Also try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). I think it’s their best flavor actually, but not enough people know about it and usually only try the regular Mint.
Almost all of those support forms are from way back when Ubuntu was user friendly and community driven. However they are no longer serving the community and shouldn’t be considered user friendly like it was previously.
Anyway almost all of the Ubuntu specific stuff will work on Linux mint as its Ubuntu based.
Your hardware is supported; consider to check driver support over at linux-hardware.org. Honestly, most hardware should be well-supported, unless it has been released very recently or is hardware from known troublemakers (i.e. Nvidia GPUs or Broadcom etc).
Your ‘computer-literacy’ is at least (slightly) higher than average.
You’ve primarily used Windows in the past.
You prefer asking others instead of finding it out for yourself; the existence of this post supports that. (It’s either that or you like to have a second opinion in all cases; but I would have expected more input from you if that was the case 😅.)
Your hardware is somewhat modern.
You will mostly stick to defaults (at least initially).
You’re aware that while hundreds of actively maintained distros exist, most of them are either niche or not worth your time in the first place. If, from the remaining ones, the less impactful derivatives are surgically removed, followed by the removal of newbie-unfriendly distros, then only 10-20 distros would remain; most of which have been named in this thread already. And your needs dictate which one out of these would suit you best.
You will educate yourself regarding desktop environments like GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, Xfce etc. Perhaps you will even boot into a live environment to check them out for yourself; loading a bunch of distros on your USB through Ventoy is excellent for that. This is important as they’re arguably the biggest contributor to how you perceive your Linux system. You should also be aware that in almost all cases a second (or heck; even third, fourth etc) desktop environment can be installed on your system and you should be able to switch between them relatively easily. However, in most cases, the one provided on first installation works close to flawless while others that have been tacked on later on are generally less polished.
You will educate yourself (eventually) regarding universal package managers (read: AppImage, Flatpak, Nix and Snap) and Distrobox as collectively they’ve (mostly) ridden the Linux ecosystem of problems related to software not being packaged in the native repos. Don’t feel the need to indulge into all of them simultaneously from the get-go. But be aware that they exist and that they enable one to install (almost) any package that has been made available to Linux regardless of their chosen distro.
Any distro I should use?
Typically, distros like Arch, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, openSUSE, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu (or their derivatives) will be mentioned in these kinds of queries. And it becomes mostly a popularity poll that measures what the community thinks is the preferred distro for beginners. And honestly, I don’t blame them as you haven’t really given us a lot to work with. My entry to that popularity poll would be Linux Mint. If you prefer to use GNOME or KDE Plasma instead, then consider either Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed. Additionally, Pop!_OS should be considered if Nvidia causes problems on all the others.
Feel free to inquire if you so desire!
EDIT: I just noticed how you mentioned to someone that your use case will be primarily gaming. First of all, gaming is somewhat equal on most distros; especially with the likes of Bazzite-Arch and Conty providing excellent environments for gaming regardless of installed distro. Though, these containers do still rely on the hosts kernel, therefore any perceived difference on same hardware but different kernels might be attributed to said kernels. Newer kernels generally come with improved performance; at least for newer hardware*. Though, perhaps more performance could be gained through other means as well. I will spare you the details, however, as this is potentially another rabbit hole within the initial rabbit hole. Therefore, instead, I will name a couple of distros known for being excellent for gaming purposes: Bazzite, Garuda Linux, Nobara Linux, PikaOS and RegataOS. If you want a no-nonsense system, just go for Bazzite; while initial setup might seem slightly more involved, it’s by far the most robust system out of these. This does come at the cost of being ‘unique’ amongst the others, but I believe it’s a great fit for your use case.
Completely agree that these kinds of threads end up being more a popularity poll than anything more actionable and usable. Everyone has their own opinions and preferences (which is great!), but that can end up being extremely overwhelming for a newbie.
sorry for being inactive here, I have other things happening at the moment. i’m just gonna put some stuff here
You will mostly stick to defaults (at least initially).
Kinda, I recently started to get interested in modding! It isn’t stuff like homebrew (although I was planning to root my phone, until OEM unlock was disabled. Thanks wiko.), I mostly just use something like vencord and Bloxstrap (just tweaks the Roblox client a bit, no exploits tho) This might be not seen as modding, but who cares.
Your ‘computer-literacy’ is at least (slightly) higher than average.
slightly, I do know how to use HTML to an extent, and can know whats the difference between RAM and hard drives, I still have a long way to go.
Ok here are some of the specs that I can remember (I’m currently not home as of typing this)
I have a HP 2022 Laptop, decent enough to play games
I have a 512 hard drive and 12 GB of RAM
only has 2 USB ports, most of it was replaced by type C, so dual booting with.something USB related might be hard
Dabbled a bit into linux with a VM (a few years ago tho, it was Ubuntu)
and thats all I could remember, I do plan to do an update post after trying out some distros on a VM, hopefully it works!
Tiny Core OS, because I want a super light distro to run from memory when trying to access computers where the data is still there but something went sour with the OS
So they’re building a whole complex text editor just for the desktop environment? seems like a weird priority or is the text editor a separate project?
