And as a desktop environment (which I think will influence your Linux experience far more than the distro pick) I’d pick KDE or Cinnamon or if you want to go old school XFCE (which is little easier on the resources) (all three stick to a more traditional desktop paradigm, so the switch from windows wont be as awkward)
luckily you can switch the DE pretty easy. you can just install them on your distro of choice and use them side by side if you’d like to try them out (generally speaking, you can choose which DE session you want to use on your login screen)
Yes but this a problem, you get very fragmented systems, tons of wasted space and resources (because your CPU/RAM will pay as well) and even worse you create a situation where developing Linux desktop apps isn’t just attractive to anyone.
Just to prove this point I’m sure you’ve noticed that the largest growth in Linux “desktop” apps (be it single developer apps or more “professional” stuff) was around the time Java desktop app became popular and then later on with Electron because at that point those packing solutions were dealing with the Linux DE mess (the constant updates and breaking of things) behind the scenes and the developers only had to add a very few checks into their code to handle all Linux systems.
What I’m saying is that by have all that DE choice and constant fuckery we’re making our lives worse in the sense that nobody same wants to develop to such platform thus getting less software and making Linux less of an alternative. Until we don’t get a single DE with a single solid and well designed theme, UI library, developer friendly frameworks and whatnot Linux won’t be getting any meaningful traction among regular people and professional developers.
GNOME and their large backing was a way to fix this mess and make all other DEs fade away but then their purist vision and CSS themes got in the way of optimizing the DE for the mass market and take over everything as they should have had.
The DE that will take Linux to succeed in the desktop doesn’t need themes, customization and all the personalization that would make it really hard to create. Hell it don’t need to be much, it can even be a simple 1:1 copy of the macOS desktop experience (and keep it updated) and it will likely become very popular in no time and send GNOME, KDE and others into oblivion.
I use both (and others) for different reasons. However, the primary homelab server I use is based on Debian - Proxmox OS. It runs on the machine hardware you have but then you can run a few ‘fake’ computers (virtual machines) on top of that host OS. This is called a hypervisor. So when running Proxmox on the host, you could run a Virtual machine (guest) that is running Rocky and play around with that. Or Fedora, or Gentoo… or ^A^r^c^h. That really would be the avenue to go to learn about different Distros and nuances without having to breakdown and rebuild everything every time.
My experience is that both Debian and Rocky are stable and very useful for what you need them to do. Debian favors stability, whereas Rocky favors being a RHEL compatible OS. It’s easier to do somethings on Debian, but you may learn more enterprise aspects using Rocky.
Debian is a distro of few surprises and stable but slightly out of date packages. Their software repositories are vast and supported across pretty much every architecture you could think of running Linux on.
Meanwhile the world of RHEL has been turned upside down with Redhat essentially putting a paywall around their sources. Although Rocky currently promises to continue being bug for bug compatible with RHEL it remains to be seen if they can continue to do so (in my opinion)
Yeah that’s one of the main reason I’m interested in your experience. The sorta recent source lock is definitely shaky just in general, although I believe in Rocky’s message that they won’t have to roll their shutters down.
Like most others have stated here, I’ll also add my recommendations for Linux Mint.
I have helped most of my family, relatives and several friends move and familiarize themselves with Linux Mint, especially those that do almost everything within the web browser (shopping/email/Facebook/youtube/travel reservation/etc…). Since I already was their goto tech support, I showed them around on Linux Mint and they pretty easily got going as everything was intuitively similar to Windows. All was point and click (after my initial setup with their network, peripherals, printer and some basic automatic updates configuration), no terminal voodoo magic for them.
For the younger ones I typically set them up with Pop!OS and Steam and they are ready to jump without me having to explain much. Sometimes, I had to install and help setup a server (Minecraft) so they can play with their friends.
Mind you, I would not recommend VMware as I am currently evaluating my transition options toward XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra or LXD/Incus or something else entirely.
You can install them like any other package from dnf/apt and then run them with startX (if its X11) or start them via their name if they are Wayland compositors (all this in the tty, the black screen with just letter outputs)
I have a home lab consisting of 9 mini PCs running Docker Swarm. They’re from various manufacturers, Intel, ASRock, Minisforum, etc. I originally tried to use Debian to build out the environment but it couldn’t find the network interfaces, or storage, or whatever else. So I made a Rocky 9 install drive and tried that. Every machine came up with all hardware recognized on the first try. So, that’s what I’ve been running for just about two years now. No complaints.
I use three systems for manager nodes so they don’t get much work. Mostly Traefik and a few other administrative services. I have about 80 containers running on the six worker nodes.
The Linux Kernel version is at 6 point something, I think they’re working on version 7. That’s not the OS though, the current Ubuntu version under LTS is 22.04. That’s more than twice as much as Windows.
Note I had to get this information from Wikipedia because Ubuntu’s website is currently unusable corporate garbagepuke.
Correct; the minor number is also the month. Which is why they’re almost always .04 or .10; the LTS version is always released in April, with non-LTS releases that serve a similar purpose to Debian Unstable (newer package base at the possible expense of more bugs) are released in October. They also have a convoluted codename system, as many point release distros do.
You’re not wrong about their website, but it still only took 2 clicks to get that information. For reference, I can’t find it at all on Debian’s website without clicking download and looking at the version number in the filename. But you can get that in one click so I suppose they’re doing better.
Edit: Sorry, I was wrong, you can see it under the Microsoft Azure section after one click:
Linux mint I would say its the one that tends to have better support in a large amount of hardware and it was the first one that I was able to stick with
I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .
The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that’s very intense, let’s say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials
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