Sorry, the goal here was to offer a few sensible alternatives, not overwhelm the reader with choices. The gist here is “start with something solid, reputable and popular, branch out later”.
Too much choices lead to analysis paralysis, and to goal here is to learn how to swim first. There are dozens of great distros, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list, as there are dozens of great DEs, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list.
I’ve been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems.
Wow, incredible management skills, genius move to treat your one critical employee like a piece of shit.
Counter-counterpoint: Wayland is perfectly fine and production ready and has been for several years now, as long as you’re on AMD or Intel GPUs. The nVidia drivers are still undercooked and not ready for proper daily use.
May I ask why you, as a beginner, specifically chose one of those distros instead of more “mainstream” ones?
Puppy Linux’s main use-case is to be a live ISO, that doesn’t need to be installed to run. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to install it, but I think if you want to use an Ubuntu derivative, there are better options for a beginner like Pop or Mint that would let you install a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and so on.
Alpine Linux is specifically designed to avoid all the core system tools that are pretty much universal on most other distros like glibc, systemd or GNU tools and libraries, which will make your life hell as a beginner if you need to troubleshoot anything as most “universal” documentation like the Arch wiki would be at best partially relevant, at worst useless.
I have almost the same laptop (PS63 8M, without any nVidia dGPU).
One of the issues I had to solve was the touchpad spamming interrupts after waking up from sleep. It would keep one core at 100% indefinitely, keeping CPU frequency (and temps) quite high and burning through the battery.
This behavior seems fixed on modern kernels since I’ve installed Fedora recently and didn’t have to do this workaround, but you can still check if this still applies to you.
You might also check if you can disable the dGPU in the BIOS (can’t check since I don’t have one), and/or play with power profiles either through Gnome or tlp (lower power profiles will make your laptop very sluggish though).
Maybe check if both your fans are running. I had to replace one of mine that was starting to fail a year ago.
Other than that, I’ve never had any overheating issues with this laptop.
There are daily threads started by new users who say stuff like “I read that systemd is bad, should I switch to [insert systemd-less distro here]” or “My RTX 4080 runs Sim City 2000 at 12 FPS, is Linux trash?”, so there seems to be a need to at least help alleviate the fears of people who read conflicting stuff (or downright flamewars) on the internet and might be overwhelmed by those conflicts.
in a terminal, type flatpak remotes. If it lists flathub, you’re good.
Try installing a random app like flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave
It shoud work. If it doesn’t, post your logs.
I have to type a password in the terminal every time I want to use sudo
This is the intended behavior and should not be changed, it’s a basic security feature. Once you’ve finished setting up you system, you shouldn’t need sudo everyday anyway, except for updating/upgrading the system.
I’m used to a desktop interface with a toolbar/start menu that I can pin frequently-used programs to, but with Debian it seems like I need to click “Activities” to do anything. Is there a way to set up the interface so it’s more like Windows in that regard?
Assuming you’re using Gnome, this is easy to solve using Extensions. First if it’s not installed already on Firefox, install Gnome Shell Integration. It’ll let you manage Gnome Extensions directly from extensions.gnome.org
Then, install dash-to-panel for a “windows-style” experience, or dash-to-dock for a “macos-style” experience.
After that, you can go wild on the extensions you want to use ;)
If I need to do a clean install, I’m thinking of switching to Ubuntu, since I’m more familiar with the interface.
Don’t. Ubuntu will teach you nothing but the Ubuntu way. Debian is as Standard Linux as conceivable. If your only concern is the Ubuntu-style interface, configuring dash to panel to appear on the left side is all you need.
Exactly. KDE people praise its flexibility and tweakability, but I feel it tries to cater at too many use cases at once, and looks much harder to maintain as it always felt buggy and a bit janky to me.
Gnome devs may have very strong opinions and that seems to anger some people, but their approach is actually the best for small teams: focus on a single use case, make it as polished as possible, and let users develop extensions to cater to their own use cases.
Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.
No offense, but your argument is exactly like “electric cars are still undercooked and not ready for proper daily use because I still have to put gasoline in mine and can’t afford one”.