of course, it probably isn’t helpful, but I’d recommend avoiding vanilla Ubuntu if you aren’t already too deeply invested. Linux Mint seems to be a common recommendation for new users and it’s based off Ubuntu, but in all honesty I’d probably recommend Nobara (gaming focused and more user friendly version of Fedora). That way you don’t get snaps shoved down your throat by Canonical, which break things constantly. Up to you if you want to install another OS though; in theory you shouldn’t need to, and there should be a way to resolve these issues with your current install.

The uninstalling issue almost certainly isn’t hardware related, Ubuntu’s app store is just a pile of hot garbage. Stuff like that happens all the time, or at least that was my experience years ago when I used Ubuntu, one of the (many) reasons I no longer recommend Ubuntu to new users.

As for the Steam issues, it’s probably a mix of software and hardware issues. It seems there are some permissions issues (likely caused by snap), but it also seems like there are GPU driver issues. What GPU do you have? If you have an Nvidia card, have you installed their drivers? There is also a very real possibility that your card is so old that DayZ is no longer compatible with it (which may be the case given that it wasn’t working in Windows, but to be fair Windows 7 is incredibly out of date and doesn’t receive updates so it could have also been a software/driver issue there).

It runs JavaCard OS, which is developed by Oracle and not open source. Even though it also runs JavaCard OS, I’d recommend the flexSecure JavaCard from Dangerous Things (for the same price as the Apex Flex), because all of its applets are open source: https://dangerousthings.com/product/flexsecure/. It isn’t quite as “seamless”, because it doesn’t have the closed-source app store available for it that the Apex Flex does, but it instead uses open-source applets that you can load onto it. Regardless, either option will run a closed-source OS, but as far as secure verification goes (by using challenge-response instead of static keys which could be read and copied like old RFID tags), JavaCard is currently the best option. And as far as implantable chips go, the flexSecure JavaCard and the Apex Flex are the 2 best chips on the market to my knowledge.

The silver lining is that there are plenty of open source applets you can run on JavaCards (like the flexSecure ones written by Dangerous Things)

I’m talking mostly about musl, but Void with glibc still requires more work than a “just works” distro. As such, I didn’t see a point in trying Void with glibc, because the biggest benefit I saw to switching was for musl. It’s great for some, but not for me, just as I wouldn’t use Gentoo. There were a lot of things that didn’t run, I don’t have a full list. I know for a fact that Steam (or any Steam games) wouldn’t run, I’m fairly confident that the OnlyOffice suite wouldn’t work, I believe that EasyEffects wouldn’t run which was a big problem, since I use that for system wide equalization, and for my microphone filters. I probably could have figured out how to set everything up with bare PipeWire, but it’s basically the same story for everything: it just requires way more work. My VPN (Mullvad) isn’t compiled for musl, nor was the Nextcloud client, and many things I use every day. Those are just the things I remember having issues with off the top of my head, and it may not have only been musl that was the problem, but it’s very likely it was.

Void Linux with musl. I wanted to try setting up a distro with Musl, but many things I use daily simply don’t work with it, and the hassle of troubleshooting everything was a bit too much. I went back to Fedora Workstation, and I’ll likely stay on it for my workstation (though I’ll switch to Fedora Kinoite when Fedora 40 releases). I also use Fedora Server for my personal server, since it’s very familiar to me, and there’s not a huge point in switching to CentOS anymore with the recent changes, so I’ll probably just stick to it.

The post explains them quite well. HRIR (Head-Related Impulse Response) and SOFA (Spacially Oriented Format for Acoustics) are standards for representing spacial audio (surround sound) in audio files and streams. A convolver is something that performs convolution (a mathematical term for taking one function, applying it to another, and then producing a third function as a result), and a spatializer is more specifically something that, as the name suggests, gives “space” to audio (distorting audio to represent sounds coming from more than simply 2 directions, or again, what you call surround sound). So HRIR Convolver is simply a method to apply the HRIR function to audio to represent it in a way our brain would interpret as 3D audio, and SOFA Spatializer is simply a method to do the same thing, just with the SOFA standard instead of the HRIR standard. Based on the comments of the post, it seems that they recommend you use SOFA.

In either case, Pipewire supports both standards, and it is trivially easy to implement them through filters (as the post covers in depth). You could try both if you want and see which you prefer. If you’re unfamiliar with managing Pipewire and need further resources, the Arch wiki has an entry in great length about it here. I’d recommend reading the comments to that post first if you struggle with anything, such as persistence. Everything you need to set it up should be accessible in that post and its comments.

I’d also like to recommend that you read the post and comments to the post, or simply use a search engine if you come across unfamiliar terms. You can find answers to all the questions you’ve asked through the linked post and a simple search.