EOS Plasma for non-technical users

General system EndeavourOS installation
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I’ve tested just about every Linux Distro and I find that fun and entertaining. I find EOS very easy to install and work with. The forum is the best. So for me and my computer we love EOS.

However, I’ve been reluctant to install it on my wife’s Dual Monitor AMD Ryzen 7 workstation. Mainly, I don’t want to be a full time IT guy fixing what she accidentally broke. So I’ve let her work with Linux Mint 22.1 since she only uses Google Chrome browser apps and sites, along with a few LibreOffice spreadsheets and documents. I use that same PC when I need to have a lot of windows open where dual monitors would help but have my own user account.

That appeared to be a sane decision up until now.

I’m wondering if I’d be safe to move her system to EOS Plasma? My current problems with LM22.1 are caused by the system’s inability to resume from suspend and switch users without getting into a endless loop of not accepting a password and forcing a reset button type of reboot.
I’ve spent months on github issues for MInt and on their forum with no luck. I’ve posted ton’s of detail logs.

So now it time to move on. How robust is EOS’s handling of multi-user, multi-monitor PCs that regularly suspend and resume changing users coming out of suspend?

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Well, I sleep all the time (the pc not me…well maybe me too) on KDE. That’s the only comment I can make.

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I suggest just leaving her’s on Mint. Yes endeavor would be fine, but just save her sanity with Mint.

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Other than the dual monitor setup it is a Ryzen but is it an igpu or do you have a dedicated graphics card on that one?

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Personally, I’d say go for it, so long as you don’t mind managing updates for your wife’s system once or week/fortnight or so. The actual experience of using Plasma is pretty intuitive for anyone fairly competent with Windows, and it’d be one of the easiest DE’s to get into for a beginner.

The under the hood stuff, handling updates and such, might be in your court though. You wouldn’t need to be full-time IT guy, but you may need to help out occasionally.

My wife’s NUC is running EndeavourOS with LXQt, because Plasma dies on that old thing, but with very similar usage to what you’ve described, there’s no major dramas.

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I mean in case your wife is like mine and do not install any applications on her own all is setup and usage is simply using what is installed, plus may setup flatpak? and you do the full update once a month.
Not a bad idea to use EndeavourOS special if thats what you use too.
With discover flatpak store you have a user-friendly app-store for a lot of common apps all sandboxed.

I got request a lot of times from friends/family to install Linux on a device for them… in this case i would never go for EndeavourOS/archbased.
Currently recommending Fedora i can not stand Debian/buntu/mint that much and it is a big difference in a lot of corners Fedora is pretty straight forward. Also have its downsides, but a ton less compared to buntus.

Sleep on Desktop PC can be troublesome on archbased too, that’s a partly a hit-and-miss.
Some devices simply working for it, others working for a long time and stop working after a kernel update.

But nowadays, most Desktops will work only some go the hit-and-miss way …

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No graphic card. GFX is built into the CPU

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So it’s amdgpu then. I don’t think you would have many issues as long as you have the multi monitor set up the way you need it working.

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Doing the updates is not an issue for me as I use this PC early in the morning almost everyday. I also use BTRFS, grub-btrfsd, and snapper so I can restore quickly if an update messing things up.

The recent problems with LM 22.1 have come when I leave the PC for a while and she comes in and wakes it up and switches users.

We’ll give it a shot. All our data is on a Synology NAS so not a lot of work to switch distros.

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Perhaps you could set up your wife’s account as a non “sudo” account? Then the chances of her inadvertently doing things which would upset the system is negligible, I’d say.

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So I finished installing EOS on the Dual monitor PC and set it up with the 2 users. So far no major issues and my wife is happy with it. Since we use Bitwarden Password manager on both Chrome for her and Firefox for me, getting back to normal is easy.

I use Deja-Dup for /home/$USER backups for us both so I could recover that data quickly. Fixing Numlock at boot required some Googling.

The only issue that caused pain was setting up Deja-dup to do backups to our NAS again. It didn’t like using smb://nas.home/netbackup. Even using just the IP address didn’t work. So I switched to NFS and just put the mount in /etc/fstab and Deja-dup then could treat the backup destination as a local folder.

I am using snapper, grub-btrfs, snap-pac, and btrfs-assistant. So I should be able to restore instantly to a previously good point if an update bites me.

Thanks for the words of encouragement. Let just hope the suspend and switch users on resume continues to work in Plasma 6.

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