I made my user account the owner of / directory later when I turned on my device it shows this thing

Since switching to Linux, I've been a little disappointed in the experience, mostly because I didn't properly understand what to expect.

One area I've found where Linux absolutely smashes my Windows experience is in sorting files. On the desktop, if I change how the files in a directory are sorted, Linux takes second to rearrange them, Windows would take several minutes, on the same drive with the same files.

Maybe the difference is because I didn't have Windows configured properly, though I made sure to turn indexing on. Still, it seems Linux has that particular feature nailed.

I need help to be able to move storage from / on one drive to my smaller /home on the other drive.

So I made the mistake of not considering that maybe I shouldn’t run steam on Linux since it’s not windows, and from the fact that this Linux laptop is not made to run games at all, so, if anyone could tell me how to remove applications off of this Linux I would be glad.

I've been gaming for a pretty good while happily on linux.

Lately, however, I realize how much storage I tend to fill with steam games that idly sit waiting to be played.

I use EXT4 because I like the speed, but I have noted in the past that space gets allocated to make the partitions.

Back when I was reliant on NTFS the general rule of storage was leave 100GB free "because it's good for the health of the drive". Does this apply with partitions like EXT4 that demand storage upfront to make use of your storage by acting efficiently?

Edit: please excuse typos.

Ive been distro hopping a lil :3 and umm now it gave me this on openSUSE tumbleweed GNOME.. how cooked am I and like should I just let my hard drive get cool or am I cooked (Also also Linux mint is still my favouritr after switching through 20 in a week)

I just bought an 8TB Ironwolf HDD, and i plan on copying all my other 1TB drives to it, and then just have that data on multiple locations just in case, but i may get another drive to mirror this one in the future. I also might install some games on it that don't require fast storage.

Since that's kind of a lot of data, i want to make sure i don't have to mess with it later.

The drive is not in a NAS, just in a desktop PC.

What would i even need from a filesystem for this? I have no idea what i'm doing here lol.

I have btrfs on my OS drive, and ext4 on my other nvme where i keep my games and stuff like that. But this will be for storing data, images, videos, projects i have, etc...

I probably won't want to use btrfs, but is ext4 fine, or should i use XFS or ZFS or something like that? And if i do, is there anything i need to know about them, how to properly set them up?

Thanks!

Hi everyone, update from my previous post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/s/i2Nqcmp3X6

Quick recap: My friend has a Lenovo ThinkPad X230 (i5-3320M, 4GB RAM) running Windows 10 and it's painfully slow. He wants to switch to Linux Mint or ZorinOS for basic school work (browser, Excel, Word, PDFs).

Now the hardware question: I opened up his laptop and took photos of the motherboard and the current drive. Can someone confirm if I can replace his HDD with a 2.5" SATA SSD?

this machine has a SSD and a HDD.

previously, this machine had fedora workstation. my sister (who uses this machine) did not like it for who knows what reason. and also it consumed 4 gigs of RAM. it only had 8.

i tried installing fedora kinoite. and then something was really off.

i have pictures of the partition section during the installation which i am unable to attach here. but i will share if anyone could help me out here.

so tldr, the HDD was being the boot drive. not the SSD. previously when it had fedora workstation it was working fine. (also! i wanted to do a fresh install. so a formatted disk is what i wanted).

i was confused why this was happening. so i tried to manually partition it. i was unable to do it. i closed everything and i was frustrated.

i turned my head to debian KDE. booted through the flash drive. and once agin, during installation the partitioning part became a problem. SSD cannot be the boot drive. this time i let the installation happen fully. after i booted to debian (WHICH TOOK FOREVER THANKS TO THE HDD), i was hit by the notification that the SSD is failing.

i am pretty scared. and i am unaware of what to do. or what happened. requesting support from you guys. mind you! i am a complete noob! thank you very much.

