Hmm I haven’t heard that Nvidia works better than Amd ever actually.
Amd drivers are included on the kernel so it will just work on all distributions. So I would give it a shot, don’t think you will have any problems. :)
So basically nvidia makes their drivers on Linux a pain to install and use and Linux’s creator has called them out on it in the past. So PopOS is known for having tools that make getting them working easier.
AMD on the other hand has open source drivers so they are right in the kernel. So their GPUS are just plug and play like a USB mouse
To break from the trend (because I recommend Mint as well),
Check out the options on distrowatch.com, test out any live distros you can. When you have some understanding of GRUB then dual boot, and then triple.
Inevitably, you’re going to end up using Arch because it’s so easily managed and you get to choose each component. But it’s better if you have experience with the different components first. I completely missed out on learning RPM (package manager), I went from Mint (apt) to Arch (pacman). I did resurrect a lot of old laptops and desktops with various different distros though, and I learned Gnome and xfce, LXDE, MATE, and i3, xmonad…
There’s a lot to learn but it’s all fun, and it’s all different. When you go to a tiling window manager, you’ll understand why Windows adopted (albeit shittily) tiling in it’s latest version.
You can also run many distros “live” from the install media without installing anything, to get a feel for them and to check that mosts things work (network, sound, movies etc.) You can make a bootable stick and choose the live option when it boots.
Mint is good, unless it’s very new hardware in which case the base (so things like drivers) can be a little dated.
Look up Ventoy. It’s a tool where you can put multiple ISOs onto one USB drive and boot into any of them. You can use that to try out a few distros. Maybe Mint, Fedora, PopOS, Ubuntu.
It doesn’t really matter much which distro you choose.
Use flatpaks - flatpaks sandbox your apps more than traditional packages. As a side effect, the package manager of the distro won’t matter anymore.
There are thousand of distros, stick to a popular one.
Install packages on distrobox instead of directly onto your system if you use the terminal. Stay as close to the base image as possible. If you want to have access to all packages, install arch/endeavouros on distrobox and use the aur. If a package is not on aur, it’s not published yet. With distrobox there’s no reason to switch to another distribution because of package availability.
Use a distro with which you can roll back to a previous state easily. If things go downhill, youcan always fall back. There are many distros that provide a very easy out of the box experience for that. If you can’t fall back easily, ignore the distro or be prepared for the worst case
Arch is for advanced people because you may set up your system as you like. There are many great distros that choose the base packages for you. You will have a great experience on most big distros. Most of them use GNOME. GNOME is great. KDE is awesome. Tough decision. Watch youtube vidoes about both. Install the other one in a VM to check it out. You may use an immutable distro like fedora silverblue/kinoite. You can switch back and forth by rebasing to the respective desktop environment.
Following is a good source for anyone looking into desktops www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ they focus on an educated distro choice.
Read the arch wiki whenever you want to do something or want to know something. wiki.archlinux.org you want to know more abiut piewire? aw! You want to know about GNOME? KDE? Type !aw KDE into ddg, qwant or brave. Read the respecting documentation of your distro. Follow them on mastodon. Register to the forum. Join a matrix community.
Watch great channels like “the linux experiment” on peertube. Yes peertube, why should you watch it on youtube if it’s on peertube?
The thing with arch is that you have to know a lot of stuff. You have to take care of selinux yourself etc. If you know what you do, everything is fine. At the same time you can be on tumbleweed, kinoite or any other distro and install aur packages with distrobox. For me, there’s no reason to use arch. If you want to tinker with your system, go for arch.
If you kind of know what you do as a beginner, you can go for it as well, steep learning curve but you’ll be more advanced than others in the same time.
I haven’t actually touched selinux at all… It’s not ‘officially supported’ in Arch yet, although there are compatible packages available. I only recently discovered PAM which I have yet to learn too.
If you want something that looks and behaves much like the Windows desktop environment, use Linux Mint. If you want something closer to the macOS environment, use Pop OS.
Try it with a Live USB stick. And maybe don’t listen to the people recommending Ubuntu. It’s somewhat okay, but they regularly do annoying business decisions that affect their users. I’d rather start with Mint or something.
There are many other websites dedicated to this question:
Also try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). I think it’s their best flavor actually, but not enough people know about it and usually only try the regular Mint.
Almost all of those support forms are from way back when Ubuntu was user friendly and community driven. However they are no longer serving the community and shouldn’t be considered user friendly like it was previously.
Anyway almost all of the Ubuntu specific stuff will work on Linux mint as its Ubuntu based.
First time? Use Ubuntu. Not only is it easy to use and a good UX overall, most tutorials assume a Ubuntu based distro (there are differences between distros that can be...hard to translate over). That's going to be really useful when you're looking up how to do stuff
This is not 2005 when the vast majority’s experience with interactive UX on a screen was Windows. People today operate Android, iOS much more so than Windows. Thus they are able to grok multiple OS chrome paradigms without much difficulty. And then the OS chrome is rather simple and therefore learning it doesn’t cost much or yield significant benefits should you have gotten that knowledge for free. Therefore the argument for choosing an OS based on its chrome is as shallow as the chrome itself. The difficult stuff is things not working due to defects (bugs), finding solutions and implementing them and that’s where the OS choice yields the highest benefit. On that front few options beat Ubuntu LTS other than perhaps Debian, but Debian isn’t novice-friendly.
The default UX used in Ubuntu may actually be confusing for newbies, as it’s quite different compared to Windows.
It's not that different, dude, and it's not like they don't give you a tutorial on first boot either.
Perhaps a distro which uses KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE or LXQt by default.
Gauge your audience dude. A Linux newbie will not know wtf anything you just named is. (For any other newbies reading, these are all 'desktop environments' - essentially collections of programs that make up a user interface)
Side dock, top panel, lack of a “start” menu are already three immediately visible differences, and you claim it’s not that different?
The side dock is a taskbar except on the left hand side. Big whoop. Top panel is basically the system tray as seen on Windows, with all functionality fairly obvious just by looking at it, and there is infact a start button where you can type in the program name you're looking for, just like most people do in Windows. Not exactly MacOS levels of relearning.
Which is EXACTLY why I mentioned them, so that they can Google it.
Or...you can explain what you are talking about. Like I did for you. Sending newbies off on wild Google chases is not helpful.
Parent comment is wrong. The default UX used in Ubuntu may actually be confusing for newbies, as it’s quite different compared to Windows. Just check some screenshots or videos and you can see for yourself. I’d instead recommend going for a distro which uses a more familiar UX (ie the Desktop Environment).
Perhaps a distro which uses KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE or LXQt by default (these are “desktop environments” (DE) - which is a collection of the desktop shell components (eg start menu, taskbar, dock etc) plus default applications that go with it eg the file manager, document viewer etc). A desktop environment like the ones I mentioned above, in their default settings, should be familiar to most Windows users. Now whilst you can install any DE on any distro, it can be a daunting task for newbies, plus, the settings might not be optimal for you. So it’s better to go with a distro that comes with such easy-to-use DEs by default. Examples of such distros include Linux Mint and Zorin. These, by default, should look quite familiar to you, and should be even more easier to use than Ubuntu.
Both Mint and Zorin are based on Ubuntu, so most of the documentation for Ubuntu should be relevant to Mint and Zorin as well. But if you’re not sure, just include quotes for your distro when you’re doing a web search, eg how do I do this in Linux “Mint” will ensure you’ll only get results with “Mint” in the page.
Parent comment is right. The body of documentation generated for Ubuntu by the community is an enormous asset. It’s one of the important side effects of it being the most used distro.
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