Are u trying to install on x86 or ARM? ARM has images u can use. As for x86 I didn’t find distro with out of the box bigscreen configured, however there are AUR recipes - makes it easy to use it on Manjaro.
Second one, which I’d rephrase as ubuntu sticking with apt/dpkg as its package manager. Which is really nice if you like ubuntu as a distro already.
Though I don’t really get why there has to be a distro to be beaten. And having flavors is always good. I, for example, don’t like distros changing too much upstream SW, so the more vanilla the better. I don’t like either the periodic releases, and to be rolling release rocks. I don’t like systemd, whereas most distros now a days are systemd dependent. I also dislike network manager and similar and require a distro that keeps support for the basic dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant… All that to say, that no distro fits all needs, so several options are good, no need to have one beating the rest, :)
I switched when one guy unilaterally decided Ubuntu would completely flip its user interface, for no goddamn reason, the night before a long-term-support feature freeze.
Mint is for people who just want stuff to work and not fiddle about too much. It does that very well. Anyone who simply wants an alternative to Windows that is easy to get into and use will be perfectly happy with it. If you want to customise everything to a t, Mint isn’t for you
EndeavourOS is the most simple to work with distro I’ve had. Ubuntu-based and Fedora all were trouble. OpenSUSE was fine but I prefer terminal centric (not saying you cannot use terminal on it). EndeavourOS is amazing. I just yay to update and all works.
Arch is bleeding edge and frequently has minor bugs as a result. This is probably fine for power users and people who want to learn Linux but I wouldn’t give an Arch distro to someone who isn’t techy. They also likely won’t appreciate the frequent updates to applications that they depend on to actually do work.
(I used Arch for almost five years and think it’s one of the best distros)
It’s simple and solid enough to give to people who don’t know what they’re doing, and its Debian/Ubuntu base makes it flexible enough to not slow down power users who want to start modifying it. Other distros that might fit this bill keep shooting themselves in the foot and going off in weird directions, while Linux Mint has been a reputable no-BS distro for a very long time. It’s a workhorse distro without any gimmicks and that’s the point.
Mint was my “gateway distro” to get away from windows as a daily driver. It still is my daily driver and it’s given me enough guardrails to not screw it up too badly and learn.
I’m looking to go further up stream towards Debian. I’ve looked at arch and “arch that’s not allowed to be called arch because it has a gui installer”, but I’m not ready/able/“risk-tolerant-enough” to keep that stable as my daily driver. Fedora dormant seem quite right for me.
I really like mint, it meets my needs, has treated me well.
I looked at Manjaro VERY briefly, and I played with Endeavor a bit. I installed several distros as VMs just to poke around. I found Debian familiar which is likely the main reason I find myself leaning that way.
I use Mint, PopOS, or Arch/EndeavourOS more or less interchangeably. I’ve sincerely never had any issues with Arch’s stability. The term “stable” when describing a distro refers more to the package versions than system stability or overall reliability. Things aren’t necessarily broken cause they’re more up to date. Back in 2020, my laptop didn’t play well with Ubuntu 20.04 because of some power management issue caused by a kernel bug. My only real option was getting off of LTS and switching to 20.10 which had a newer fixed kernel version. So in effect, the Ubuntu LTS was less “stable” for me because of them keeping the kernel version stable.
YMMV, obviously, but most of what I’m doing when doing a fresh install is installing the packages I need, and configuring them. I can do this pretty much regardless of the distro. Most of the difference is if those packages are available in the first place, and how I’ll have to install them if they aren’t in the base repositories. Configs/dotfiles are usually pretty portable. The rest is just well… Linux as usual.
From experience, ignore your instincts and give pure Arch a try. It’s a lot more stable than you’d think, and their wiki has very thorough instructions for everything.
It’s a bit of a trial by fire on your terminal knowledge, but you’ll learn a ton in the process. Worst case, you get fed up trying and just go to Fedora or something after.
i dont have the energy or patience to go to a wiki for my OS, i just want it to work and not be proprietary. besides setting up wine staging and pipewire it’s generally been smooth sailing
I’m with you here, sometimes I’m really lazy and don’t want to mess with it. Other times I’m hell-bent on doing something I know how to do in a GUI through terminal.