As is often the case with scientific research which many people believe to be pointless, technological innovations aren’t always made by achieving the end goal, but through the technologies developed to reach that goal.
Development on COSMIC Edit has lead towards improvements to the cosmic-text library, which is used by many GUI libraries in the Rust ecosystem now. Similarly, the UX designs for the text editor improves the COSMIC interface guidelines, and puts design theories to practice. Likewise, widgets that are necessary for the editor are added to the COSMIC platform toolkit, and existing widgets and features are improved to improve the development experience for applications like this.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text. Many would also find it debilitating to have a desktop environment without a text editor preinstalled. Imagine if GNOME didn’t have Gedit, and KDE didn’t have Kate.
Besides, this is a default text editor for a desktop environment. It is really not that complex. The goal is not to develop an IDE, but a text editor that anyone would feel comfortable using as their default editor on the COSMIC platform.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text.
Is the idea that people are only going to be running Iced applications in COSMIC? It feels to me like the realistic option would be that, if COSMIC ever becomes daily-drivable, people would still be using GTK applications with it, at least at first. Might as well use a GTK text editor then? Then System76 could focus on building a text editor after COSMIC is a thing, and COSMIC would hopefully arrive sooner (or even at all - this looks like the path to burnout).
You are heavily overestimating how much effort is required to develop a text editor. It’s a single person project using components that had to be developed for use in multiple applications; regardless of whether there is a text editor or not. Components that you’d be silly not to develop through a text editor project.
You are trying too hard to justify that we not make a text editor. It feels like you don’t want us to make a text editor at all. No one is on a path to burnout. Everyone is paid a full time salary to work on their respective areas. COSMIC development is doing really well.
I mean, I don't really mind - I'm pretty happy with GNOME. All I'm saying is that if I were the project manager, I'd worry about delivering something and not burning people out ("focus is choosing what not to do" and all that, and the last 20% of the work taking 80% of the time). But in the end I'm just a random person ranting on the internet, of course - I do actually hope that I'm wrong.
But a diff viewer in the text editor... It just sounds like folks are eager to jump on shiny new things rather than finishing something, from the outside 🤷 Looking forward to be proven wrong!
COSMIC Edit is being developed by our manager through personal motivation; who also developed cosmic-text, so this is the perfect playground for simultaneously advanced cosmic-text, and developing useful real world software with it. The git diff view was not yet part of planned designs, but it took only a portion of a day to implement. It adds a useful test case for the cosmic-text library, and improved cosmic-text as a result.
We’re all paid a full time salary to work on COSMIC and Pop!_OS. Each person on the team is going to spend a full day writing software, regardless of what they’re working on, so concerns about burnout are somewhat silly. Burnout is typically caused by working overtime for extended periods of time. System76 has never required developers to work overtime to meet a deadline, and variety of workload can alleviate mental fatigue, so burnout is not a thing here.
Yeah, that's fair enough. It's not just working overtime though - endless toil on never-ending projects, especially when at a certain point, you're not really making visible progress but rather are just working on a seemingly endless list of bugs and papercuts, is also terrible for motivation. The good news, of course, is that the Pop!_OS GNOME extension also got delivered, which, though a lot smaller than COSMIC DE, I'm sure also wasn't a small undertaking.
In my experience, that has never been an issue with any Rust-based projects. It’s quite the opposite. 80% of time is spent completing the first 20% of the project, and then the remaining 80% is quickly finished as everything fits into place. Most of our time is spent in foundational work getting widgets created that we can use with our theme system, and then the actual implementation of the interface in the application is stupid easy.
What you describe is what I felt developing the GNOME extensions. There’s very little you can do to resolve issues that you encounter there.
That being said I can imagine if KDE didn’t have Kate or Konsole or any of that - there’s plenty of text editors and Terminals that already exist out there.
GNOME users wouldn’t be happy having to install KDE dependencies to use a KDE text editor which doesn’t have a consistent look and feel on their desktop. Same applies for KDE users.
OP, I have an entire guide for Linux/Windows computing, having been a couple decades old user of Windows. I am using Linux for the past 6+ years, and am using Debian as of now.
Start with Ubuntu LTS. Your priority is being able to search your solutions easily on AskUbuntu, StackOverflow or similar websites within the first few search results, and NOT needing to interact with and/or get harassed by the toxic evangelists in Linux community. I assume you already got a taste of that evangelism with the comments here.
Also, it is essential to require optimal corporate and community software support, and maximum stability/compatibility with WINE, without your system breaking upon automatic/random updates. This lessens the need for you to go around scrambling on the internet for solutions. Make sure to utilise whatever you need, Snaps, AppImages, regardless of what people say, to make your Linux life easier.
Most operating systems mostly work find something that has a release cadence you like and is close to what you want then you will have to customize it to fit your needs
Linux Mint is definitely the right choice here in my opinion. I installed it for my parent’s on their older laptop when they were having issues running windows. They were blown away by how fast it was and how they could do all of their usual tasks (i.e browsing, financing, basic games, etc.). It will be a great first experience for you!
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.