They are intro distros, sure, but don’t ever think that you have to move to anything else if you don’t want to. Mint is probably the best Linux distro there is if your goal is ease of use, support, and “it just works”. I’d say that’s more than enough for what people want in an OS. I recommend it to anyone looking to hop into Linux, be it temporarily or permanently. People jump into other distros for specific use cases or because they feel like fucking around with something…but that’s absolutely not required or necessary to be a Linux user or advocate.
I don’t have much to comment on native installs that hasn’t already been said, but if you go with a VM, please don’t use VirtualBox. It’s a pile of hot garbage that pales in comparison to the already existing, kernel-level virtualization offered by KVM/QEMU. Use a package like virt-manager for KVM/QEMU based VMs and your experience and performance will be infinitely better. The Linux kernel has KVM built in for a reason, so take advantage of that.
Otherwise, Distrobox is a great recommendation, as are many of the other install methods listed in these comments.
For maximum performance you probably want to skip virt-manager, virt-viewer has a hardcoded FPS cap.
If you use QEMU directly and use virtio-gpu paired with the sdl or gtk display, and OpenGL enabled, you can run Ubuntu at 4K144Hz no problem. The VM is near imperceptible, and it works out of the box, that’s not even touching the crazy VFIO stuff.
Perhaps I was a bit vague with the word “performance”, but given that this user only seems to be interested in running ROS, there is absolutely no reason they need anything above the FPS cap (hence my recommendation of virt-manager, as it is quite user friendly). The “performance” aspect of it boils down to CPU utilization and efficiency more than anything.
Let’s start simple: You should consider hoping from Linux Mint to LMDE if you haven’t already.
As a user, you have no obligation to participate in the politics between the Ubuntu and the Mint Development team, but if you’ve followed the controversy and agree that Ubuntu is being a bully, this would be a small yet material way to show support.
what am I missing?
Every Linux distribution has a purpose - a reason its author thought it was worth the effort of creating it. Some are grand, others are silly, etc. When you explore distros, you’re telling the community which ideas resonate with you. Popular ideas will replicate, unpopular ideas will be abandoned.
Also, switching distributions makes it harder for business to ‘capture’ the Linux demographic. The mere act of switching occasionally means that tools to import/export/manage your data stay relevant. This literally fights enshitification.
Finally, and this is a matter of personal taste, but I like trying different versions of Linux for the same reason I try different flavors of ice cream: It’s fun; and even if now and then I get a bad flavor, I feel enriched by the experience.
I installed my first distro, slackware, from diskettes in the 90s, so Im not exactly a newbie. I now use Mint ( just works but you can get under the hood fine), with both a dual boot windows and a VM for when I don’t want to reboot, since I use a few programs that are windows only. The setup works fine for me. That said I’m playing with NixOS. Definitely not for the masses, but awesome.
Well, it’s not like more advanced distros are built to not work. Rather, they work better for different focus points.
So, I would encourage people, especially those with a techy background, to take a look around eventually, but yeah, your conclusion to that journey may as well be that Mint was nice, actually.
I use linux for a couple years as a server and for 6-9 months as a daily. Am also a sysadmin.
Mint works great but is very simple. Ubuntu works good as well but the proprietary snap store is shit imo Switched to debian & kde yesterday and am already fully set up. Not without any hickups but a great experience so far. Maybe try a second hard drive to switch out and install debian if you’re feeling like it. Its pretty cool.
I like fedora but I’m really loving opensuse tumbleweed on both my desktop and laptop. I have Nvidia rtx cards and support is just a few mouse clicks post-image. I get better FPS now than I did in Windows 11.
I do all my editing in neovim, with omnisharp as an lsp. It works pretty well. Happy to send you my dotfiles if you want.
As far as deployment, dotnet just runs on Linux now, especially if you’re do8ng web, its all the same. I deploy through containers to kubernetes, and its super smooth
I think there are windows containers available, but even M$ has given up pushing windows server for cloud native stuff. All their tutorial docs for containers use linux haha
The application will stream the selected monitor if the mutter screencast portal is available. If it is unavailable, a fallback to X11 based frame grabbing will happen. As such, it should work fine in almost all setups.
I work professionally from Windows, and as a hobby from Linux. My tool of choice for coding in .NET is Visual Studio Code (not FOSS, but there is a FOSS version which is just a bit more limited). It’s not as complete as Visual Studio, but it’s much faster, it has all the basic tools including a debugger, and it’s much more customizable.
Also if you have never done it before, you might love dotnet watch which works with any IDE and lets you make realtime changes to your code while the application is already running.
As for UI, my personal choice is deploying a static website on localhost through Kestrel (it’s less than 100 lines of code for a fully configured one), and then let the user’s browser take care of showing the UI. You could use Blazor if you really want to use C# all the way, but my personal recommendation is to stick to web technologies such as TypeScript and React (using either Parcel or Vite to build your project). Making your UI web-friendly also makes your app cloud-ready, in case tomorrow you will decide that’s something you need.
Finally, you can now deploy .NET apps as a single self-contained executable on all major platforms. But as already recommended by other users, I would keep adopting a web-first approach and go for Docker, and eventually Kubernetes. It’s a lot of work to understand it properly though, so perhaps you can start studying this topic another day in the future.
Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions.
Been a long while since I’ve done any C#, but for other languages (Java, Python, Kotlin) I’ve very much enjoyed the JetBrains IDEs. They have a dedicated C# one as well, though I’ve not used it.
JetBrains Rider: I use it, and I love it; I used it during my day job on Windows until they got restrictive on only using company-authorised software (😭), but I still use it on Linux and macOS for any C# work I do outside my day job. All the benefits of their Visual Studio add-in, Resharper, are built-in to Rider.
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