Mint has let me keep my system OS rock solid, and I’m not afraid to try about anything in the vm. Reinstall when time permits or just roll back to a snapshot.
I’ve got time shift installed, but I use my computer for work, so there’s some draw to stability and having everything just work.
I’m sure it’d be fine, I’m probably not willing to put in the right amount of effort. I think a big fear for me is I use the computer for work, and while I have others, I prefer this one. I may not have the 15-30min to research and resolve something I did to myself.
I also try not to be the person who asks for help on the same question for the 17th time.
So far I’ve always been able to find answers in documentation or communities. Turns out I’m not so unique. ;).
I would echo that but suggest going to EndevourOS. EOS is a lot easier to install for normal people. What you get is insanely close to pure Arch.
I agree that running Arch is easier than people think. It is very stable. Also, because everything you could want is in the repositories ( and up-to-date ) it does not become a spaghetti like mess over time. No more third-party repos. No more PPAs.
Thanks for this recommendation as it’s potentially a logical step. I’ve thought about this but not researched it enough, yet. I don’t understand enough about the differences yet. Hypothetically, do I need or want Mint on Debian, or do I just want to get the real deal? Not posing the question to you, just what I’ve yet to research further. Mint is currently working fine for me, so there’s no rush.
Going straight to Debian isn’t hard. LMDE might have newer packages, IDK. I used Debian 12 for a bit and still use it on my server. Mint offers a great stock experience but Debian has a hard to explain vanilla coolness if you will. I would also recommend considering OpenSUSE if you haven’t looked at it.
It just works. Whenever anyone I know tells me they are going to install ubuntu or try out linux for the first time - I just tell them to install linux mint and they’ve had no complaints so far.
(Even though I only use mint as a fallback distro, I really appreciate it being there)
I have not used pop recently. To be fair both are kind of similar, at least base wise. So one cannot go wrong with any of the two. I like the traditional layout of cinnamon better than Gnome (out of the box) so I’ll pick Mint.
It’s just that my model is a newer generation Dell and I’ve heard from multiple people that Dell is getting more and more locked down and proprietary like Apple, so im thinking that’s why I haven’t had the best linux experience on this darn thing.
yes Ive heard they are good too, but i’ve been having issues with mine. it came with windows pre-installed, i doubt that plays much of a role but Idk. like the system is naturally fitted for windows only, so the linux experience has been a little rough around the edges. I have no clue, just a thought maybe
To me, the big mistake both make is in the presumption the UI and utilities shipped with those platforms are why people use it. But no. Nobody uses MacOS because of its nifty calculator or the Finder. It’s the overall toolkit integration with apps. Not even look and feel. But consistency in use.
I don’t presume to know why others choose to use anything. But MacOS is highly consistent across apps. Dialog boxes, text input forms, file browsing, hot keys, all the same across applications.
Glad I’m not the only one with this question. Feels like it’s difficult to find up-to-date information on the performance of these Arc cards on Linux; I’d like to support Intel’s move into this space but it’s hard without knowing how drastically it’s going to affect my gaming performance. 😅
I’m glad to hear the situation seems to be rapidly improving. I may pick up an A770 yet.
I’ll assume that was meant to be WiFi. It’s indeed one of the few components that’s easy to swap (a new one is about 30€), as long as it’s accessible (it usually is).
I feel a bit lazy at the moment, but Brodie does IMO an excellent job at explaining what a package manager is within the context of Linux. I’d recommend you to watch that instead over here; it’s already set to play at the correct time*.
Not sure if I’m using the same package or just a similar one. I’ve been annoyed at all the snaps, flatpacks, appimages, etc. for a while now. I just want to update from the repo and not end up with a bunch of slow, broken, poorly integrated alternatives on my computer. Being able to properly manage app images with a tool like this made the alternate distribution formats so much more tolerable. Now when I install something I pray that I’ll find an app image if it’s not in the repos!
