I wonder. Lemmy is be definition much less future proof that r&ebbit. Information posted on Lemmy will not last long, as instances come and go. The price we pay for decentralisation and freedom.
so, I had a pendrive that a friend borrowed once. later on another friend used it and said it had virus. I simply couldn’t know since I was on GNU/Linux.
I’ve always enjoyed regular Ubuntu but Linux Mint is a favorite. I’d install that before anything else. I’ve used both on my school laptops with great success. I’d use Linux as the default if it wasn’t for gaming, which is why school laptops (laptops owned by me, used for school) are the perfect use case.
These days gaming on linux is pretty good, lots of games run better than on windows. Typically the only thing that doesn’t work (on release, often afterwards it gets fine) is (shitty) DRM/anticheat like denuvo.
They are correct 100%. 99% of things work without issue or with minor fixes. (protondb.com for any issues you have.) I recently switched from Windows to Linux myself and ended up going with Mint.
I’ve been running ubuntu and then pop_os for a couple of years now and honestly, I’m surprized how much stuff just works out of the box.
There are times when I need to tinker with the OS to make one thing or another work properly, but proton DB is quite a good resource for that. And I like it so it’s not a big deal if I need to spend an hour messing around with the configurations.
I’m not as lucky when it comes to figuring out problems. I’ve had bad luck with pop_os, at least when I tried it a few years ago. I’m impressed with proton DB in how far it has come but I don’t have much experience with it.
do you use windows for your gaming machine?
i had to install it on a family laptop because of some apps that worked on windows only. I wanted to install a locked-down version of it and came across reviOS. it’s a stripped down version of windows with cruft removed. it was very very fast(almost comparable to my Debian machine). perhaps it’d be of interest to you if you’re into privacy. An alternative to that is winutil, which is basically a script to debloat windows.
I’ll have to look into those and experiment on VMs. Thanks for the info! I used to use Windows 10 LTSC and it worked great, but I wanted the Microsoft Store to experiment with ray tracing in Bedrock Edition of Minecraft as SEUS’s PTGI wasn’t free at the time. I use Windows 11, I’m familiar with debloating the OS since Windows 10 came out. Usually I use Spybot Anti-Beacon 1.6 and WinAero Tweaker. I then remove all the useless apps I can with a script :)
Worse thing about snaps is that the server that provides them is propietary and owned by canonical.
Open source people tend not to like when things are not open source.
Other than that they are like flakpacks but blessed by canonical. Sometimes they are more curated or there’s more official releases on snaps that flakpacks.
Both are a way to deliver software without falling in dependency hell and kind of isolated and more secure(?).
Also is a way to wait 10-15 seconds to launch a simple app so there’s that.
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.
There was at one time a group pushing to make a more active up to date. User friendly plan 9. Distro if I remember correctly called Harvey OS. They may still be at it. But such a small group means that it’s going to take a long time combined with a lot of effort. And at this point so many things have moved on and become rather linux specific even. That the task only keeps getting more and more difficult.
Honestly, in the interim, many of plan 9’s better features were adopted in some small part or completely by other operating systems. Definitely not quite as elegantly.
What I really want to know is why is nobody here talking about inferno. It’s what came after plan 9.
Sounds like my experience with QNX 6. It was fun for a while, especially with the microkernel novelty. I could kill the mouse driver and bring it back to life. It was interesting to have that on a 486 with memory corruption issues.
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