6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?
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I did used to use xfce back in the day, yes. Never had a problem with it, but those were maybe simpler times. Might look into KDE this time, why not.
I was really thinking less of the DE and more along the lines of if you had any recommendations that weren't Ubuntu- or Debian-based, as that's pretty much all I've used I think. But maybe that's too much experimenting...
Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros.
There's tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn't match what they wanted.If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:
- Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other "Spins" are available.
- Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It's really up-to-date, so much that it's referred to as "bleeding edge" (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It's also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
- Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I'm on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
It's the most "maximalist" mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I'm biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You'll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it's less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you're less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.
As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you'll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead.
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you'd notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint useapt, openSUSE useszypper, Fedora usesdnfand Arch usespacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it's still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both... -
Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros.
There's tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn't match what they wanted.If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:
- Fedora: Rather much tied to the corporate side (Red Hat / IBM), tends to be rather up-to-date. Kind of has a focus on GNOME, but other "Spins" are available.
- Arch: Community-driven, pretty much a DIY distro, so the initial setup is somewhat challenging. It's really up-to-date, so much that it's referred to as "bleeding edge" (rather than cutting edge), meaning you might get faulty updates from time to time. It's also often loved by minimalists, because they can decide for each component, if they want to install it.
- Well, and perhaps the most niche of these – which is what I'm on – openSUSE: Has the best integration of KDE (not by a huge margin, but still). I like it in particular, because of its snapshotting system. It automatically starts snapshotting your OS (not the user files) once per hour or whenever you make changes to the installed packages. If something breaks, you can boot into a previous snapshot from the bootloader and roll things back.
It's the most "maximalist" mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I'm biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You'll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it's less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you're less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.
As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you'll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead.
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you'd notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint useapt, openSUSE useszypper, Fedora usesdnfand Arch usespacman. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).
Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it's still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both...Thanks again for the rundown! Snapshotting like that is definitely cool, I can see why you enjoy it. I'm no stranger to having to nuke the system partition and reinstalling because I broke something so snapshots definitely sound like a convenient tool. Though I might be older and lazier now and less prone to do a bunch of weird things.
I know the memes of "Arch, btw" and have always been scared of it tbh. Maybe it isn't so bad though? I've also heard people praise Bazzite, but I might lot end up doing much gaming on my laptop as I said.
Is the whole thing about real-time or low-latency kernel still a thing, or is that old news? Just in case I wanted to play around with JACK again.
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I have not any experience with WatchGuard, but it from some quick searching around it seems to not be far from the easiest to set up for linux. dual-booting is probably the easier solution.
I hope you find a solution to what sounds like not the best life situation, and may you have an otherwise have a nice Linux journey.
Sorry for that, it gets hard sometimes when I start accidentally living the examined life for a second
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Had the completly oposite experience: mint installed in 2 hours with everything working. No bloatware, no bullshit.
Biggest obstacle was, that changing the device bootorder is nog enough- uefi seetings needed some love to. I can imagine that this is not necessery if you do not use dual boot ( like win....talking about experience...)For me everything works perfect- mint is my primary os now
Ok, a quick update.
After posting, and a little soul-searching, I decided to install Ubunu and give things another try.
Installation failed the first time, seemingly right at the end! Tried again, and it went through.
Set things up, and things seem to be OK. I'm only running a browser, and needed to try a paid windows program through Wine, which installed and loaded up without any real issues.
I go for a walk during lunch. Come back to the Linux login screen (expected, as I'd assume it locks like Windows). Log in... blank slate. All my work was closed, and it was like a fresh reboot. What the hell??? No error messages or anything. I literally have the browser and like a few other programs installed, so it's not like the system is a mess from years of bad software installations.
Sigh...
Then I try another paid Windows program used to convert video files. It seems to work, but it's not detecting my Intel graphics card. As I look for help on how to do this (officially, from my Laptop vendor), I get pages and pages of things to try... all through the terminal.
I mean, this is stuff that just works on Windows. No messing with stuff.
I really want Linux to be my daily driver, and even I type this from Ubuntu, I can't help but feel like something is going to catastrophically self-destruct at any moment, and that kind of anxiety is never felt while using Windows.
I couldn't imagine setting linux up for my wife, if this is the experience I'm having.
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Cool, thank you. What's up with the bezel? Flimsy?
It was tricky to get it to snap into place cleanly and I had to jostle some of the monitor wires into place while installing. The instructions did note that this was a common challenge point and so I was prepared for moving the wires. Once installed it's good quality.
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Microsoft: you had a good thing with Windows <previous version>, and you pissed it all away when you put out the crap that is Windows <new version>.
Ftfy.
That said, there is something to be said for how popular Windows is, and the modifications and QoL improvements offered by 3rd party devs.
I hear what you're saying, but, there have been some pretty significant improvements to Windows, generation after generation.
Windows 10 finally seemed like they were on the right (and hopefully final) track with the direction of the operating system. Probably the last big improvement was to bring basically everyone to 64 bit.
XP moved us from the 9x kernel to the NT kernel that's used in Windows today. Vista introduced security features and driver updates that help to keep systems free from many common root kits. 7 brought in a very standard UI, that would be the basis for things going forward, 8/8.1 existed..... Then 10 basically uplifted everyone to 64 bit as a default.
Of course this is far from a complete list.
What did W11 add that we didn't have before? A TPM requirement? Ads? AI slop/shovelware/spyware?
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Install size has gone up, its sluggish on my surface pro 7, its constantly wanting to grab my attention to put towards their other products, windows 10 was bad as it seemed to be ms's first iteration of their now billboard, but at least I could offline install, make a local account and mostly be left alone. And windows 11 is aweful for its kiddy gloves.
While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.
Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as "Entra ID" - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone's email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.
This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.
For home users, it's less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).
So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don't, but that's something that a large number of home users want.
The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don't use an online account, it's up to you to back then up, and users either don't do that, or do it in such a way that it's ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.
I've seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I've known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.
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I also have access to W10 LTSC, so I can always pivot to that if I need to.
You can pivot to W11 LTSC if you want
.... But why?
I would pivot to W10 LTSC to avoid Windows 11.... So why would I move to the LTSC version of the OS I'm trying to avoid?
Makes zero sense.
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My friend was unable to update to windows 11 due to the TPM requirements and looking to switch to linux. I upgraded my CPU and said they should buy my old one. They finally said OK and asked if I could help them install it before they switched to Linux. I installed the CPU and they never switched to Linux because now they have a CPU that meets the TPM requirements.
Windows users really hate change. Microsoft will force them to update and the users will whine but 1 week later they will be used to it then they will stick on windows 11 till EoL.
Hi GNU/Linux my new friend.
