I use Ubuntu. It generally tends to be boring stable, which is kinda what I want out of my OS these days. I can still customize it, and even break it if I really get bored, but it’s nice to have things just work for the most part.
I switched to Debian Stable after using Ubuntu LTS for 6 years, and recommend Ubuntu for beginners. It is stable, best community support, boring and good ol’ reliable, which is perfect to learn Linux and get accustomed to it. Even corporate support and game developers target Ubuntu first. Considering it runs smoothly on a 6 year old midrange Intel laptop chip, nobody is getting that 200% performance boost with other obscure fancy distros.
Yep, games being designed to support Ubuntu first is a big reason why I’m so far into Ubuntu. I could easily switch if I needed to since I’m both a programmer and very comfortable with Linux but for me, it does everything I need an OS to do.
Debian Stable is really, really close for gaming, since Ubuntu LTS itself is based on Debian Unstable branch, if you choose to upgrade with more Linux knowledge in future. Nobara is dedicated to gaming.
Honestly speaking, I keep W10 on SSD for games if any works in a wonky manner on Linux. Takes like 30 seconds to log off Debian, boot into Windows, fire up a game, get back to Linux when not playing.
Once you learn about Linux, you go faster than any other noob. And that is very useful for programming/hacking jobs, faster than all those noobs with 0 knowledge about what is what.
heres the thing: as a decade+ software dev, I never want to even think about my distro.
I just want Linux terminal style commands, and Linux style ssh shit to just work in the most middle of the road way as possible. I’m trying to get a job done, not build a personality.
I used Arch for AUR, but with flatpak getting more popular these last few years even the more niche stuff I had to rely on AUR for got a flatpak. So I’ve been trying out immutable distros like Fedora Kinoite.
I interpreted “middle of the road” as doing nothing special, just normal tasks done a normal way and therefore hoping everything just works so you can focus on work
I only ever have Mac stuff from employers, but it is nice hardware and linux-like enough for me to be happy.
Probably also helps Mac that every windows machines provided by an employer is some random HP buttbook that looks and preforms like it could be from 2021 or 2012, who knows
Moved from Fedora > Arch > Manjaro > Fedora > Debian. I consider Arch for learning purposes. For troubleshooting / recoveries , that knowledge will be a great help.
Arch is great, but I’m too lazy to learn how to set it up. Once it’s running I think Arch is amazing. I just use Garuda Linux and love it. The Arch wiki is an amazing ressource.
That reminds me, some time ago I tried installing Garuda on a Ryzen 5800H based mini PC but there where so many issues (namely worrisome graphical artefacting, which has never occurred with other distros on the same mini PC) I had to abort and abandon trying it until maybe the next or a future release.
I simply wanted to check out Garuda (arch based, if I recall well). I used the Cinnamon iso with Ventoy (not sure where the issue arose from).
That’s weird. I have had zero issues with it so far (talking about distro specific issues) and I am running this with an AMD APU, Nvidia GPU, prime offloading on wayland. Works like an absolute charm. Though granted, this isn’t quite out of the box, you may not need to be a wizard to figure it out, but I would not recommended this to a noob.
?? The arch wiki is one of the greatest Linux resources out there. Sure there may be situations where it doesn’t have the answer for something, but for a new user? It has all bases covered.
On one hand, the archlinux bbs had the only exact reference to the issue I was having. On the other hand, no one could replicate it enough to figure anything out. :/
It’s actually really great… if you know how to interpret and apply the information on it to your situation and adapt as needed. A good new user experience it does not make however.
For a total newbie, Linux Mint or PopOS are probably the best options. But EndeavourOS is getting there. There shouldn’t be any issues during the installation if one sticks to the defaults. Only thing is, it doesn’t come with a graphical package manager out of the box. But once that is installed (I think anyone will be happy to write a single terminal command, at least), I don’t see why it’s any harder to use than any other distro.
Mint, with any DE, does come with a graphical package manager. It’s as easy as any appstore. The only confusion is it suggests both it’s original and flatpack versions to install.
Reading it in a linear fashion, you drop one distro after another without much distinction. I believe it’d be better if you serve EndOS it’s own paragraph since it’s so different.
I’m wondering why “I use Funtoo btw” didn’t become a meme, and arch did. Gentoo is objectively better at letting the user customise everything compared to arch
I’m pretty sure it’s because less people use it. They make fun of Gentoo taking longer to compile stuff on install/update, but that’s pretty fast nowadays. What really takes up time is making all the choices. I remember hours of selecting obscure kernel options and choosing use flags “what is ncurses? Do i need ncurses? What is sdl? Do i need sdl? …” I mostly use Ubuntu now, because I got no more time for that.
There are binary versions of heavy stuff at least. Although, yeah, it kinda becomes tedious once you get into more or less obscure options… Mine was compiling everything with musl (for some reason)
I honestly had no idea how to do use flags and just gave up on gentoo since a lot of things I wanted to install needed me to tinker with them somehow, but I might try again later on.
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