The biggest trouble I have had through-out my use of linux so far is understanding the purposes with all the different file systems. Everyone seems to know exactly what they are and their use cases yet never explains it. One big thing I'm confused on is on my system, I use base Fedora linux (KDE) and it automatically set up my main drive as:

/boot/efi - fat32
/boot - ext4
/ - btrs

Why is it like this exactly? What's the purpose behind having them all a different file system?

Even with this, thats only three different systems, but there are a ton more and it seems everyone uses a different one but I have no clue why

I am moving from Windows 11, and I have a few doubts regarding how I should set up and utilise my storage. I am looking to install Fedora 44.

256 gb SSD

1 tb HDD

In windows I had the OS in the SSD and my data including the huge games in the HDD. I installed only the super frequent apps to the SSD like Firefox.

And I had C: drive in SSD. The 1tb HDD was partitioned such that D: drive 680gb was for all Data. And E: drive 250gb was for Work. Do I need such partitions in Linux? Or is it a bad idea?

I don't have much idea about Linux filesystems but just know that Linux handles it differently than Windows.

In Linux (Fedora 44), how do I get a similar arrangement where the OS and frequent stuff is installed to SSD and big installations and games are installed to HDD?

I used to allocate way more when I had a 1tb hard drive. Tho my C drive is selfish and took more than half of my storage. Left 75gb for games, and other stuff. Using 512gb right now

But I plan on doing schoolwork on mint, I can probably pair it with a 32gb usb and a 16gb usb too if I need to save files, and move them later or something.

Update: I upgraded the storage to 42gb, so I can atleast download a couple of apps. While my files will just be directed to my C drive instead, which surprisingly works. (didnt work on my dual drive boot)

Edit: Solved. To quote u/pelazas1:

That's usually Windows Fast Startup leaving the drive half-hibernated. Turn it off in Windows power options, do a full shutdown, and it'll mount again.

I installed CachyOS on a separate SSD partition yesterday morning, went off without a hitch. No errors, no problems. It was able to handle all of my other NTFS-formatted storage devices that I've mounted in my system. Last night, I had to reboot into Windows to do a couple of things and make backups of some config files that I use on the same program across OSes.

I put all of my files that I need to share between OSes on my smallest HDD, which is several terabytes in size and has been working reliably for five years. Formatted in NTFS, obviously.

This morning, when I booted into CachyOS, I attempted to mount the drive using Dolphin and... it wouldn't.

"The requested operation has failed: Error mounting /dev/sdb2 at /run/media/(username)/(nameofdrive): wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb2," so on and so forth.

I was under the impression that with the new NTFS driver, it would be fine. It was fine, in fact. It was reading and writing with no issues beforehand. It can mount, read and write to other NTFS-formatted drives instantly with no problem.

Reddit threads told me to run chkdsk on Windows. Chkdsk returns no errors. Once again, chkdsk returns no errors. The drive is fine. I did reboot into Cachy after running chkdsk. No dice.

I don't understand this. What incredibly obvious thing am I missing here?

Hello everyone, I built a new computer about a month ago and decided to finally give Linux a shot. I realize now that I made a mistake that I would like to correct before I get too deep. I have a single 4TB drive with a single partition. I would like to repartition it to have some space set aside for the OS and the rest for everything else. This way if I do something stupid or want to install a different distro I won’t lose everything. How much space would you recommend for the OS? I’m going to look at moving /home into the data partition.

With Linux is it possible to repartition the drive while I’m logged in or will I need to boot from a live USB to do this? I’m keeping notes of what I’ve installed, different configs I’ve made and so on. I’m also using a program to easily back up everything important on an external drive.

