I would go with Mint because it has the largest selection of apps. Of course you can run any Linux program on any Linux distro, but with Mint you are able to just install almost anything without difficulty from a package manager like synaptic, or the built-in Mint Software Manager. That includes game launchers like Steam and Proton. This is, in my opinion, what makes Mint OS truly the most beginner friendly Linux distro.
Fedora is good too, but you need to grant it access to other sources of apps before you see the wider selection of apps outside of the more limited, strictly FLOSS apps that are available by default on Fedora. And these extra steps of finding trustworthy sources and installing them makes Fedora a bit harder to use, at least for beginners.
I love openSUSE and think it’s one of the few distros that has a pretty good implementation for every DE/WM. GNOME, KDE, Xfce, lxqt, enlightenment, mate, sway, etc… are all a solid experience on openSUSE.
That said, I have never found a distro with a good Cinnamon experience other than Linux Mint. Probably in part due to cinnamon being developed by mint, but regardless, if you want to use cinnamon, mint is your best option.
thank you, that seems to be the general opinion i have seen online. i am writing this on linux mint, thank you to all of the comrades who helped me pick it sankara-salute
I’ve tried basically every mainstream-ish distro there is, I just want some outside opinions because I’m bad at picking stuff and I want to stick with something for a while
Hi there. I know what is a meta distro (Gentoo, bedrock, LFS), and an immutable distro (NixOS, Fedora Silverblue, MicroOS, VanillaOS) but what is a transactional distro?
I don’t think I will ever go back to a filesystem without snapshot support. BTRFS with Snapper is just so damn cool. It’s an absolute lifesaver when working with Nvidia drivers because if you breathe on your system wrong it will fail to boot. Kernel updates and driver updates are a harrowing experience with Nvidia, but snapper is like an IRL cheat code.
OpenSuse has this by default, but I’m back to good ol’ Debian now. This and PipeWire are the main reasons I installed Debian via Spiral Linux instead of the stock Debian installer. Every time I install a new package with apt, it automatically created pre and post snapshots. Absolutely thrilled with the results so far. Saved me a few hours already, after yet another failed Nvidia installation attempt.
Please tell me more about Spiral Linux. I’m not a huge Debian fan personally(at least for desktop), but I often install Linux on other people’s machines. And Mint/ Debian is great for them.
Key points are BTRFS with Snapper, PipeWire, newer kernels and some other niceties from backports, proprietary drivers/codecs by default, VirtualBox support (which I’ve personally had huge problems with in the past on multiple distros). They also mention font tweaks, but I haven’t done side-by-side comparisons, so I’m not sure exactly what that means.
Edit: shoutout to Spiral Linux creator @sb56637 , who posted a few illuminating comments on this older thread: lemmy.ca/post/6855079 (if there’s a way to link to posts in an instance-agnostic way on Lemmy, please let me know!)
Well for one thing their driver support is apparently “harrowing”. 😊
I will never understand why people choose distributions that will brick themselves when the wind blows, so they add snapshot support as a band-aid, and then they celebrate “woo hoo, it takes pre and post snapshots after every package install!”
How about using a distro where you never have to restore a snapshot…
To clarify, this is my first time using Spiral Linux. My experience regarding Nvidia drivers is across several different distros (most recently Ubuntu LTS and OpenSuse Tumbleweed). I have never had a seamless experience. Often the initial driver installation works, but CUDA and related tools are finicky. Sometimes a kernel update breaks everything. Sometimes it doesn’t play nice with other kernel extensions.
The Debian version of the drivers didn’t set up Secure Boot properly. Instead, I rolled back and used the generic Nvidia .run installer, which worked fine. Not seamless, obviously, but not really worse than my experience on other distros. In the future I will always just use the generic installers from Nvidia.
Point is, with BTRFS you can just try anything without fear. I’m not going to worry about installing kernel updates from now on, or driver updates, or anything, because if anything goes wrong, it’s no big deal.
And my point is that it’s not normal to fear updates. Any updates, but especially updates to essential packages like the kernel or graphics driver.
If you’re using the experimental branch of a distro or experimental versions of packages on purpose then snapshots are a good tool. But if you’re using a normal distro and its normal packages you should not have to resort to such measures.
And 10 is extremely secure compared to the jungle that was XP, and 7 was barely doing well, so post EOL usage will remain high. Most people will just airgap their Win10 machines.
Here’s some creative software that replace the functionalities of Adobe software & more.
photo editing: GIMP
vector images: Inkscape
drawing/painting: Krita (GIMP also fine for this)
video editing: kdenlive
3d modelling, animating, etc.: Blender
audio editing: Tenacity (Audacity fork made after the buyout without telemetry)
DAW: LMMS
media player: VLC or mpv
if there’s any other specific software you’re looking for a FOSS alternative to, don’t hesitate to ask. You always have more options on Linux than you’d think.
Gnome with Wayland: I am just too used to the touchpad gestures and sleek looking apps to go back. Even windows looks and behaves janky in comparison
Firefox: plain better than the alternatives, the scrolling is so much better under Wayland too
The auto dark mode GNOME extention: it between dark and light mode depending on the time of day
Rounded window corners GNOME extension: forces all 4 corners of applications to have rounded corners
Separate /home partition, very useful for distro hopping or in case just going the nuclear option and reinstalling everything is the easiest way to deal with a breakage
I still have my HP Mini311, it has a 11.6" screen, 1366x768, discrete GPU, can decode 1080p in hardware and output on tv via HDMI. In 2009 it was a beast!
I changed the 2.4bg with a 2.4/5n wifi, upgraded to 3GB of ddr3 ram, SSD, overclocked to 2GHz, and installed MX Linux on it, works perfect.
How was this measured? Just asking cause a lot of PCs are sold with Linux there cause it’s cheaper and the user immediately slaps a pirated Windows on after purchase.
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