Linux

48390 readers

821 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

198

What are some things you wish you had known when switching to Linux? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

191 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it's the package manager.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Read/write operations can happen in the background at any moment as long as the drive is mounted, so that's not terribly comforting.

Anyway, Windows has always avoided deferring writes on removable media, for as long as it's been capable of deferring writes at all. That's not new in Windows 10.

Linux has a mount option, sync, to do the same thing. Dunno if any desktop environments actually use it, but they could. Besides being slower, though, it has the downside of causing more write operations (since they can't be batched together into fewer, larger writes), so flash drives will wear out faster. I imagine Windows' behavior has the same problem, although with Windows users accustomed to pulling out their drives without unmounting, I suppose that's the lesser of two evils.