I guess I’m open minded because I’m a noob with Linux yet I’ve worked with XFCE, LXQt, KDE, and GNOME (in that order), and none of them were a pain, except possibly LXQt, which was super clunky to customize, but it ran amazing on weak hardware, so I’m giving it a pass. I reckon I’d be cool with Cinnamon, MATE, Unity, or even one of the lightweight DE’s.
Yet, all of these DEs I’ve used were on Ubuntu based distros. I feel afraid to encounter weird things with other distros. For example, doesn’t DaVinci Resolve only run on Ubuntu based distros?
The most important thing for most new Linux users would be a pathway to getting support. Because of this the distro you use matters much more than the DE because each of the major distro’s have different pipelines that the funnel users in to getting support. The package manager lock in is distro dependent and depending on the philosophy that they subscribe to can be the difference between how many steps a new user has to take to get a working system up and running. Thankfully, with the rise of flatpak, appimage and snap being more popular than ever package availability is much more streamlined but that is another layer on top of an already overwhelming package system for new users. The defaults for all of this depends on your distro which can be different. Heck we haven’t even gotten to support cycles which depending on user needs can be different. Because not every user has or wants what comes with for example maintaining an rolling release distribution. Did they setup their system to have snapshots so they can roll everything back when the new kernel update breaks something system critical and they have a presentation at 2:00? None of these things are really DE dependent but are baked in to the defaults you subscribe to when you choose a disto. The good part is that if you don’t like how something is configured you can change everything easily depending on how well documented it is. This is why it’s more important to choose a distro with good documentation or at least a active enough community so when you run into hangups you can get some sort of resolution.
Getting “Linux” support online usually means Ubuntu, but I ran into a Mint problem back in the day (I wanna say about 2014 or so…) And Clem himself replied to me personally with, not just a link to a fix, but an actual “copy and paste this exact thing into the terminal” reply, and it totally fixed me up. Clem being the guy who is in charge of Mint.
Always left me with a warm feeling about Mint, and I keep coming back.
Using LMDE 6 Cinnamon on one of my boxes for that reason.
Same here! I joined lemmy right around the time my main hdd took a dump–so there was probably a bit of influence coming from here…While scrambling to get another windows installed (and encountering a bunch of obstacles along the way) i finally decided to just try Linux Mint Cinnamon. Tbh, i wasn’t sure if my computer was bricked by the time i finally got mint to start up via usb. When it started working, i tried a few basic things–browsing the web, playing music, videos etc. When it all worked with a minimal amount of fuss, i decided it was time to give up windows if i could. Haven’t been back to windows since!
This isn’t a bad take. DE is what is going to keep people from running back to windows right away, mostly. I do think it is better for people coming into Linux not to try to emulate the Windows experience. It is easier to learn when you accept it is going to be different from the start.
DE is how you interact with everything else on the computer for anyone thats not a 100% terminal hackerman.
a good, simple, easy to use windows-like DE is probably one of the most important things for a new user. Since it will influence how easily they can handle and do anything and everything else.
I remember doing that for reddit back in the day. I downloaded a bunch of apps, then picked the one I liked best. Good to see devs doing the same for Lemmy!
Nowadays they’re so many options, GNOME and Plasma are nice, but heavy, same for DDE(Deepin) and others fancy DEs I know why it’s heavy, but xfce and lxqt looks better on my PC, xfce you can make looks beauty and fast too
For the WM guys: I’ll try some day, for now only DEs :3
not really, compare installing something like Spotify on Ubuntu vs something Arch Based, something that allows you to access AUR packages with a few simple clicks.
I can’t imagine that there is any overlap between Linux users and Spotify users, considering what a shitty piece of software Spotify is. I think you must be the only one.
many people use linux because they dont like windows and still use proprietary software like spotify, discord and steam (mostly steam, just because of how good it is)
Both made possible by librespot. Not only do some Linux users use Spotify, some great open-source devs have worked to make clients for it. I honestly prefer Spotify-qt to the official one.
the DE is more important. yes, arch has more options than ububtu, but as long as the new person chooses anything that allows using flatpaks (like mint and anything that isnt from canonical), theyll have an easier and better experience since they would already get the DE they want preinstalled and flatpak would help with any proprietary software they want that isnt on the main distro’s repos
The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
Installed it on a thin client instead of win10 iot for the same reason, basic functionality all there, being used as a media streaming browser machine, no regrets.