I mostly used apt-get but when I installed Ubuntu as a desktop OS, I used their store until I understood that Snaps were not always the officially packaged versions. The same thing with Flatpaks. I wanted to install Sublime Text so I looked to Flathub and found a package by Sublime HQ Pty Ltd. Imagine my surprise when went to Sublimes own website to saw that they offer it via apt-get (on Ubuntu/Debian), they even say on their forum that they do not provide via Flatpak or Snap.
Someone just uploaded a package using a name that looks official, while not actually being the owner of the product.
Gotcha! I browsed their site a bit. I’d have to check ebay because I cannot afford the prices on their new stuff lol. I have a question that maybe you can answer. alot of folks recommend older laptops or whatever for linux. Does age of the computer matter much? I know you can always make upgrades to the internals and such, but say I got an old thinkpad for example maybe from 2010… and it’s certified linux compatible and all that… would i be able to run the latest versions of distros or would i be limited to older kernels due to the system being old? or is all of that determined by the hardware specs?
You don’t need certified Linux hardware to use Linux, and hardware is supported for a really long time once it’s there.
So you don’t have to worry about using latest distros, you should always welcome every update, they fix and add new things (unless it’s Ubuntu, screw them). And if you have new unsupported hardware, it will usually be supported in the next kernel release.
Meaning if you go with usual x86 CPU, Linux won’t have issues with almost anything that comes with it.
So, gnome is an alternative desktop environment and it’s great that they exist. If they inspired Apple’s UI or the other way around, doesn’t matter but they are the Apple UI of Linux. Mac users switching to Linux can have a somewhat familiar experience.
That said, their “we know better than you what you want, luser” attitude makes it hard for me not to grin when someone rants about their stuff. It shouldn’t, because they are probably mostly unpaid contributors and their work should be valued, but once in a while…
Dell is well known for their proprietary fuckery, both in hardware and software. Pretty much anything other than a Dell or an Ultrabook like the Surface or MacBooks (obviously) should give you very little issue. Look for something that uses Intel NICs and you should be fine, Realtek NICs are poorly supported in Linux.
One of my coworkers had a Dimension or whatever the “base level” laptops are and absolutely hates it. He said it ran like shit but couldn’t get another one.
I’ve had two Dell laptops that ran Ubuntu perfectly. Dell sells laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed and also certifies models for Linux. Their Linux support is top notch in my experience.
Yeah, obviously the ones they sell with Linux pre-installed support Linux perfectly, but that’s like 5 out of their 20 laptops. It would be shitty if they didn’t. People tend to buy a model with Windows preloaded and then install Linux on it though. Even though I used to work for Disney+ as a Linux System Engineer, which runs entirely on Linux, I had to fight with the helldesk to get a laptop that runs Linux, they would only support Windows and MacBooks. I told them straight up that I didn’t need their support and I was able to figure out things on my own. It took me about 5 months to get the Lenovo Carbon X1, granted this was during the end of the first year of COVID.
Seconding this, Dell has excellent support for Linux on their enterprise laptops (Latitude and Precision). XPS are another breed, and tend to be marketed as a ultrabook or a MacBook competition.
I wiped Windows and have been running Linux without issues on a Dell XPS 13 9360 for some time, so it can be done at least with some of their models. For what it’s worth I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Is that a desktop or laptop? The desktops are generally better supported and they just make the case and motherboard proprietary. My dad had an XPS Gen3 desktop back in 2005. When it finally died I couldn’t reuse the case since it was the BTX form factor and the front panel connector was proprietary 😑
It’s a 13" laptop from late 2017, with an 8th gen Intel i7 in it. With Tumbleweed it feels faster than my other XPS 13, which has an 11th gen i7 but runs Windows. I actually thought the 2017 one was finished because under Windows the fans ran all the time and it overheated so badly it would slow to a crawl. I repasted it twice with no improvement. But once I switched it to Linux the fans hardly come on, and they’re quiet when they do. Linux has been a huge improvement on that machine.
With Windows it always feels like I get the dregs of the CPU cycles after all the corporate interests with software on the computer have taken their share.
Every Dell laptop I’ve ever owned has had a key repeat issue. Mind you, this was an issue on Windows too. Otherwise, I bought a Dell Latitude last year and it has worked great.
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