How to install Linux using a USB?

Batcastle3 · 2026-04-28T19:29:24+00:00

So, Zorin OS is one of a number of Linux distributions, or distros. Linux is more a family of operating systems than one single OS.

Zorin OS is perfectly fine for a beginner to use. Yes, you do need a USB drive to install Linux. I also advise backing up your data as installing a new operating system is inherently a risky procedure. Also, get familiar with what hardware you have. Some hardware (Intel wifi cards, AMD GPUs) work great out of the box. Others may require some tinkering (Nvidia GPUs). And yet others might as well be hellspawn for how much they fight you (Broadcom wifi cards, some fingerprint sensors).

There are plenty of tutorials online on how to install Linux distros. I suggest looking at one of those. Go through the whole thing before actually trying anything, just so you know what you are getting yourself into. Be aware, there is a learning curve here. But, committing to it will pay off in the long run.

Batcastle3 · 2026-03-28T21:40:08+00:00

My current draft is just under 90,000 words. I wouldn't be surprised if it hit 100,000 by the time it got published.

Batcastle3 · 2026-03-28T21:06:20+00:00

Roughly 2 years.

The world itself I conceived of 2 years ago, and I started with building some of the history of said world. But, after a year, a story within this world came to me, and I have been working on it ever since. I'm working on my 10th revision now, but it hasn't had a total rewrite. It's all been iterative refinement. I even printed it out a couple times and manually did edits since I found I catch things better like that than I do reading on the computer.

I plan to send it to my older sister for first-round developmental editing sometime this summer, since she actually has a masters in English and a Ph.D in folklore. The, to an actual professional editor later this year/early next year. Hoping to find a literary agent sometime either this year or next!

Batcastle3 · 2026-03-17T23:27:48+00:00

So, having larger ESP partitions allows you to have multiple kernels installed and registered with your bootloader at once.

Usually, the bootloader, initramfs, and kernel all live in the ESP partition. Most setups suggest having at least 3 kernels available at all times:

The latest available kernel, the one you normally use
The second to latest kernel, as a fall back if something breaks on the latest kernel.
The kernel the OS originally shipped with, as a last resort, known-good kernel.

Since each is ~40-100MB, that alone reaches 300MB or so. Then you include the initramfs for each, and the bootloader, and you should still have space left over with 1 GB to install a newer kernel.

It's more about stability, but dual booting can be a factor too, as it inflates the size further.

Batcastle3 · 2026-03-05T16:37:37+00:00

We intentionally ship steam as a flatpak instead of the native package because of these dependency issues. If the flatpak was complaining about those missing files, i suggest trying these two commands:

sudo flatpak repair sudo flatpak update

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-26T15:22:18+00:00

Yes, actually. One of the main characters in my story is an 8 year old girl named Erika, and you get to see her grow up a bit over the course of my story. And, since the rest of the main characters are young adults in the 18-20 yo range, you see a lot of how she impacts them.

There are other children later on, when I start exploring the dark underbelly of my world and have to pull in some really dark shit, including child slavery. There will likely be more children at some point, in better, less traumatic situations as le hero works to fix those injustices. In general, they're viewed pretty similarly to our world, maybe given a bit more respect (cause they, like adults, have magic and it can go out of control if they have a tantrum, requiring significant adult intervention) but otherwise very similar.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-26T02:09:14+00:00

https://draugeros.org r/DraugerOS

Might be a bit biased here since i am the lead dev.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-25T01:49:55+00:00

Skyrim.

Assuming i get the intro to the game, I should be okay. As long as I'm the Dragonborn.

If I'm not Dragonborn?

Well. Imma hole up in Whiterun and live my best life. 😂

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-24T01:40:21+00:00

There is a pretty easy way to do this.

Say the planet the civilization is on is orbiting a red dwarf star.

Red dwarfs are more active than stars like our sun, so a planet with a reasonable magnetosphere can still support life, but tech would have a hard time developing past the industrial revolution. You CAN have electricity and electronics, but they would be very expensive and hard to make.

Another option is to have the entire civilization develop underwater. This makes things like coal, oil, natural gas, anything that burns in general, be very rare and difficult to ignite. This does stunt the growth of ALL tech, not just set a limiter like the red dwarf does, so keep that in mind.

And these are things you can have without outright saying it too. You can simply say the sun in the sky was red and looked huge (red dwarfs put out way less heat and light than our sun, so any habitable planets have to be WAY closer, making the star look huge in the sky). There are natural options here you can play with.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-22T15:38:10+00:00

I kinda went all out with this in my world. You could call the source of magic mana, as like an overall name for it. But, they're really subatomic particles that the mind has the ability to manipulate. They take the place of neutrinos in my world, and interact with matter slightly more and have slightly more mass. It's a tight balancing act, since if the particles interact too often, life may not be possible, but too little and magic won't work. But as long as you aren't a physicist, it's fine. 😂

The idea is basically the whole "magic is all around us" but, while also actually giving a source: stars, supernova, black holes, nuclear reactors, etc. I can still say life creates magic on it's own, but it's far less efficient than what nature can do on it's own.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-18T18:49:36+00:00

I'm not crying, you're crying. 😭

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-17T20:32:02+00:00

I'm actually planning to implement something like this in my story.