Had previous experience with fedora and others many years prior, definitely can tell how far it all progressed since
I installed Mint for the sake of trying it and I quite liked Cinnamon, but after that I did some distro and desktop hopping, I will not go back until it has proper Wayland support.
I’ve been using Linux in different capacities since the late 90s. I use Mint with Cinnamon because it’s stable, does all I need and I don’t need to fuss with it. You’re more than fine.
PopOS is great! I have used a few other (but never strayed far from APT), and I also did some light reading when doing my final decision . PopOS was the best fit for and easy-to-use OS without Snaps. Linux is great and all with how much control you have, but I want as little maintenance as possible for my daily driver.
Yeah that’s all I need - I’m super into everyone else hyper customizing what they use, I love seeing everything that can be done, but I just need something that works and pop_os is it, and as I’ve said before, my games run better on pip_os than they ever did on win 10/11
I agree - was switching to Fedora about month and a half ago, and only learned about KDE vs Gnome like a week ago, when I was reinstaling to Nobara to fix some NVIDIA issues.
I did hear terms like KDE or Gnome thrown around, but never really realized that it’s actually and important choice. And once you add X11 vs Wayland to the mix, it’s suddenly so confusing I just subconsciously choose to ignore that choice and went with whatever the OS installed for me. I though that DE chouse is similar to X11 vs Wayland choice, i.e something tha is more about back-end than front-end, and didn’t realize that’s literally how your OS UI looks and controls, instead of how it works in the background (which I now know is what X11 vs Wayland is actually about)
Turned out I really don’t like Gnome (Which was default for Fedora), but love KDE, which was thankfully a default for Nobara.
So, if you’re ever recommending Linux to someone, be it in a comment or somwhere else, or someone is asking for a recommended distro, please include a short paragraph about the importance of choosing the correct DE, and explanation of what it is and that you can change it!
Ubuntu is VERY heavily invested in snaps at a very basic level. I think the recommendation is to not mix snaps and Flatpaks as they may not interact well. As a new Ubuntu user, I’m slowly discovering some of the random problems with snaps.
For example, just the other day, I was trying to configure my fish shell using the html-based fish_configure utility, but it just wouldn’t work. Of course, I assumed the problem was with my fish install. After a couple hours fiddling with it, I finally came across a stack exchange comment indicating that the snap version of Firefox simply can’t access the /tmp/ directory, which is where fish_config creates its html configuration page. WTF? Also, you can’t even install a non-snap version of Firefox via apt because the official apt repository just links back to the snap version! I finally installed an apt-based version of librewolf, but had to get it from a non-Ubuntu repository, and then magically I could access to fish_config html page. That’s a pretty long workaround just to view a simple HTML page!
So, if snaps have problems like this just interacting with the base Linux file system, I wouldn’t be surprised if random weird behavior cropped up when trying to use Flatpaks.
Not a hot take, I keep saying the same thing in different threads. I was not able to switch to Linux for years before I understood that I have problems with Gnome not with Linux itself, tried KDE and given I was migrating from Windows it clicked immediately.
After you gain some experience, DE becomes mostly irrelevant, but it is crucial for starting off in an unfamiliar environment.
the DE is very important unless you have A LOT of free time and REALLY WANT to see something different from what youre used to.
my first distro (other than ubuntu in school computers, but we dont talk about those) was fedora server minimal install, where i installed dwm and had fun using it. i had just switched from windows and was happy to have so many options, even though i had (almost) no linux experience before. after trying most of the big DEs and distros, i ended up on arch with xfce, which i have been using for more than a year now.
most people really should go slower and try things step by step, as what i did would be really weird for anyone that tried it …probably
I’m not sure if it is, but I don’t see it as a hot take. And it sounds reasonable, specially when some distros offer different “flavours” out-of-the-box, and offer you the option of different DEs before you even installed it.
It’s certainly not a hot take. Every “which distro should I try thread” is just a discussion of the different DEs out there. I would like to hear about different package managers. I always seem happiest with apt, and I don’t know why.
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