Hello, apparently hanging out in Lemmy inadvertently makes you thinking about using Linux. I am planning to install Linux Mint cinnamon on an older laptop, which I want to bring to LAN Parties. From what I read I can just format my C:\ windows disk, install Linux via bootable drive and from what I understand, proton is basically included when installing steam after setting up my new Linux OS? Thanks for your comments:)
He didn’t imply that, he said he wanted to format C:\
Why is it oversimplifying to say the disk will be called / in Linux?
I just meant with the
C:comment that OP shouldn’t expect it to still be calledC:after he’s wiped Windows and is running Linux.As for the oversimplification comment:
First off,
C:(orD:,E:etc) doesn’t refer to a disk in Windows. It refers to a partition. So it’s entirely possible (and not terribly uncommon) to have a single disk with both aC:and aD:on it.It’s very typical for a Linux installation process to (by default, if you don’t tell it to do something else) make separate partitions on a single disk for
/and/home. (Plus there’s usually an extra EFI boot partition on most modern desktop/laptop systems. And a swap partition.) In such a case, you couldn’t really describe where “the disk” (that was formerly calledC:on Windows) was mounted in the mindset of conflating “partition” with “disk”. What was previously “the disk”C:(again,C:isn’t a disk, it’s a partition, but Windows makes it easy to conflate the two) is now split in two (or three or more) and mounted not just on/but also on/home(and maybe on/bootas well, and maybe one partition isn’t mounted on the main abstract root filesystem)./and/homearen’t really even partitions (let alone disks). They’re mount points in the slightly more abstract root filesystem.The most obvious software representation on a typical Linux system of the main internal disk in that machine would probably be something like
/dev/sdaor/dev/nvme0. The partitions would likely be something like/dev/sda1//dev/sda2/etc or/dev/nvme0p1//dev/nvme0p2/etc. Also, the “filesystem” on the partition is arguably a subtlely a distinct concept from the block device that is the partition. And where that filesystem is mounted is yet another distinct concept. (Another subtlety I haven’t mentioned is the distinction between the device in the/dev/directory/filesystem and the kernel representation of the device with the device major/minor numbers.)A typical Windows install kindof conflates a lot of these probably a lot more so than Linux does. But I didn’t want to be like “akshuly things are a lot more complicated than that and you have to understand a bunch of Linux kernel internals to understand all the ways in which you’re wrong so you can install the holy ‘Guh-noo Plus Linux’.” All that is stuff that OP will learn by installing and using Linux. And if OP’s going with Mint, it’s probably not necessary to really understand all of that before starting the install process.
And technically OP doesn’t really need to understand that the main disk won’t be called
C:after switching to Linux. Probably. (I don’t think I’ve ever installed Mint. So I don’t know for sure, but from what I’ve heard about it, I’d be surprised if the installation process had much of a learning curve.) But I told OP anyway. So there. :DOkay thank you. I feel like it’s a lot of information here that is about, like you say, how complicated abstract and advanced it is, with the devices, kernel representations and mount points.
There must be a better way of just explaining how the root fs works, because I still don’t understand anything.
It really doesn’t feel like comparing it to windows gives any favours though, maybe explain use cases, like where would the user save downloads, where would you install apps?
I’ve used Linux a little. Right now it’s modernized enough for me to not learn the file system. But I remember in old times when I ran Ubuntu I just crammed files in a folder and struggled a lot with it