I appreciate the not your office OS commentary. I have the use Windows for work. I do this mostly via RDP to a work provided laptop, as well as a win10 VM for MS Teams. And I take great pleasure in shutting those down at the end of the work day.
The last tolerable version of Windows for me was XP. I find myself fond of Windows 98, but that’s probably just nostalgia speaking.
Arch Linux with NVIDIA is definitely not great for newbies, especially for people who can’t keep up with the distro. If left unupdated for too long, your system may break. Even if you update every day, you could break something. You just never win with a rolling release distro like this. My only saving grace is that I run with an AMD gpu and so far, that thing has just worked.
My tip for anyone switching to Linux is to switch to AMD. Even if NVIDIA is better overall for performance and features, even if the last time you tried AMD on your windows system it was slow and a bit buggy, on Linux, AMD just works, without extra steps.
My point is less that leaving Arch alone breaks things and more that updating after a really long time can break something. It also kinda defeats the point of using a rolling release distro. I can see how you thought i was spreading misinformation though. My bad for poor wording.
A using a spare desktop as a headless VM server would be a good way to practice your CLI skills. Don’t install a GUI, or web admin tool, and only use SSH to admin it.
From there, setup a couple of VMs for Arch or Gentoo testing. Eventually, a Linux From Scratch attempt would provide a lot of learning opportunities.
Are you leaving behind the dotfiles because you don’t want to bring over any of your old configuration?
For whatever it’s worth, you can remove Snap support from your Ubuntu system. If you want more current software, AppImage and Flatpaks are good for that.
Removing snap is somewhat unwise. Ignoring it is the safe way to go. Ubuntu might ship a system component you’re not aware of via snap. If you kill snap support you may end up with a broken system. To avoid headaches, simply ignore snap.
Zorin, Mint and Pop all are Ubuntu based distros that replace snaps with flatpak by default. I don’t know what would make any of those any more difficult than straight up Ubuntu. I’d even argue that most mainstream distros aren’t any harder to use than one another. Most of the differences between traditional distributions are behind the scenes: package manager, init system, default applications/configurations…
Even Arch, which has a reputation of being “hard”, isn’t particularly hard to use. It’s the lack of an installer that makes people freak out. The rest is just Linux. Once you plop in a GUI for package management and a proper desktop environment, from an end user perspective, nothing of it is inherently harder.
Solving problems is what becomes more difficult. There’s rarely issues with the happy path. The further away you move from mainline, the more components are different, the fewer of the solutions on askubuntu.com work by simply copy-pasting them. A novice user has no idea what the solutions do and why they don’t work. Instead they have to keep trying other copy-pasta hoping some would work. At best taking longer to solve it, and at worst some copy-pasta breaking something on their system.
Copy pasting random stuff from askubuntu is how you break your install in the first place. Novices don’t “have” to do that, they get told to do it by randoms on askubuntu that should not do that. Understanding an issue is key to fixing it, regardless of the problem’s nature.
I’ve yet to hit anything that worked on Ubuntu that didn’t on Mint. Hell, I find half of what I need on Arch Wiki even when not using Arch.
While you’re right, this expectation is unrealistic. Not only is it unrealistic for novice hobbyists, it’s unrealistic for people who use Linux to do other things, not for the sake of using Linux or learning its innards. For example my family members who use it for work an leisure. They couldn’t and won’t be bothered with learning how hibernation on Linux works. They want hibernate to work. The have me to make it work for them but folks who don’t will go to askubuntu.com, grab a well upvoted answer and copy-paste it straight into a terminal.
That’s what I mostly do now. But it requires some extra work, as some apps are not available in Ubuntu DEB repository. Also, I don’t like the approach that Canonical takes, pushing snaps so much
Well, my original plan was to copy configuration over after I install apos that are not available as flatpaks. Looks like I can copy configuration for those too, just to another location
Try installing Gentoo. Follow their installation instructions. I was able to install it, but failed to install a DE. So, got a console going and couldn’t go further. That was about 2 years ago. I have an extra laptop that I always install stuff on to learn.
Default? Top left. It should be visually appealing to most people, and it would honestly just be odd to have the default wallpaper be cartoon styled. And the bottom left looks too much like W11. But I think they should all be included as options.
I made the same switch earlier this year. The only real issues I can recall were learning to update flatpak manually because it holds up the other updates if I don’t do that through the Konsole first.
Granted, that might just be my system, but I generally have had far fewer issues with Tumbleweed than I’ve ever had with Mint.
Oh, and my art tablet gets tagged as a game controller for some reason, but it works for what I need it for so I haven’t bothered to fix it.
Just try it out and see how you like it. It’s been around as long as it has for a reason. And if you don’t like it, there are other fast moving distros. Fedora and Arch/Endeavour have similar packages.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.