This is mostly down to desktop environment rather than distro, but I had the same experience as you with gnome on Ubuntu, and switching to fedora it was a lot better. Still some problems with the on-screen keyboard but it at least works. I guess having a more up-to-date version of gnome helps, or ubuntu’s additions to gnome mess with it.
I haven’t tried KDE but I’ve heard it’s been getting better touch support, so it might be worth trying out too.
As a KDE fanboy I will agree, I installed regular Ubuntu on an old Surface tablet and the touch interface is better than most Android tablets I’ve used
As far as I know, other distributions just don’t show these errors, but Ubuntu choose to show them.
Most of them are just due too a BIOS implementation that is not entirely up to standards, from what I understand. It seems some manufacturers have chosen to make their system easier to use with Windows instead of strictly enforcing standards.
I just ignore the errors. As long as everything works properly, I feel fine with that.
It’s a very beginner-friendly distro, similar in goals to Linux Mint but more modern. It’s stable, comes pre-installed with graphics drivers and important apps like Wine, a custom clean version of Gnome or XFCE, and having a lot of UX improvements like explaining what Wine is the first time you open an exe file, and providing popular alternatives for the app you’re trying to install.
There’s nothing brand new about it, it’s just really solid and I do recommend it as people’s first distro.
This was the first I’d heard of it and from my first impression it seemed like it could be a solid beginner distributor.
Glad to see you do recommend it to beginners. This would probably be easier for my partner to get into compared to Pop!_OS (I’ll be testing this soon though!)
Second this. Zorin OS, and Mandriva Linux (before they went bankrupt, and the community picked up development) were my first exposure to Linux over a decade ago, and the ux familiarity really helps a ton.
A lot of the other distros had funny stuff going on with multiple docks, open apps showing in the top dock, others looked like a Stardock Special and it was just a little confusing for younger me lol
Does it ended? On all distros I know of, Fedora, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin, we can swap the desktop environments like gloves. The only exception being immutable things like Fedora Kionite, but they are made to be untouchable and for specific users.
Wayland does not change anything there, only that the desktops with less developers must take more time to adapt. What makes desktop interoperable are FreeDesktop standards, which are now in full swing to Wayland.
Yeah I really don’t know what they mean, in the past couple months I’ve used Plasma, Gnome, NsCDE, i3, Sway, Hyprland, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, Mate, Trinity, Xfce, and probably others I forgot
It’s an Ubuntu-derivative using Gnome, but with a large number of tweaks to make it very user friendly out of the box. They have a variety of pre-made layouts in a beautiful theme that can pretty well replicate Windows 7, 10, 11 and Mac layouts among others, as well as a clear option to include Nvidia drivers OOTB in install media, and a better WINE experience for example.
It supports wayland just fine.
In my view it has all the benefits of Mint without many of the drawbacks stemming from its custom DE.
I personally don’t use it, preferring Gentoo or Fedora, but I think it is a very good choice for beginners or those people who only use a computer for web browsing and home office use.
I would definitely recommend installing it in a VM or liveUSB and trying it out. It won me over, when I thought it would just be another themed distro.
It’ll really depend on your local job market. I was on a serious job hunt earlier this year and I couldn’t find a single Linux job which asked for LFCS certs. There were a couple which asked for Red Hat certs though. Of course, this could be specific to where I live, so I’d recommend looking at some popular job sites for where you live (+ remote jobs too) and see how many, if any, ask for LFCS, and you’d get your answer.
Should I focus more on dev ops? Security? Straight SysAdmin?
From what I’ve seen so far, the days of “traditional” Linux sysadmin roles are numbered, if not long gone already - it’s all mostly DevOps-y stuff. Same with traditional security, these days it’s more about DevSecOps.
As a modern Linux sysadmin, the technologies you should be looking at would be Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers (Docker mainly, but also Podman/LXD), GitOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts and tools.
Some Red Hat shops may also ask for OpenShift, Ansible Tower, Satellite etc experience. IBM shops also use a lot of IBM tools such as IBM Could Paks, Multicloud Management, and AIOps/Watson etc.
And finally there’s all the “cloud” stuff like AWS, Azure, GCP specific things - and they have their own terminologies that you’d need to know and understand (eg “S3”, “Lambda” etc) and they have their own certs to go with it. I suspect a “cloud” cert will net you more jobs than LFCS.
So as you’d probably be thinking by now, all of the above isn’t something you’d know from just using desktop Linux. Of course, desktop Linux experience is certainly useful for understanding some of the core concepts and how it all works under the hood, but unfortunately that experience alone just isn’t going to cut it if you’re out looking for a job.
As I mentioned before, start looking for jobs in your area/relevant to you and look at the technologies they’re asking for, note down the terms which appear most frequently and the certs they’re asking for, and start preparing for them. That is, assuming it’s something you want to work with in the future.
Personally, I’m not a big fan all this new tech (I’m fine with Ansible and containers, but don’t like the industry’s dependency on proprietary techs like Docker Desktop, Amazon or Red Hat’s stuff). I just wanted to work on pure Linux, with all the all standard POSIX/GNU tools and DEs that we’re familiar with, but sadly those sort of jobs don’t really exist anymore.
Sorry, I guess I meant Docker Desktop, and some of their other proprietary business/enterprise tools (like Docker Scout) that companies have started to use, the stuff that requires a paid subscription. The Docker engine itself remains opensource of course, but a lot of their stuff that’s targeted at enterprises isn’t. These days when companies say “Docker” they don’t mean just the engine, they’re referring to the entire ecosystem.
Also, I have a problem with Docker itself. My main issue is that, on Linux, native container tech like Podman/LXD work, perform and integrate better (at least, from my limited experience), but the industry prefers Docker (no surprises there). As a Linux guy, naturally I want to use the best tool for Linux, not what’s cross-platform (when I don’t care about other platforms). But I can understand why companies would prefer Docker.
Ah I see what you mean, that stuff is pretty annoying.
Well at least the core tech remains open, though I agree, I would like to see more agnosticism from the industry in regard to the tool implementing the containers, since they’re pretty much all interoperable to a certain extent, as I understand
“With the new Desktop Cube, you can switch between workspaces in 3D. Your app windows float off the desktop surface with a parallax effect, so you can see behind them,” said the Zorin OS team. “There’s also the new Spatial Window Switcher, which replaces the standard flat Alt+Tab and Super+Tab dialog with a 3D window switcher.”
NixOS’s documentation is dog. It’s not absolute dog, but it’s dog. The learning curve is brutal.
But… the (mostly) declarative management is its strongest feature. It’s very solid and you can easily unfuck you system if you haven’t done stuff like mess with partitions or delete files manually.
If NixOS had better documentation and GUI to manage the system, it would be a no-brainer, but unfortunately, it is about 5-10 years away from that. The community is very top heavy, but it’s easy to just do your own stuff.
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