No worries, I appreciate it :)

So it looks like the brother driver utility installed both brlaser and brscan3, however it still wont detect unfortunately. Thanks for the welcome though!

Thank you! I checked and It does have both brscan3 (skips brscan as brscan3 is considered the newer version) as well as brlaser, but still no luck unfortunately.

Thank you, they both like it already and my Father has said that he thinks it is much easier to find what he is looking for so I think it was a big success :)

Nice! Yea a disk from 2013 would not only have been hanging on by a thread but I also guarantee it had never been defragged haha.

Best of luck to you in resolving!

My move for my parents to Mint went very well thankfully. Brother even supplies Linux drivers for their printers as a I found out and printing works great, but even after installing their scanner driver for the model, I can’t seem to get any scanning softwares to detect it so I’ll have to look into that part further.

Otherwise everything else runs super smooth. Now I have to deal with my system!

Thank you, this is very informative.

Thankfully I have ~15 TB of external storage so backing up the totality of the internal storage shouldn’t be an enormous problem.

Haha, if only my brother would move away from Mac, but I understand why his use case warrants his choice.

I find it is all pretty relative as well. People do talk about Debian as if it’s always boring and ancient, but I think the release cycle on Debian stable is something like every 2 years? So it’s not super out of date for what I use. As I said in another comment I think a few rust libraries I wanted for installing the Helix editor were not available on Bookworm, but other than that there really isn’t too much that I want right this second that even warrants me changing the repos to Sid. Everything I needed to install and run Kakoune was available so I’m just running that as my editor for now instead.

Beautiful, I did not realize it was a fork, this is even better news!

This is top tier information, thank you very much :)

Very glad to hear that at least one person out there had a good experience in doing what I will be trying to do.

I am not currently striping the storage, but traditionally I have used one as the drive for the entire OS and then the secondary one is for extended file storage for things I frequently access which require a large amount of storage (I have a game called STALKER Gamma installed which is essentially a collection of mods so it is hundreds of GB, I have enormous files for 3D work such as textures etc, and a great deal of music/video files).

I am especially appreciative you brought this up though as I had not considered changing the configuration. To me, striping sounds like it might be the way to go based on how I tend to use the storage, but this might be because I am unaware of the benefits of having a full disk dedicated to /home.

Can you expand on why that may be preferable as I would be super interested to hear about the potential benefits!

Thanks

Thank you for your advice, I had looked at Bazzite as well, but wanted to try for Debian first as it is simply where I have the most personal experience and I enjoy the bedrock-tier stability despite not having the cool shiny new things (There are some things I cant install yet as they are new and written with rust libs not available for the current Debian release).

If the graphics card creates too much trouble for me I am likely to distro hop and would be looking at Bazzite, EndeavorOS, or one of the other suggestions from this thread, so I really appreciate your suggestions and advice. Thank you!

Thank you and I agree, the power on the command line is something I miss every day I use windows so I believe I will be much happier after the switch!

Thank you, all good suggestions. I have looked at Bazzite and another user had recommended EndeavourOS so if things go awry then I will likely try one of them.

I am hoping that as long as I can get the card functional I will be ok. I have been running lower-requirement games through proton on my Debian laptop without needing to install additional libraries and they all work well.

If too many problems are introduced from the card I will probably distro hop (which should be easy as I keep good backups) and see how things look elsewhere.

Otherwise I will save some money and see about a comparable AMD card going forward in any case!

Thanks for your advice!

Good to know, I’m certain they wouldn’t have a problem as they learned open office easily enough. Can confirm Mint comes with Libre Office installed as well as Thunderbird which they also currently use as their email client. Thank you!

Thank You, I will take that under consideration :)

I’m finally moving myself and my parents over to Linux this weekend. I’m putting them on Mint and I think I’ll probably be using Debian 12.

For the longest time it was games that prevented me from moving, but with what MS has been doing as of late, and especially with them trying to force copilot/recall onto systems/my Win 11 install refusing to get security updates anymore, I went and checked my entire game library on steam against the proton db and found the following.

95 of my games run natively on Linux. 31 of my games are rated platinum. 73 of my games are rated gold. 12 are rated silver. 3 are rated as bronze. 3 are unplayable.

This shocked me a little when I counted it out as this is a huge improvement compared to a few years ago.

The actual difficulties I will be facing are getting all of my music/sound production stuff functioning well enough to use.

But yes, anyone who claims they won’t move to Linux due to gaming in the contemporary is either sorely out of the loop or hard stuck silver in a game like Valorant which they cannot bring themselves to drop and artificially refuses to run on anything where it can’t have kernel level anti-cheat.

I guess if you can’t get it running with WINE or something, you could grab a windows ISO and boot a VM for it if you want to use it.

No worries, I am always really happy to see people who are new as learning Linux has been very fun for me over the last decade or more, and I love to see people discovering it and learning about it.

Regarding your actual question about having art in your terminal as you open it, you could store an ascii file like that and then put a cat command like that at the end of the hidden .bashrc file located in your home directory in most cases.

Before doing any of the following, I recommend making a back up of your .bashrc in case things go awry. You can do that by doing mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrcBackup.

Assuming you are using a bash terminal, there will be a .bashrc file located in your home directory. Files that start with . are hidden. In the terminal you can use the ls -a command followed by a directory name (for a different directory than the one you are in), or by itself (for the current directory you are in) to show all files including hidden ones such as this.

The .bashrc file runs automatically whenever a user opens a terminal/logs in to the command line, so if I opened a terminal, I could do the following to make it so that ascii art shows up every time I open a new terminal.

First I would create some file in my home directory that contains the ascii art. Lets assume I made that and that file is called my-art.txt.

Then I could run these commands in the terminal to set it up.

Note that cd by itself will move you to your home directory, ~/ means “the folder that is my home directory”, echo will send the following string to the next command, and >> tells the output of the last command to get appended to the file named after it.

cd
echo "cat ~/my-art.txt" >> .bashrc

This very simply just makes sure I am in my home directory, and then appends “cat ~/my-art.txt” to the end of my .bashrc file.

Now when I close and reopen my terminal, the contents of my-art.txt will be printed out as the terminal opens every time.

To undo this, you just have to remove that cat command from the end of .bashrc.

When it comes to editing files in the command line, there are super powerful tools such as vi, but they are hard to get the hang of initially, so if you want to edit files from the command line easily, I recommend using the nano command to start out as it is much more straight forward starting out.

Finally, two great commands for when you are starting out especially are man and apropos. man followed by the name of a command will show you the man(ual) page for that command, telling you how the command works, what options it has, and what its for etc.

apropos followed by a search term will show you commands that contain that search term in their short description, so its useful to learn about new commands even if you don’t know what they are called. For example if I knew I wanted a command to edit text in a file, I could try apropos editor, and you would likely see nano and vi among the commands listed there.

The ascii art is stored in a file called fursona-ascii-art.txt as text.

In the screenshot, OP has run the command cat fursona-ascii-art.txt.

The cat command when used like this will take the contents of the file named, and print it out to the terminal, showing what is in the file, so this is how they have shown it here.

The cat command can also be used to join text in files together (cat is short for “concatenate”).

Another way you can read files from the command line is with the command less. Less will paginate the contents of the file, and you can then bit spacebar to move down one page, and B to move up one page. While looking at a file with less you can also hit / followed by a search term to search the file. To move to the next item found, you can hit the N key. To quit the less program, you can either scroll all the way to the bottom with spacebar, or you can hit Q to quit.