I’m excited for these, especially with them likely coming for stable Firefox soon, too. My $DAYJOB hands out Ubuntu laptops and every time, we have to scrape off the Firefox Snap, because e.g. saving images doesn’t work and the Downloads directory is in some mystical place somewhere underneath ~/snap/. These APTs will almost restore the usability of other distros…
You don’t need to worry about formatting. The installer can do that for you as part of the process. Just make sure you merge all of the existing Windows partitions into one, then let the installer partition as needed. I’m not 100% sure about the Steam question, but I think I remember reading somewhere that this is the case.
Keep in mind, Linux isn’t magic. If the hardware sucks, the hardware sucks. Games can take a lot of resources. Just make sure your old LAN party laptop can handle the games you want to play on it.
Side note: Mint Cinnamon is a perfect choice for a starter distro.
I made sure that only the OS is on C. That’s my MO since I had some bad experiences concerning windows installations (my first PC was running Windows ME)
That’s a good MO to have. I was talking about the partitions that Windows does on its own, depending on the version, of course, and the ones that the manufacturer does. For example, Lenovo has a recovery partition with a (supposedly) untouched installer for the Lenovo bloatwared OOTB Windows installation. Since you never plan on using that laptop for that version of windows again, you can just merge all partitions on that drive, and let the Mint installer use the whole drive for its purpose.
And again, a distro chooser guide that completely fails to mention OpenSUSE, despite being a full-featured desktop OS supported by the second biggest corporation in the Linux world (behind Red Hat), with a history that goes back longer than Debian’s.
They didn’t include my distro of choice (Gentoo) or my desktop environment (TDE) . . . but I’m not surprised. Lists like this aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and they always reflect the author’s biases and what they’ve been exposed to. Not including someone else’s favourites doesn’t make them bad lists for the purpose they’re intended to serve.
Probably the best way to deal with newbie choice paralysis is a big flowchart, or a questionaire: "Which of these are important to you: ‘just works’ - stability - customizability - organizational transparency - keeping up with the bleeding edge - . . . "
Gentoo is a bad choice for a generic newb, yes, but I would say that Arch is too.
TDE wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice for first-timers if any distro of significance preinstalled it, but the extra installation work pretty much wipes out the user-friendliness it might offer, alas.
For me, the fact that Chris Titus basically said “the opensuse installer is better” is, I think, more praise than OpenSUSE has receive in years , but far less than it deserves. Honestly, the only issue I had with Tumbleweed was the notoriously slow package manager. I think it’s the only package manager slower than dnf, and even installing apps by appending them to configuration.nix (if you so choose) on NixOS felt far faster than using zypper. I really like Yast, though.
Sorry, the goal here was to offer a few sensible alternatives, not overwhelm the reader with choices. The gist here is “start with something solid, reputable and popular, branch out later”.
Too much choices lead to analysis paralysis, and to goal here is to learn how to swim first. There are dozens of great distros, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list, as there are dozens of great DEs, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list.
Then why even mention arch? Especially a guide claiming to be for beginners? Using your own metaphor, that’s like teaching someone to swim by tossing them into a shark infested reef.
Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.
A snap could actually be possible. I am happy they dont focus on that, but Ubuntu can even run cups as a snap, their Ubuntu Core is pretty cool. It sucks that their store is proprietary, but you could write your own installer, fetching .snap packages from any repo and installing them locally
This is not a very good question. If you are concerned about security you need to think about what specifically you are trying to keep safe? Here are some examples of different security scenarios:
Do you want your computer to be safe when it is stolen?
Do you want to run lots of native apps from untrusted sources?
Do you want it to be used by many people and you don’t want them to be able to steal each others secrets?
Each one of those questions has different means of securing the computer. With question 1, it is not so much a matter of desktop environment, rather it has more to do with using full-disk encryption, setting a boot password in UEFI, and always having your lock screen enabled.
With question 2, this is a much more difficult task and you would probably be better off running apps in a VM, or carefully crafting your “Security Enhanced” Linux profile – or not using Linux at all, but using FreeBSD which allows you to run apps in jails.
With question 3, be more careful with filesystem permissions and access control lists, setup your sudoers file properly, and use a desktop environment with better security auditing like Gnome or KDE Plasma.
Never heard of these jails, like bubblejail? Its available on Linux too.
I know the question is vague and highly dependend on Threat model etc. Pre-enabled services, distribution adding stuff to it, SELinux confined user (not working with Plasma at all), xwayland support for keylogging chosen keys (Plasma).
Also GTK is widely used for rust apps, this doesnt exist on Plasma at all, not a problem though as Plasma is not Gnome and simply supports GTK normally.
I don’t think the DE itself matters, but I can recommend using an immutable OS (makes it harder to install malware) and installing flatpak apps only. You can also use software like flatseal to further lock down permissions
A mostly read only filesystem built from a limited number of packages, with other files being in a fixed number of locations mean it is harder for malware to hide.
You can achieve the exact same thing with a normal distro if you mount /var and /boot separately of /. And if you get a root exploit it’s just as harmful on either approach.
“Immutable” systems are meant for maintainer comfort not for user security.
No, you can’t : in an immutable distro I can reasonably trace almost any file in the filesystem back to the package that created it, and know with a reasonable degree of certainty that the installed version of said file has not been tampered with. That isn’t possible an a normal distro.
Sure it is, has been for decades. You can use a read-only root partition, there are many tools to ensure the integrity of everything on it, and tracing files back to their package is a very old feature.
Ublue is like rpmfusion but for image-based. Its the addition to fedora, with packages they can’t ship. They replace all the libav* with complete ffmpeg which is pretty great as its a great tool and Firefox works ootb.
For example they have -nvidia images for every image, which is the best way to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers as you can roll back and a broken update simply wont ship to you.
They also have modded kernel images for Razer, Surface and a special Framework image.
Another cool project basing off their “starting point” toolkit to create custom images, is secureblue, a security-optimized Version including
hardened kernel and hardened_malloc
updated Chromium, maybe soon Brave
soon a hardened Chromium (currently as COPR “vanadium”) like GrapheneOS
hardened services, firewall
removed unused kernel modules
It is very security focused though, so no Firefox, no Flatpak as its currently broken, Podman (distrobox, toolbox) is currently not working and its unclear if that is actually necessary, …
Bluefin is their fancy distro with lots of Tools, a custom Desktop, integrated Developer packages and more.
You don’t have to use an LTS version if you don’t want to stick to it… Also Fedora is on a yearly upgrade cycle too, just so you know, it’s not a rolling distro. You can actually upgrade sooner on Ubuntu because it’s on a 6-month upgrade cycle.
Fedora is on a six monthly cycle just like non-LTS Ubuntu; neither distro is on a yearly release cycle. The previous release is just supported for an extra six months, for one year of support per release for Fedora.
Fedora itself isn’t rolling but the kernel and mesa packages do roll between releases, and it is more bleeding edge than Ubuntu generally.
+1 Plasma. However, I don’t dislike gnome. Gnome just doesn’t fit my personal taste of workflow and customizability. Other that that, gnome did a pretty good job on the look and feel department. I feel at home on Plasma (and almost at home on xfce)
I don’t feel like they’re inherently bad, but they’ve become so popular that they all feel like they’re blending together. I think it’s kind of stale at this point.
Aliyaut’s logo? It is clean, but it’s hardly even identifiable as a gecko. It blends in too much with all the modern corporate logos we have today IMHO. It’s not a bad choice if they decide to go with it, but they could do better.
Yes, that escape on spectacle is literally my workflow; I take a lot of screenshots and that change was the only thing I did not like about this newest Ubuntu update.
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