Disclaimer: I’m an android user and would love to switch to a Linux phone.
Problem with android is updates being locked by carriers or Google themselves. To get updates after 2-3 years you basically have to buy a phone that has unlockable bootloader and supports LineageOS, AND you have to have the technical skills to Install and set up LineageOS, I do, but no one else I know does, they just happily buy a new phone because app X,Y,Z stopped working on their old phone, which is perfectly usable. And if you have a phone where bootloader is locked (I’m looking at you, Verizon, EVERY PHONE THEY SELL THEY LOCK), oops there’s an expensive paperweight, can never be running anything other than Android 8 or whatever it came with.
My problem is the lack of availability of custom ROMs on new devices like the newest OnePlus and ASUS. Not the fault of the maintainers but it is what it is. I don’t want to be locked to Pixel hardware because come what may I will never trust Google on a single thing
Your hardware is supported; consider to check driver support over at linux-hardware.org. Honestly, most hardware should be well-supported, unless it has been released very recently or is hardware from known troublemakers (i.e. Nvidia GPUs or Broadcom etc).
Your ‘computer-literacy’ is at least (slightly) higher than average.
You’ve primarily used Windows in the past.
You prefer asking others instead of finding it out for yourself; the existence of this post supports that. (It’s either that or you like to have a second opinion in all cases; but I would have expected more input from you if that was the case 😅.)
Your hardware is somewhat modern.
You will mostly stick to defaults (at least initially).
You’re aware that while hundreds of actively maintained distros exist, most of them are either niche or not worth your time in the first place. If, from the remaining ones, the less impactful derivatives are surgically removed, followed by the removal of newbie-unfriendly distros, then only 10-20 distros would remain; most of which have been named in this thread already. And your needs dictate which one out of these would suit you best.
You will educate yourself regarding desktop environments like GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, Xfce etc. Perhaps you will even boot into a live environment to check them out for yourself; loading a bunch of distros on your USB through Ventoy is excellent for that. This is important as they’re arguably the biggest contributor to how you perceive your Linux system. You should also be aware that in almost all cases a second (or heck; even third, fourth etc) desktop environment can be installed on your system and you should be able to switch between them relatively easily. However, in most cases, the one provided on first installation works close to flawless while others that have been tacked on later on are generally less polished.
You will educate yourself (eventually) regarding universal package managers (read: AppImage, Flatpak, Nix and Snap) and Distrobox as collectively they’ve (mostly) ridden the Linux ecosystem of problems related to software not being packaged in the native repos. Don’t feel the need to indulge into all of them simultaneously from the get-go. But be aware that they exist and that they enable one to install (almost) any package that has been made available to Linux regardless of their chosen distro.
Any distro I should use?
Typically, distros like Arch, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, openSUSE, Pop!_OS and Ubuntu (or their derivatives) will be mentioned in these kinds of queries. And it becomes mostly a popularity poll that measures what the community thinks is the preferred distro for beginners. And honestly, I don’t blame them as you haven’t really given us a lot to work with. My entry to that popularity poll would be Linux Mint. If you prefer to use GNOME or KDE Plasma instead, then consider either Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed. Additionally, Pop!_OS should be considered if Nvidia causes problems on all the others.
Feel free to inquire if you so desire!
EDIT: I just noticed how you mentioned to someone that your use case will be primarily gaming. First of all, gaming is somewhat equal on most distros; especially with the likes of Bazzite-Arch and Conty providing excellent environments for gaming regardless of installed distro. Though, these containers do still rely on the hosts kernel, therefore any perceived difference on same hardware but different kernels might be attributed to said kernels. Newer kernels generally come with improved performance; at least for newer hardware*. Though, perhaps more performance could be gained through other means as well. I will spare you the details, however, as this is potentially another rabbit hole within the initial rabbit hole. Therefore, instead, I will name a couple of distros known for being excellent for gaming purposes: Bazzite, Garuda Linux, Nobara Linux, PikaOS and RegataOS. If you want a no-nonsense system, just go for Bazzite; while initial setup might seem slightly more involved, it’s by far the most robust system out of these. This does come at the cost of being ‘unique’ amongst the others, but I believe it’s a great fit for your use case.
Completely agree that these kinds of threads end up being more a popularity poll than anything more actionable and usable. Everyone has their own opinions and preferences (which is great!), but that can end up being extremely overwhelming for a newbie.
sorry for being inactive here, I have other things happening at the moment. i’m just gonna put some stuff here
You will mostly stick to defaults (at least initially).
