Easy mode: LMDE/Mint. They are all geared towards a good user experience and trying to keep you out of the terminal. I would recommend them to any new Linux user.
For a slightly more advanced experience, Debian with XFCE as the desktop. The installation is slightly less friendly and they expect you to be familiar with using the terminal and tinkering with the guts of your OS from time to time but you can have a ‘lighter’ installation with less background services. (I run Debian on all my machines so I have a bias towards Debian and LMDE).
I’d say Pop_OS! which has a spin (version) with Nvidia drivers already installed. Below is a direct link. It’s based on Debian, so it enjoys excellent app support. Linux Mint is also a good choice.
To add some clarity, Pop uses GNOME and is working on their own desktop based on Rust and Mint uses Cinnamon, a fork of old GNOME that they’ve significantly upgraded. I’ve used both and like both a lot, but have come to prefer GNOME.
I have installed PopOS and so far it’s been very stable. Most of the games I play are on Steam and support has been pretty awesome (BG3, CP2077, Valheim, Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor). For non-Steam games, WINE with the Wine Glass GUI has been great, allowing me to run older windows games without a problem.
EDIT: Forgot to add I’m running an Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB ram, RX 5700XT
EDIT EDIT: +1 for Mint as well. Outside of my gaming PC, it’s my daily driver on my laptop.
If you are running things inside of containers you aren’t helping yourself by disabling unprivileged namespaces, you are actually just running more things as root. Inside the containers they generally block namespaces anyway.
TBH I’ve never heard anything positive about most of what hardened does.
I’m also looking forward to Bcachefs, but rather for storage of large amounts of data. Just hoping the multi device feature works as well as advertised
Basically, you want to not disable kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone.
For a temporary solution that has to be redone after reboot, there is sysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1.
For a lasting solution, consider echo kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-enable-unpriv-userns.conf.
In either case you’re foregoing security for the sake of convenience/functionality, so I understand why you would rather not act upon either of them.
I don’t know what the solution is that would be analogous to installing bubblewrap-suid. Perhaps, it’s worth exploring the projects found within the github page of Awesome Fedora Security for some pointers.
For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.
There’s things like Unraid and Synology that have their own UI. But they have some limitations, for example Synology requires one of their devices, doesn’t run on generic ones.
All of the universal blue images come with distrobox so I gotten used to that, it’s nice that you can export apps so they appear in the DEs application menu
I’m also looking for general tips and advice for beginners if anyone has some to share.
The only thing that is stopping a Windows user from becoming a Linux user is the package manager – learn how to use it in the cli. Then the "rest’ should be an obvious, flat curve (which “package” goes for video card, audio, etcetc).
Windows’s package managers are MS only (ish). msiexec is a bit of a convoluted pain compared to apt, yum, pacman or even portage.
When you update a Linux box, everything is updated not just the OS. That is not the case on Windows where each browser, pdf viewer etc has its own updater service or not.
I’ve been doing IT software monkeying for several decades for many companies, some of which you will have heard of. Trust me: the Windows model is not the best. It certainly should not be a reason to fear Linux.
Most distros have a “Politely notify that some updates are available, would you mind awfully if I install them?” … cracks on in the background and then suggests a reboot only if the kernel was updated.
If your main concern is UI distro doesn’t really matter, the thing you need to think about is desktop environment, most big distros let you choose from a few
TL;Dr I would suggest looking for a distro with kde plasma as it’s quite customisable and looks quite clean out of the box. Personally I prefer gnome out of the two but you definitely hit a wall eventually customising it
Gnome is what Ubuntu and fedora use by default I believe and looks somewhat like Mac (but is fairly distinct from everything else, you kinda have to see for yourself)
KDE Plasma is what the steam deck uses in desktop mode and looks kinda like modern windows.
Cinnamon is what Linux mint uses which also looks like windows 10 and is designed to appeal to windows users
Pop!os recently released their own DE called cosmic, but they were originally using their own customised version of gnome
Make sure you test out those images every so often too. I recently got a new computer and used clonezilla to copy a system over, only to find btrfs restores fail spectacularly without warning until you boot into them.
Yeah this isn’t really much of an issue with EFI now. You can change boot order in the BIOS and things are way less likely to get overwritten or broken. You can even have 2 EFI partitions if it’s something your concerned about.
The only time I got my grub overwritten was when I have to update bios/firmware from Windows. After bios/firmware update, the update app always restore windows boot manager and I need to reinstall grub from live environment.
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