Thanks everyone, I’ve used Linux in the past but it’s been a few years since I have used it as my main OS so it feels like I’m starting over.

hello, iam trying to mount my external hdd but it wont mount and keeps throwing error after i switched from kde plasma to cinnamon ( fresh install )
os: cachy

desktop environment: cinnamon

An example, I have WoW on an external drive, that I use for Windows. I know WoW works on Linux cuz I have it working there. However I keep bouncing to Windows to play it since that's where the portable drive is, and sometimes I take the drive with me to play at other people's PCs if I'm there for a few days and they need to work during the day. Is it safe to play on this external NVME drive when I am on CachyOS, or is it going to screw up the drive? I also have stuff on the external that syncs to cloud storage, like game dev projects and music stuff, that I while I could download the backups if something went wrong, would be a real pain to have to do, something I don't want to do unless like the drive fails or something.

I have a number of ntfs external drives (that still need to be used with windows) where the majority of the folders and files are fine, but a few can't be moved or deleted or something. I'm tired of fixing them one by one and just want a clean command to fix everything. They are all auto mounted in permanent locations.

Will the command below work? I know it will probably take awhile to run. Again these are external drives with no system files on them and just a various media files, music, videos, pictures, etc.

find /media/drive1 -type d -exec chmod 777 {} +

find /media/drive1 -type f -exec chmod 666 {} +

If not is there a better option?

Thanks!

EDIT: Alright I have done some testing, considered everything, and I'm going to compile what I've learned from the post and what I'm going to do below.

I'm on cachyos which comes with ntfs3 (you can still install it on most other distros I'm pretty sure). This allows linux to assign permissions to files and folders on ntfs drives, and seems pretty reliable DEPENDING ON YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES. I have the drives set to automount under:

/media/drivename ntfs3 defaults,nofail,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000 0 0

I have used chmod 777 for folders and chmod 666 for files on small subsets and it gives permissions to delete or move them.

I have booted into windows and opened the drives and those subsets, and they still have their permissions set in linux. I have booted into windows and moved the files around, renamed them, etc and they still have all their permissions in linux. I have added new files and folders into the drives in windows and when I check in linux, both the new files and folders have 777 permissions.

Now on linux, if I add a folder to the ntfs drives they don’t get 777 like the files added from windows. Folders get 755 and files get 644. I am the only user on the machine (always the owner) so this doesn’t matter to me.

If you have multiple users in linux AND are writing files to the drives in linux rather than just windows you will have issues with files created on the drive in linux by other users. But if you are the sole linux user, you should be able to use ntfs3 to just access the drives like any other with no issues. Other users should still be able to read the files fine though.

I’m not sure how my files got this way, but some files are really old, originated on windows, freefilesync’d across eachother on windows, then kubuntu, and now cachyos, and have probably just gotten messed up permissions along the way, especially in small gaps when the drives weren’t always automounted with ntfs3 and being dual booted into at the same time.

All that being said, if you could just reformat to exFAT, it’s probably worth doing, but seeing as how:

I have three 5tb drives and I don’t want to reformat
The drives are media only and not OS’s
If I can get them all fixed I’m pretty sure they will stay that way
and I don’t plan on having second users on the linux os

I’m going to try and chmod 777 the folders and chmod 666 the files using the commands above and then update this post if I have trouble down the line, or if everything is working fine.

Edit 2: So far so good! Everything seems to be working now. I don't move all the files all the time so it will take time to know for sure but the commands ran fine and honestly didn't take that long, and the few things I've been messing with all seem to be going smooth.

Hey guys, so I have 2 computers, one at my student housing and one at parent's. While I dont care for most of the files I do care for

1. My personnal coding/art project (assets, git, ...)

2. My university files (obsidian, pdf, class material,...)

My current setup is having a laptop with "syncthing" that I take with me to sync the files but this isn't very efficient as I always have to run it myself.

I am curious if I could use something like Google Drive to sync my files into multiple shared folders across multiple computers

Thanks in advance !

I am planning to install Linux on a new drive and dual boot for some programs who are not supported on Linux. I have some games on my Windows drive i would prefer to not have to reinstall on the Linux drive. Can i safely mount the windows drive and access games there without worrying about accidentally corrupting data or breaking something? I am planning to run Cachy os, and i am currently running Windows 11.