Kinda, I recently started to get interested in modding! It isn’t stuff like homebrew (although I was planning to root my phone, until OEM unlock was disabled. Thanks wiko.), I mostly just use something like vencord and Bloxstrap (just tweaks the Roblox client a bit, no exploits tho) This might be not seen as modding, but who cares.
Your ‘computer-literacy’ is at least (slightly) higher than average.
slightly, I do know how to use HTML to an extent, and can know whats the difference between RAM and hard drives, I still have a long way to go.
Ok here are some of the specs that I can remember (I’m currently not home as of typing this)
I have a HP 2022 Laptop, decent enough to play games
I have a 512 hard drive and 12 GB of RAM
only has 2 USB ports, most of it was replaced by type C, so dual booting with.something USB related might be hard
Dabbled a bit into linux with a VM (a few years ago tho, it was Ubuntu)
and thats all I could remember, I do plan to do an update post after trying out some distros on a VM, hopefully it works!
I had several drives in my PC, so I wiped a small one and just installed a few different distros and figured out what I liked. I ended up sticking with nobara with KDE.
Start off with Gentoo to get the hang of the basics. Switch to Arch because compile times and heat burns. Try Linux from Scratch for a laugh, giggle and move on, but with a new found respect for distro maintainers.
What’s your use case? If it involves AAA games then that will narrow things a bit but if you simply want a bit of docs n that and, internet browsing and a spot of email and realtime sound and CAD then we’ll need a broader chat.
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint - those would be my starters for 10 in no particular order. Pick yours and your hip angle. I personally run Arch (actually) and Gentoo. I don’t recommend them as a dip your toe in the water job 8)
So they’re building a whole complex text editor just for the desktop environment? seems like a weird priority or is the text editor a separate project?
As is often the case with scientific research which many people believe to be pointless, technological innovations aren’t always made by achieving the end goal, but through the technologies developed to reach that goal.
Development on COSMIC Edit has lead towards improvements to the cosmic-text library, which is used by many GUI libraries in the Rust ecosystem now. Similarly, the UX designs for the text editor improves the COSMIC interface guidelines, and puts design theories to practice. Likewise, widgets that are necessary for the editor are added to the COSMIC platform toolkit, and existing widgets and features are improved to improve the development experience for applications like this.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text. Many would also find it debilitating to have a desktop environment without a text editor preinstalled. Imagine if GNOME didn’t have Gedit, and KDE didn’t have Kate.
Besides, this is a default text editor for a desktop environment. It is really not that complex. The goal is not to develop an IDE, but a text editor that anyone would feel comfortable using as their default editor on the COSMIC platform.
No one would want to build applications for a platform that lacks widgets capable of properly displaying, formatting, and editing text.
Is the idea that people are only going to be running Iced applications in COSMIC? It feels to me like the realistic option would be that, if COSMIC ever becomes daily-drivable, people would still be using GTK applications with it, at least at first. Might as well use a GTK text editor then? Then System76 could focus on building a text editor after COSMIC is a thing, and COSMIC would hopefully arrive sooner (or even at all - this looks like the path to burnout).
You are heavily overestimating how much effort is required to develop a text editor. It’s a single person project using components that had to be developed for use in multiple applications; regardless of whether there is a text editor or not. Components that you’d be silly not to develop through a text editor project.
You are trying too hard to justify that we not make a text editor. It feels like you don’t want us to make a text editor at all. No one is on a path to burnout. Everyone is paid a full time salary to work on their respective areas. COSMIC development is doing really well.
I mean, I don't really mind - I'm pretty happy with GNOME. All I'm saying is that if I were the project manager, I'd worry about delivering something and not burning people out ("focus is choosing what not to do" and all that, and the last 20% of the work taking 80% of the time). But in the end I'm just a random person ranting on the internet, of course - I do actually hope that I'm wrong.
But a diff viewer in the text editor... It just sounds like folks are eager to jump on shiny new things rather than finishing something, from the outside 🤷 Looking forward to be proven wrong!
COSMIC Edit is being developed by our manager through personal motivation; who also developed cosmic-text, so this is the perfect playground for simultaneously advanced cosmic-text, and developing useful real world software with it. The git diff view was not yet part of planned designs, but it took only a portion of a day to implement. It adds a useful test case for the cosmic-text library, and improved cosmic-text as a result.
We’re all paid a full time salary to work on COSMIC and Pop!_OS. Each person on the team is going to spend a full day writing software, regardless of what they’re working on, so concerns about burnout are somewhat silly. Burnout is typically caused by working overtime for extended periods of time. System76 has never required developers to work overtime to meet a deadline, and variety of workload can alleviate mental fatigue, so burnout is not a thing here.
