Linux Survival Kit for (Half)-Noobs

Introduction

Maybe you’re a bit like me. You have set up several systems in your life, have somewhat advanced knowledge of your OS of choice and are not afraid to stick your hand under the hood and get your fingernails dirty. Yet you are not really an expert either and constantly look things up or ask AI for help, feeling a little guilty about it.

Maybe you’re a bit like me and have had enough of Windows or MacOS or maybe even Adobe and want to break free from them.

If you are, cool :)! The goal of this blog post is to have a collection of useful tips, tricks and commands mainly as my own reference. If it helps someone else as well, then that’s great! If you bungle something up, don’t come blaming me though, ok? Good.

And always double check what lines you’re copying from a site and executing in the terminal.

My Distro

I have wanted to make the swtich to Linux for a fairly long time, but never had the guts to do it. I have successfully switched to Rocky Linux 10 in July in 2026. I’m still in my «new car» period where I just blissfully sit at my workstation, just clicking around, doing nothing in particular,.

The switch wasn’t completely without friction, but it also wasn’t totally awful either.

Some of my tips are distro specific, buy most should work for many RHEL distros.

My Specs

I have a bit of an exotic setup in some regards. That means if I can get everything to work properly, chances are you will as well. But as a bit of a warning: If you are a tablet user, especially with multiple monitors, you will have a harder time with your setup. Here is my workstation specs:

Hardware:

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on an Asus ProArt X870E-Creator WiFi board
• 4x Kingston Fury DDR5 32Gb 6400 (clocked at 4800)
• NVidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti (GUI)
• NVidia GeForce RTX 4070 (Rendering)
• Samsung 990 Pro 2Tb M.2 for both OS
• Keychron H10 Keyboard (we’ll get back to the headaches this one caused me)
• XP-Pean Deco Pro XLW (Gen 2)
• Logitech M705 mouse
• 2x Acer B287K work monitors (not for much longer)
• LG C2 for video playout
• Tascam Model 16 for audio playout

Some Simple Stuff

This is just a collection of simple commands you may not be aware of or can’t remember yet if you are fairly new to Linux.

If you can’t a your .sh script or the likes to run, execute this in the terminal:

NVidia and The Black Screen

It has happened to me that, after installing the nvidia-open drivers and blacklisting nouveau, I would get a black screen with a blinking cursor instead of the login screen.

This very likely happens because of a display-manager/login-session startup ordering issue (often sddm + logind) plus possible NVIDIA KMS timing. But fret not, this can be fixed. You can still reach a CLI prompt by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F3. Then log in with your credentials.

Fix 1

Chances are very low that this is not already set if you already logged with a graphical interface. But still, make sure that the GUI target is default:

Fix 2

Ensure that the KDE display manager is enabled:

Fix 3

Make sure «logind» is enabled and not masked:

Fix 4

Add NVidia DRM KMS early (this with Fix 5 will probably solve your problem):

Fix 5

Force NVidia modules into initramfs early:

Now reboot. The login screen should now appear normally again.

Blackmagic Resolve Tips

Fonts not readable by Text+
You may notice that Text and Text+ in Resolve don’t have the same fonts. This can happen because Text+ only sees system level fonts, not user fonts. To fix this you can copy the fonts from

/usr/local/share/fonts/

to

/usr/share/fonts/

Fusion Scripts
Should you want to install custom .fu scripts for the fusion page, they are stored here for user specific setups:

~/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/Fusion/Config

and here for global availability

/opt/resolve/Fusion/Scripts

Fairlight Preset Backup
If you want to backup or copy Fairlight presets, they are stored in this location:

~/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/configs/Fairlight/Presets/

Cockos REAPER

It can happen that, despite having VLC and FFMPEG installed, REAPER does not play back video. That is probably because a restricted codec stack is blocking it. Here’s how to fix it.

Nobara’s BM Resolve Wizard

In theory, this is a great idea. However, it did not work for me at all. The Install Wizard would freeze on me. Turns out, their script tries to install the AMD ‚rocm-meta‘ GPU drivers. On a NVidia system, that wont work. I’m not sure if I did something wrong or why there is not check for what driver is needed. Simply removing that part of the script made it work though. Here is what I did:

First, make a backup of the original script, just in case:

and then edit the script:

or, since nano is not installed by default, you can also use Kate:

No «sudo» needed. Kate asks for elevated privileges when saving.

Here is the part of the script that is causing the problem:

subprocess.run([
    "dnf", "install", "-y",
    "rocm-meta",
    "nobara-resolve-runtime",
    "zlib",
    "libxcrypt-compat",
    "python3.11",
    "python3.11-libs",
    "alsa-plugins-pulseaudio"
], check=True)

The third line installs «rocm-meta». So it has to go. This gives you:

And presto, the installer script works just fine.

Of course, if you DO have AMD graphics cards in your system, leave that line in there!