I guess I just think that it’s one of the easiest desktop environments for a transitioning Windows user to get used to despite the fact that I’ve personally used Linux for over 25 years starting with old school Red Hat 5 command line.
It doesn’t default to dark themes like many DEs do lately…
There’s other things … Desktop shortcut naming… idk
Ooh, stumpwm. I never did get fully satisfied with that, compared to ratpoison, though I wanted to. Part of the reason I’m now considering NixOS not Guix next install.
and why should it be? vim and its bindings are extremely popular. should window managers all use alt+f4 to kill programs, just because its familiar to new users?
There’s really no point in criticizing something like vim. It has a history and a following, and no one is forcing you to use it. (Unless someone is, in which case you should be annoyed with them, not vim.)
There was a time when the Freezer devs didn’t make a windows version of some updates, and their solution was to use it via WSL. So I never used it again.
I’ve been using Debian on servers for maybe 20 years now, so I’m very experienced with Debian on servers, but I’ve never really used the Fedora/RedHat/CentOS side of things.
The last time I used a Linux desktop was Ubuntu back in 2006 or so, back when it was still a new up-and-coming distro and they’d send you a free CD (very useful since I was using dialup at the time).
I’m thinking about which distros I should try since I want to switch from Windows. I’ve heard Mint and Pop OS are good? I might try Debian too. I used to love tweaking the OS back in my teenage years, but now I’m in my 30s and don’t have time to fix random breakages… I just want something stable that works well. (that’s why I was considering Debian)
Fedora is moving a bit faster than Debian(but it’s pretty unstable), the main selling point is in my opinion dnf/rpm, but on a server a rhel clone would be a better choice. Pop OS and especially Mint are great distros, Debian is great but very outdated, I would try them live and then decide
Debian remains the king of “something stable that works well”. And with release of Debian 12 that brought a lot of quality-of-life improvements, easier non-free package managing etc, many users go for it on their desktops. So I suggest you do too.
Fedora tends to include a lot of the latest tech in a stable working configuration, stuff like Wayland and GNOME in the past and more. I like that I can get that while still enjoying a nice curated set of package repositories and without relying on something like the AUR for most packages. I’m happy to let others do the testing on the absolute bleeding edge and take the risks while I get to enjoy the fruits of that with a lot less pain with Fedora.
Fedora runs at a twice annual release model and includes kernel and firmware updates within those releases whereas Ubuntu matches a kernel with a release.
Their packages, to me, feel much higher quality in terms of reliability and reaction time to reported bugs. They also test and guarantee updates for packages in their repos. I ran my college laptop through 15 system upgrades without any issues, nothing has been that reliable for me.
I enjoyed using Ubuntu for several years and hadn’t considered Fedora until they were the first to default to Wayland (f21) and never switched again.
You can do anything on any distro, so you end up just shopping for your fav package manager and default repo and staying there. I encourage you to play with all of them with a separated /home partition or so it’s easy to shop.
I ran my college laptop through 15 system upgrades without any issues, nothing has been that reliable for me.
I’ve got a VPS running Debian Bookworm (12.0, latest version at the moment) that I haven’t reformatted since Etch (4.0, 2007). I’ve just done an in-place upgrade every time a new version is out.
That’s not a GUI setup though, so probably more stable when updating…
Manjaro KDE (default) makes Arch a wonderful starting point. Beautiful (gold standard of KDE implementation), truly blazing fast (thanks, Arch), incredibly Windows-like, and unlike Arch itself, completely plug-and-play.
Their update withholding schedule, while causing anger among some Arch enthusiasts, is what makes the system super stable and completely effortless to maintain, while remaining close to the bleeding edge.
The only thing newbies should be taught is that AUR should be used with caution due to potential (rare) dependency version conflicts; luckily, Manjaro repos have just about everything you can think of and AUR is almost entirely unnecessary.
Newbies should be taught to review what they install beforehand on the AUR which almost anyone can contribute to with minimal barriers. Most users treat it like any other package repository but its not the same thing and it’s definitely more risky then a curated repository.
Sure! I just don’t expect people who just came from Windows/MacOS to get into that. I’m talking “just works” here. Later on, they’ll be able to develop that understanding too, but to each its time.
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