Yeah, that's fair enough. It's not just working overtime though - endless toil on never-ending projects, especially when at a certain point, you're not really making visible progress but rather are just working on a seemingly endless list of bugs and papercuts, is also terrible for motivation. The good news, of course, is that the Pop!_OS GNOME extension also got delivered, which, though a lot smaller than COSMIC DE, I'm sure also wasn't a small undertaking.
In my experience, that has never been an issue with any Rust-based projects. It’s quite the opposite. 80% of time is spent completing the first 20% of the project, and then the remaining 80% is quickly finished as everything fits into place. Most of our time is spent in foundational work getting widgets created that we can use with our theme system, and then the actual implementation of the interface in the application is stupid easy.
What you describe is what I felt developing the GNOME extensions. There’s very little you can do to resolve issues that you encounter there.
That being said I can imagine if KDE didn’t have Kate or Konsole or any of that - there’s plenty of text editors and Terminals that already exist out there.
GNOME users wouldn’t be happy having to install KDE dependencies to use a KDE text editor which doesn’t have a consistent look and feel on their desktop. Same applies for KDE users.
I can tell you how not to choose a distro: what its screenshots look like or what its default desktop environment is. Many begin shopping around for a distro that suits them best, which means visiting a website like DistroWatch.com, looking at the various screen shots, and picking one that looks nice. But any Linux distro can be made to look like any other distro without too much effort, what you see in the screen shots is just the default look. Really, the the screen shots should be the least of your concerns.
So don’t worry about Xfce, KDE, Gnome, LXDE, LXQt or whatever else right now, you can try all of those in good time. First, just get Linux and, worry about figuring out which apps that you can get that work best for your work flow. Almost none of the apps you use now are available in Linux, the hardest part is figuring out how to replace the apps you use daily right now.
You should choose the distribution with the best web service, and the best apps.
Is the service reliable? Do they have a good team of people making sure the packages are always online, and making sure they are providing timely security updates?
Do they have corporate, or non-profit, sources of funding? Do you trust the people who are running it?
Do they have the apps you want, are the apps up to date? Do they have things you need, like word processing, presentation software, photo scrap booking, file sharing, video editing, music editing, personal organizers, video conferencing (can you install Zoom, for example?). Can you easily install Flatpaks or AppImages?
Many of the really big Linux distros all provide completely reliable service, which satisfy the above requirements, but I recommend any of the following four:
Mint
Fedora
Ubuntu
Pop!_OS
Mint and Fedora are community-run with backing from various sponsors, Ubuntu is run by the Canonical corporation, Pop!_OS is developed by the System 76 company (a medium sized US-based business that sells laptops and PCs).
If it ends up being Optimus, I’ve found optimus-manager-qt from the aur to be great. You don’t have to mess around with configs and you can make switching or setting to Nvidia permanently really easy with it
Fedora is a good base and comes with most DEs as spins so you don’t have to swap live.
Choose the one you like the most.
Personally, XFCE for all around customization amd performance, KDE for out of box solid functionality (and wayland if you care).
Once you feel comfortable, then go ahead and install or dual boot.
Silverblue is okay but kinda overrated because Flatpaks are not a silver bullet and will break or have basic FS dependency issues. Plus, it’s not a great intro to Linux experience because you can’t shoot yourself in the foot easily most tutorials on Linux will be for a regular system.
As for the distros themselves:
spoilerArch: Bleeding edge and you want to actually suffer every time you boot. Manjaro: Arch but supposed to work out of box. Debian: The King of stability at the cost of slower package updates Fedora: Cutting edge and works out of box unlike Arch Ubuntu: Useless Canonical distro that is heavily dated Pop! OS and ElementaryOS: user friendly downstream of Ubuntu that suffer the same issues as Ubuntu. Linux Mint: Ubuntu if it was actually good except it’s still a downstream so still has aforementioned Ubuntu issues. Gentoo: You want something completely custom Slackware: You want a classic Unix like machine but with Linux RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Oracle/Etc: Enterprise Linux (server usage and desktop usage) OpenSUSE: The RPM equivalent of Arch & Debian (comes in rolling and stable releases). So you can choose bleeding edge or stability.
Personally, I have stuck with Fedora for a long time. Debian or OpenSUSE would be second choice. Arch only if I’m forced to like the steam deck lol.
Also ArchWiki is your friend. Even if you’re on any other distro, it has a wealth of the latest information and tutorials for whatever you want or need.
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