You might want to think twice before using unique, niche distros like GoboLinux, Alpine, or NixOS. PuppyLinux doesn’t look like a proper distro, more like the equivalent of EndeavourOS or Artix. Since you’re using Linux for the first time, why not use Linux Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora?
No not really. Gnome for me is about 2.5 gigs of Ram, XFCE 700 megabytes and the CPU load also is way lower. XFCE can be heavy or light depending on how you configure it
Heck ya to Fedora, glad to see it recommended for a first time user. It’s not much more difficult than Mint, but you can also get into the weeds instead of having to find a new distro after Mint. Mint basically has permanent training wheels, while with Fedora you can pop em off whenever it’s convient.
Edit: Fedora is also a more up to date Alpine and it’s not directly controlled by Red Hat.
Since it’s your first time, my first suggestion is to try Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE desktop) or Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE desktop and generally more popular than Xubuntu). Both distributions are lighter on resources and they have an Ubuntu base which means there’s a ton of documentation online so if you run into problems, you will have plenty of resources.
Alpine is small for sure but it is more niche and it doesn’t use systemd which most major distributions use which means if you happen to run into weird issues, your pool of resources will be smaller. Don’t get me wrong, Alpine is great but I wouldn’t recommend it for new users. I don’t know anything about Puppy Linux; maybe it’s fine?
If your machine can’t run Xubuntu or Kubuntu, then worry about trying more niche distros like Alpine or Puppy.
If you run into issues, feel free to ask questions. The community is generally nice but you’ll want to try fixing it yourself first and then including what you tried in your post to get a better reception.
Embrace the terminal. It’s daunting at first but it’s such a powerful tool. Don’t use sudo with every command. Don’t paste random command in the terminal without doing a little research to understand what they do. Again, ask if you need help, you won’t learn everything overnight.
Good luck!
Edit: Linux Mint is also probably a good choice. Never used it myself but I’ve heard good things.
I struggled with Kubuntu as newbie (coming from Windows) - Mint was easier for me and I sticked with it (Cinnamon in my case, but my laptop is more powerful)
I appreciate what KDE is doing with their DE, I’m glad it exists but it’s not for me either. I only suggest it because it’s surprisingly light on resources for the amount of customization options you get.
Microsoft has pushed OEM’s to stop supporting S3 in bios, instead wanting hybrid sleep. Microsoft wants this because hybrid sleep allows waking for sending telemetry to Microsoft all the dang time, like cell phones do. I curse the day they did this.
It seems your machine has 4GB of RAM, in which case you can run KDE (for example) quite comfortably and don’t necessarily need a lightweight-focused desktop environment. So I’d say to go with a popular distro, as the other comment suggested, and not a niche one. Then pick the DE you like from videos/screenshots.
My Linux knowledge isn’t what it used to be, but I believe you can easily make a thumb drive with a bootable distro. I would recommend taking whatever you choose for a test drive before you wipe a working system. That way you can see if there’s any weird stuff that doesn’t want to work.
Puppy Linux is mostly focused on tiny install size (<300MB), built from source and hasn’t had a new version in over 3 years.
Alpine is even more minimalist and designed to run on embedded devices or in containers.
Go with a desktop-oriented or general purpose distro instead.
I am a software developer and am forced to have Windows on my work computer. WSL allows me to have a Linux terminal that I can use directly on my files without needed a VM.
But being forced to use a terminal to do anything is kinda hard to deal with if you’re not a developer. I’m probably guessing this didn’t bother you that much.
What are you trying to do on WSL? I think the whole point of WSL originally was to have a linux terminal on Windows, before they added graphics in WSL 2.
I was trying to run applications on it, similar to their Windows Subsystem for Android that they released as an update to Windows 11. I have to say, the latter is significantly easier to deal with imo.
Same. Well, not forced, but using Linux would just make everything more difficult. I like being able to drop to a shell and use a Linux environment with its useful utilities to manipulate stuff on my Windows PC.
Yeah, I could use mingw, but that is a pain, and I can’t just apt install stuff.
There’s also a package called gsudo which allows you to preface a PowerShell command with sudo to run it as an administrator. It will cause a UAC prompt.
<span style="color:#323232;">sudo choco update all
</span>
Like the others, I suggest you stick to a distro designed for desktop use (Ubuntu, Fedora etc), you’ll have a much easier time.
If you really want to go with something closer to “scratch made” I’d recommend Arch. Its documentation is killer and you can build a system suited to your requirements.
Okay, folks. NixOS needs your help. No bull. I’m talking documenters, designers, coders, package maintainers. Why? Because the NixOS community has a lot on it’s plate right now.
Like I can understand why flakes haven’t become standardised, why it’s still marked as unstable, even though it’s pretty much feature complete, and that’s because nix is a complex environment builder and the current contributes are taxed to the max.
But what is nix?
Nix’s job is to create reproducible environments where you can put any library, any service, any application. It does this through compile time flags and modifying ELF headers to isolate applications on a system to their own, exclusive UNIX path. These are linked together as clojures, or a dependency graphs, that can share libraries, applications and services intetchangably with each othet, or use another version or patched version without causing any dependency conflicts.
You can fire up pretty much whatever you want and it will be reproducible elsewhere. It’s like if you took a package manager, build environments, as well as VMs and micro services and make them kiss.
You can spin up a nix environment on any supported system and expect it to run 1:1. This however breeds complexity and there’s a lack of NixOS contributors.
If only you spin up a nix environment on a VM or use it to replace your current build systems (because nix can use several build systems in one single environment), and then contribute back with some changes to nixpkgs, then you are helping to bring about the most powerful deployment tool since kubernetes.
No joke. Check out how you can contribute, because at the end of the day learning nix is gaining a new superpower.
I find your mileage is somewhat dependent on the rest of the system config and how you access it. I kinda hate how WSL2 is based on hyper-V because the network stack for that is a pain in my ass, but tools like NMAP just don’t work on WSL1.
I have found that using something like MobaXterm is pretty awesome. The built-in X-Server lets me run a few useful graphical tools within WSL (GIMP, Wireshark, etc) without needing to install their windows counterparts.
I think qcow2 images are always a fixed size (but I could be wrong on that) however I saw some threads explaining how you could relatively easy modify the size of the qcow2 image :)
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