Ok, so, this is something I've been looking for answers, and they are mixed. It's not exactly conclusive for what I want to know.

I have an NTFS flash drive. It's the one I use to store clips, screenshots, and videos from my Xbox.

Looking around in Bazzite just out of curiosity, I read that it can't handle NTFS storage units. I think they aren't compatible as far as I remember (it was a quick look, I didn't memorize it)

I decided to look further into, and it seems that this is common knowledge, but when I ask info about NTFS flash drives or storage units, it mentions they may be read only, or get corrupted, files may be not executed, games stored may not open, have issues, and so on.

But what I want to know is if there may be problems if I plug my flash drive on my laptop with Linux Mint, copy the pictures and videos, and then disconnect it (safely). I won't use it for anything else. Just to store those files from my Xbox and then transfer them to my laptop to edit them later on and such. Nothing else.

Sorry if it's a dumb question, but the different answers make me think it may indeed be problematic, and Xbox only accepts NTFS flash drives (as far as I know) for storage of those files.

Thank you beforehand.

I don't know what's going on. Followed the standard tutorial for formatting drives and automounting for bazzite, but EXT4 just would not work, so we switched to BTRFS for the two external drives we have. At first things seemed to be working, but now every time we boot up the system, not only do the drives mount to a completely different location but one drive won't be seen by the disk app at all despite both being plugged in and the computer will say "could not mount this device". Using the computer's auto solution "mount and open" does nothing.

Unplugging and replugging the unseen/unmounted external drive seldom helps, typically just changing what drive the computer sees and mounts. It never sees both at the same time. Even when the drives are being recognized, things can't be properly downloaded to them. Movies and tv shows have errors in jellyfin because the drive isn't being registered properly and steam games throw up error codes and won't finish downloading if told to download directly to the drive.

We tried mounting through gnome-disks and remounting manually but both have resulted in the less than functioning results I've explained. I'm not sure if it's a hardware issue (both hard drives work fine with other computers, and the mini pc I bought is brand new and runs fine) or something else. I've also tried running code to fix any broken bits like the journal, but even after the code the issues will not resolve.

I'm really at my wits end. Please someone help 🙏. Neither me nor my brother who is helping me are well versed in Linux at all and I really want it to work, but I can't find anything that seems to fix the problem.

I am planning to replace windows with linux on my PC. It has a SSD that currently contains and will continue to contain the OS, and it has a HDD that is just media storage.

If I replace windows with linux on the SSD, can I still access and play the media on the HDD or will it be speaking a different language?

Im probably going with Fedora, but if a specific distro handles this better than another, Ill consider other options.

Hello!
I have been trying to make a partition for a windows installation, but I have reached no success with all my attempts at unencrypting the drive and using GParted to hopefully make a partition.
I also don't want to wipe my installation of Linux either because there are a lot of files I have on here for school purposes. I am currently running Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with a 1 Terabyte SSD (too much) and I am hoping to halve that storage space to repurpose it for Solidworks on Windows.

My PC Specs are as listed below if needed:
Laptop : ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. G615JHR (1.0)
RAM : 15.22 GiB
Processor : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14650HX
Graphics : Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-S UHD Graphics (rev-04)
Graphics : NVIDIA Corporation Device 2dd8 (rev-a1)
Disk capacity : 933.93 GiB

If you need any more information Ill try my best to respond, thanks for the help!

Before it used to work alright, the sectors stayed the same. But lately it started to get more bad sectors. Explaining why when i used that hard drive performance wasnt as good, compared to dual booting it in my 1tb hdd with w10.

What can I do to alleviate it? Or is it hopeless? I know hdds are cheap but cant reallt buy a new one rn becuz i might get a bad one, and sata ssds are pretty steeply priced.

I think theres a program to stop bad sectors or something, Im not sure.