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.
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
Too a certain point. I’ll give you that this applies to the Debian and Ubuntu distro. Gentoo, on the other hand, is a completely different animal and will have a far greater impact on user experience than the DE.
You look at your DE all day and your distro holds everything together. Op didn’t say distro is unimportant and I agree it makes sense for new users to look at images and videos of different desktops first, maybe try a live cd, and then choosing the backend that suits their willingness to interact with.
If your electricity and time are cheap, you want to learn and your pc-system is your playground not a productivity tool, Gentoo is a valid option. In this case, your choice of DE impacts your compile time massively and knowing alternatives beforehand gives you options.
Sway is basically the wayland version of i3. I’ve switched to wayland on my new laptop and learning sway after using i3 for years has been relatively easy.
Yeah, the config syntax is exactly the same. The major difference is the wayland version of various programs can be hard to figure out with out some decent google-fu.
I’m on BSPWM on X11, but have been trying river wm and that is a much less friendly conversion than i3 to sway. I’d convert entirely were it not for certain applications still not quite working on wayland without considerable configuration (wacom tablet drivers don’t work, screenshottung and eyedropper tools are available but still need more work to be feature comparable with equivalent tools on X11).
And I’m using proprietary NVIDIA drivers which are currently stuttering real bad on the wlroots protocol since driver update to 545 (sway/river both stutter bad whenever lots of movement on the screen, I’ve tried many tweaks to my environment variables to no avail).
So…just gonna wait for app, wayland, nvidia devs to eventually make the migrate worth while.
I understand the argument being made, but I kind of disagree. Yes, picking a DE in which you’ll be comfortable is really important (and often an undervalued aspect of using Linux for the first time), but I think that the time you need to spend self-maintaining your distro is more important, and is also prone to make-or-break your first-time Linux experience. That’s the most important factor on whether a new user says “I love Linux and want to continue using it” or “I fricking hate Linux, it’s filled with a bunch of problems, I’d rather just use Windows instead”. And that’s why it’s important to recommend beginner-friendly distros, as to avoid frustration of newcomers, because those are more manageable (unless those newcomers want the frustration of managing something that they don’t quite understand :)
Does it matter which one in specific? No, and it’s probably at this point that the DE and visual looks should kick in.
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
Meh, I feel that the only important choice is the type of distro; source, rolling, stable, immutable, reproducible, etc. as that’d impact difficulty to some degree.
Beyond that, it’s not a big deal. Newbies will just pick the DE their most comfortable with. The popular DEs don’t really have difficulties, just differences.
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?
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