Alpine was the most interesting for me. It goes against the tendency of complicating the systems. I have to use Arch because everything can work on that distro.
I always have Terminal open in the background. Never know when you might need to enact a dramatic hacker scene. I just can’t believe what they charge for thise minitors that project text onto your face.
I love how polished everything is in Gnome. I try another DE because of some cool thing, but I keep coming back to Gnome.
There are a couple of minor things that irk me, but man, how good Gnome looks, the consistency, stability, and attention to detail from the devs make it superb to me.
The accessibility options are also great for a Linux distro.
And, and I know people hate this about Gnome, but I love that it’s not just a Windows UX/workflow clone with a start button in the bottom left that opens a small start menu, Taskbar along the bottom with time and system stuff shoved in the corner, minimise/maximise/close buttons on the top right of every app, etc.
They’re ballsy enough to do usability studies and go with what makes sense, not just what we’re most used to, even though it’s opened the devs up to hate and threats.
There are two more I’d reccomend as its what my family and friends have been using and have ran into literally, zero issues.
Linux mint (specifically cinnamon edition) is very stable, and customizable if you’re into that sorta thing, you can install custom kernels and get greatly improved performance out of gaming if thats your thing. It’s built off of Ubuntu (but just better) so there’s great support for it, especially with devices such as printers.
Fedora Kinoite is a solid, also well supported, immutable distribution which will either make your life easier, or more difficult.
Immutable means you can’t change anything in your root directory, so basically your “C: Drive”. You still have a regular file system and can install all your apps, but the operating system stays the same as everyone else’s and is something that by design, never breaks and “just works”, and is what I personally use.
Pop_OS is definitely another option if you have “newer” hardware and Linux Mint doesn’t work for you and you don’t like the immutability of Fedora Kinoite (you can always try regular Fedora KDE). But I’d personally reccomend just the first two. But Pop is also built off of Ubuntu, so you still get that great hardware support.
But please, avoid stock Ubuntu. Ubuntu has far gone away from being a beginner, “just works” distro.
Hope this helped! Please reply or message me if you have any issues or are confused, or you can always ask for some more help within this community as well!
Pop OS is great because of up to date kernel and drivers, and they even have a specific version created for nvidia gpus, on disadvantage is that gnome version is a bit old, but its very stable at least
That’s what bots are for: an automated response like “have you tried XXX? share the link to the results here with additional information if you think the questionnaire didn’t consider an aspect important to you”.
I think it depends on what you are looking for. While Linux Mint is a safe option, it does have some drawbacks… well it’s more drawbacks from Ubuntu but as Linux Mint is based off of it, it’s also impacted. Primarily the fact that Ubuntu packages are terribly out of date. Thankfully mint makes adding PPA’s painless, but for apps that don’t have a PPA it’s a pain to install them from scratch like Mangohud. It’s not impossible, but there is an expect level of Linux knowledge which is required before going in.
Another option is Manjaro. You will hear the litany of endless criticism about it from the community, some of it is valid. But for the most part, while it’s not as nice as Linux Mint, I think the OS will get you to the point where you can start using your machine faster. Mostly thanks to Arch’s rolling release, as well as the AUR for filling the gap between official packages and flatpaks.
I was using Manjaro for the longest time, but switched to Mint due to a freak bootloader accident. I prefer Manjaro in terms of how well it handled Games and Windows software due to it’s association with Arch. But I like how well Mint manages my laptop’s battery and performance or lack thereof due to it’s pitiful cooler.
Keep in mind they have zero Linux experience so I doubt they’ll be needing packages that are too obscure for mint, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to run windows software in Linux to a novice.
While I agree, the issue is, that they’ll want to. Thankfully Valve is handling games well enough right now that it’s a non problem. Regardless which distro you are on.
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