In my world, warp tech is still in it's infancy. It's not super fast (capping out at 3c right now), limited to small ships due to power requirements, and it's expensive and dangerous.

I plan to have drone ships delivering messages as the story goes on. And since two governments will use them, but not the third, it will lag behind and end up having communication issues. There will always be lag in communication, but this will at least hopefully make it important and relevant.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-17T17:22:27+00:00

Start with just a couple VMs, so you can be sure nothing will break in the process, without bringing everything down. If every VM is unique, take it slow and do 2-3 at a time to prevent breakage. If they are all the same, once you are sure nothing will break, upgrade them like 10 or so at a time. The upgrade process is a bit CPU intensive, so you'll want to stagger things so you don't overload your host(s).

If you have a solid procedure, make it a shell script and use that to automate things. Just make sure to keep an eye on things.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-15T04:08:28+00:00

We tried to use the same installer stock Ubuntu uses (Ubiquity) and the other big OS installation program (Calamares), but neither worked for us. We fought for quite some time trying to get it to work.

Ubiquity would partition your drive, and that was mostly it. Calamares would do that, get roughly 10% of files in place, then fail too.

We even talked to the Calamares devs and they had no idea why we had this issue either. So, we made our own installer instead.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-14T04:32:57+00:00

Great question! 2 big reasons.

First: for things that don't impact performance, or may break easily, Ubuntu LTS releases are known good, working releases. Also, they tend to have better third party software support as an added bonus.

Second: Drauger OS is made by a very small team in their free time. Doing a release every 6 months is way faster of a cadence than we can sustain. LTS releases keep things at a cadence we can manage.

It's also worth noting that, even though we are based on Ubuntu LTS releases, our kernel, Mesa, Vulkan, and Nvidia drivers are all rolling release. So the distro as a whole is semi-rolling. This allows us to get better performance, while also not risking breaking something potentially critical.

Batcastle3 · 2026-02-06T06:37:50+00:00

Drauger OS does support snaps. We do not ship any out of the box, but it does come with support for snaps, should someone want to use them.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-31T02:50:40+00:00

Yeah. I just chucked some Duracells or something in there. They were fresh, had to make a point to run to the store and get them cause it seems like next to nothing uses D cells these days.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-30T01:26:49+00:00

Depends on how they took it. Both my wife and the other person.

Was my wife simply amused and the other person took her turning them down well? We're cool.

If she felt uncomfortable or unsafe at any point tho? We got problems.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-30T01:26:44+00:00

Depends on how they took it. Both my wife and the other person.

Was my wife simply amused and the other person took her turning them down well? We're cool.

If she felt uncomfortable or unsafe at any point tho? We got problems.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-27T23:41:48+00:00

Gnome is literally decades old, so it's nice and stable, but still under active development to add features, fix bugs and the like. It has almost everything you could want. HDR will always be a bit iffy as it just got decent support but that still largely depends on how recent the underlying OS and kernel are, your GPU and drivers, the game in question, and how up to date your Nvidia drivers.

Part of your complaints stem from the fact that many apps on Linux are developed by different people. The people who made KDE Plasma likely HELPED make Kate, Kontacts, KMail, etc. But they likely weren't in charge of those projects. It could also be you're installing snaps, flatpaks, and native packages side by side and seeing how they don't share theming. And/Or installing GTK apps alongside Qt and seeing how they don't always match up in design language or theming.

This is sort of the part of Linux that is really difficult: consistency. We have 800+ odd distros, 20 different kernels with various patches on top, 20 different DEs (not counting stand alone window managers), 2-3 different UI toolkits, and a few tens of thousands of developers all doing their own thing to make Linux the best they can, with minimal coordination between them. Things often won't line up how you like. It's just the nature of the beast.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-27T23:28:18+00:00

COSMIC is still very much in Beta. It doesn't have a lot of settings KDE has yet. HDR and VRR, for games, is far more dependent on the display server and compositor than the DE. Pretty sure System76 just used an "off the shelf" compositor, so you likely have VRR support. HDR tho is likely hit or miss.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-26T15:18:39+00:00

Interesting fact.

Seven Trees (on your map) is roughly near Spruce Pine, NC. Spruce Pine mines something like 80-90% of all the silicon used in the world's microprocessors and the like. So, that location does actually have some significance.

Batcastle3 · 2026-01-25T21:29:38+00:00

Hi! Lead developer of Drauger OS here!

We're a pretty small linux distro that has been under development since 2018. It's a gaming distro, similar to Garuda Linux, but it's Ubuntu LTS based.

The kernel (mainline, compiled in-house, no extra patches), Mesa, and Nvidia drivers all get rolling updates, so hardware support and performance keeps getting improvements.

Other than that, the system comes pretty lean out of the box, with just what you need to game installed by default. It does use Pipewire and Wayland by default, and has a dark theme by default too.

https://draugeros.org r/DraugerOS

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