Here’s another vote for EndeavourOS if you need it. I run BTRFS and timeshift-autosnap, but I’ve never needed to use it. Like the other poster said, I’ve had minor annoyances and brief package conflicts, but nothing critical has ever gone awry.
I use my laptop for work all day every (week)day. It runs EndeavourOS and I haven’t had any problems - if anything I’ve encountered fewer annoyances than with any other distro I’ve tried to date (Pop, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, Debian). I don’t use Btrfs but I do use Timeshift as well as Syncthing to back up files to a file server at home.
I haven’t felt the desire to install Arch, and TBH I’m not sure what the benefit might be because I’d just configure it to be basically the same as EOS anyway.
if you decide on Gnome, keep in mind there are two main paths to follow – stock Gnome (“as the developers intended”) and Gnome with extensions (ie. addons or plugins or mods) – extensions can do everything from minor aesthetic tweaks (Blur My Shell, Rounded Corners, Remove Rounded Corners) right on up to completely changing the behavior of the window manager (PaperWM, Pop Shell) – which side of that particular divide you end up on is purely personal preference
I don’t agree with avoiding stable distros. In the case of Debian for example stable gets priority on security patches. Just subscribe to the security mailing list and have auto updates on.
Also download any disto or bleeding edge container and scan it and you’ll have vulnerabilities in some library. The ecosystem is always moving. The question is how exposed are you.
Use a firewall, secure your browser and whitelist sites you trust to run JS. Stick to repos. Scan downloaded files via virus total or open In a vm. Dont install what you dont need.
You are far more likely to get compromised in a site breach than to get hacked. The browser is the main attack vector that you need to secure.
Also dont run servers if you dont know what you are doing. Use a non networked VM to practice.
Dont blindly paste commands and be sure to read the source before you compile and run some random program.
As a complete noob who installed Mint about two weeks ago, I have Thoughts™. This is a good start, I think., and I’m really glad to see it, but it still makes some assumptions and misses a couple of things I came across that I think would be helpful.
I’ll try to find some time tomorrow to pull together some edits and suggestions to share, rather than a bunch of comments here.
Perhaps it’s important to point towards resources where new users can check compatibility; like e.g. linux-hardware.org. Or even better ones that I’m unaware of.
In the Networkmanager you can set that a connection is either available to all users or just yourself. If you set it to “all users” its configuration will be saved somewhere in /etc/Networkmanager (I’m too lazy to look up the real path) and will therefore be available for Networkmanager on boot. If you just make it available for yourself Networkmanager will only attempt to connect after you log in.
I think the default is to make it only available to yourself, because then you don’t have to enter your sudo password when you set it up or want to change something. The downside is of course what you describe in your post.
After buying a steam deck and seeing how good everything worked I just yeeted my entire bootdrive. Never looked back ever again (Then again I still own a surfacebook so it’s not fully commiting)
Any beginner guide that advises against Ubuntu does disservice to beginners. It’s doing the opposite of helping beginners get into Linux. Ubuntu is still the easiest on-ramp to Linux today by far, despite anyone’s feelings about Canonical. Avoiding it harms Linux adoption.
As a kid I had windows 98 (and later xp) dual booted with debian and at some point some version of suse. This was ~20 years ago
Well I used it just fine and I knew a bout the mysterious “root” and “sudo” that my dad would use but I was just playing some games and maybe using the web browser.
Using the GUI I never learned Linux and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started using Linux again, and it was only because I wouldn’t be able to continue using Windows 7 anymore.
So I don’t have any experience with teaching Linux and especially not to kids, but I think kids are actually really good at learning stuff if they need too, so give them a PC and the tools to figure things out, if they want to use it they’ve got to learn, and don’t give them other options where they don’t have to learn anything.
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