You need to first understand what kind of interaction you expect with your OS. For this, you can start by considering what you use your OS for and currently what you do for your OS. e.g. Before I jumped to Linux, I was just starting to learn PowerShell on Win, because I saw a lot of places in my system where I wanted to use it. I felt consistently dissatisfied with the lack of things I could just tell the system to do, making me go to scripting. This way, I knew I won’t have a problem with putting time into something that takes a lot of configuring. But since I was still new and wanted an easy start, I went with Manjaro KDE. It was based on Arch, but had a system of differed updates, giving me a feel of it being easier. Plus, it had a lot of customisations out of the box, some of which, I learnt from, when making my own configurations for EndeavourOS. EndeavourOS considers itself to be more terminal oriented, and it is possible to easily get a full-fledged tty system, just by selecting it in the installer. I chose KDE because I like changing the Appearance a lot, but you might want to look at other DEs depending upon your expectations.
Ubuntu has been shifting a lot to snaps, so if you want your computer to be snappy (the literal meaning), you might want to avoid it (ironically). But at the same time, if you want less configuration requirements and want to keep most of your exp outside the terminal, on top of finding it easier to install software from vendors’ websites, you can consider it. If you are fine with putting in the minimal amount of brain usage it takes to understand the installation instructions of the website - and by that I mean, read the heading telling you which distro the copy-paste text is meant for (I know ppl too lazy to do that and trying paste an apt command into Red Hat) - I suggest Fedora/Linux Mint and a slew of others.
DE = Desktop Environment apt = Package Manager (kinda like an app store on terminal) used for Ubuntu
P.S.: If you choose an Arch-based distro, make sure you keep a backup OS that is in the Debian/Fedora tree. I keep a Debian KDE, mainly for older linux games, which ask for packages that have been long removed from Arch, but it is useful in case you break something. That way you won’t have to wait for the time it takes to make a Live USB and can just restart.
My toaster is electromechanical. No µC / mutable memory available. Not even a manual switch (turn on/off using the wall switch). So no arch there unless I swap some components. I use EndeavourOS with DWM on one of my VMs, though.
Gaming on Linux can still be considered difficult in general. The main reason I don’t have any difficulty is because the few games I play are well supported on Linux, giving me few to no crashes. Playing Elite Dangerous (Epic version) on wine seems to be causing memory leaks over time, making me have to restart every 5 hours, but Linux supported games I get from GoG work perfectly for normal scenarios normal => Single monitor 60FPS.
Apart from gaming, Linux has been a charm. But I am one of those ppl who likes programming and creating my own solutions for problems (which fits well with Linux), so I can’t say the same to someone who just wants “a solution. Any solution”.
In that case, it seems to be a good idea to setup a linux installation yourself for the user and not give them sudo (or root password) and then make a service allowing them to use the app store and updating their system without requiring root privileges, but not letting them add a repository.
It’s only natural, really. When you get used to putting the brainpower into learning it as if it were breakfast, you feel frustrated when someone comes around putting a tenth of the effort and acting like the world is weighing on them. Then you tend to forget that most people choose something else to put that effort into, same as they forget that you chose this.
Most probably: wrong driver + background windows updates + background windows telemetry + background windows downloading ads + background windows Superfetch (SysMain) + background trial version of McAfee with windows
Win 7 worked pretty well on my 2010 desktop [Care2Quad 4GB DDR2] until a few years ago, when I just switched to Linux and didn’t care to look back.
I do both. When someone comes to me regarding their laptop overheating and slowdown issues, I recommend them Linux, right before fixing their Windows. And when someone asks me which one to use, or what to start with, or how to install, I warn them about the difficulties (because one who potentially can use Linux, will ask different questions).
“I have no idea what I’m doing here” <- Happens in the beginning. How about you start by trying to know what exactly you are doing? Let me give you a fasttrack…
The first command you get in the instructions is curl. It is generally used to download stuff from a networked server.
1.1. To understand the -fsSLo in the command, I strongly advise you to check out the manual of curl using man curl in a terminal.
The second command in the instructions is echo “something” | sudo tee some/file
2.1 Here you see 3 commands echo , sudo and tee. 2.1.1 Again, you can use man command-name to check the manual pages for these commands 2.2 There is a | symbol over here. It is called the “pipe symbol”, which is what you can use to search for it. It is usually difficult to search for the symbol itself and I haven’t found a man page for it, but open man bash and look for “Pipelines” and you’ll know what it is about. Use Link, Link and Link to help yourself understand this.
e.g. If you have a program called Xorg from 5 years ago, and a program called mesa from 5 years ago and Xorg depends upon mesa to work. Here, if you replace your mesa with a new, recent mesa yourself, there is a good chance Xorg will not work. The Package Manager prevents that from happening.
The gist of what the instructions are making you do is, telling the Package Manager that there is another place from where you want it to look for packages.
To understand man pages better, check out this link.
Don’t think too badly of people dissing you in the comments. They are tired and fed up of help vampires. Hopefully, you can try not to become one.
Try and build your own process of understanding the commands you see on the internet before entering them into the terminal.
The comments telling you to just follow the instructions, are coming from the perspective that you don’t have the patience and determination to understand them yourself, which, a lot of people don’t. I will leave it upto you to determine which one you decide to be. It is, however, a bad idea to follow instructions on any website, just because it “seems legit”. You can’t really say you “trust” the site until you have the ability to find out for yourself whether you want to trust it.