Whats a good Linux distro to dip my toe in with in a laptop running Windows 11? Is there a decent longer form guide to doing it successfully?
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I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
Xubuntu is very user friendly, low on resources, and overall great to use.
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Mint is a great choice for windows converts. The UI closely matches what you are used to.
Mint and Ubuntu are both fine and have a huge support base so you'll always find help.
I've been on Linux for going on 10 years, went through just about all the major and moderate distros out there and the past two years I've just been using mint on my study laptops (in particular LMDE for stability) and it's completely fine for me.
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I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
If you use your machine predominantly for gaming, Nobara is a good option. Built by the same people who made Proton (the tool to get Windows games working well on Linux). Comes with everything you need to get going out of the box. Based on Fedora so lots of community support. Comes with either KDE Plasma or GNOME to give you the desktop environment you prefer.
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I know you want to move away from Windows, but trying to choose something completely different might be a bad idea, you're already unfamiliar with the system also being unfamiliar with the way to interact with stuff might be a bit too much. That being said I don't think any of the largest DE mentioned would be a problem, so look at pictures and choose on what you think looks best.
As for distro lots of people recommend Mint and I'll back that up, although I haven't used it in years it was my go to distro to give new users as it was very plug and play.
And the two recommendations I always give new users are:
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Keep
/and/homein separate partitions, this allows you to format your system, change distro, or whatever without losing your personal files. -
As much as possible use the package manager, googling a program and downloading an installer is 99% of the time the wrong way to install stuff and a major cause of problems for new users.
When you mention putting the
/homeelsewhere, that's something I do when setting up a distro install? I can't recall from the last time I did a system install of mint. Sounds extremely helpful so I would like to do it next time
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When you mention putting the
/homeelsewhere, that's something I do when setting up a distro install? I can't recall from the last time I did a system install of mint. Sounds extremely helpful so I would like to do it next time
Yes it is. I mean, you should be able to do it later, but if you have to ask how it might be better not to risk it since that would involve resizing your root partition. If however you have a secondary disk you want to use for it it's just a matter of adding a new entry to
/etc/fstab(which the UI installer in Mint and others allows you to do with a nice UI instead of having to write the file manually). Although bear in mind that mounting a disk on top of an existing folder will mask the contents of the folder, so you won't be able to access the files that were there before. Long story short you can move the files over to the new disk first, them add the fstab entry and it should work, for future installations you can set this during the installer, same way you create a different partition for/boot, in Linux partitions are mounted to folders and they work as if they were in that location for all intents and purposes. -
I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
Linux Mint and PopOS.
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I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
Zorin Linux is very Windows'ish (xp) :]
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PopOS was only initially released in 2017, making it one of the newer distributions. It is actively developed and really pushing the needle in the community. It is a great option. Don’t know what distro you’re actually thinking of, but it isn’t Pop.
Let me explain, the current version of pop is based on the 22.04 branch of Ubuntu. They've been in dev hell trying to update to the 24.04 branch.
As a consequence it doesn't have full support of more modern hardware and you can run into libc issues trying to run precompiled binaries.
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I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
I tried Linux Mint Cinnamon but swapped to Fedora Workstation. I like Fedora Workstation, it’s very well animated and smooth.
But I think I heard in another YouTubers review that on her laptop it wasn’t as battery efficient as other distros. But I like it on my desktop pc.
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Can't go wrong with Linux Mint
Mint didn't work at all on my last desktop. I should have tested more with the live disk before installing.
The mint discord I found was pretty helpful though.
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I know you want to move away from Windows, but trying to choose something completely different might be a bad idea, you're already unfamiliar with the system also being unfamiliar with the way to interact with stuff might be a bit too much. That being said I don't think any of the largest DE mentioned would be a problem, so look at pictures and choose on what you think looks best.
As for distro lots of people recommend Mint and I'll back that up, although I haven't used it in years it was my go to distro to give new users as it was very plug and play.
And the two recommendations I always give new users are:
-
Keep
/and/homein separate partitions, this allows you to format your system, change distro, or whatever without losing your personal files. -
As much as possible use the package manager, googling a program and downloading an installer is 99% of the time the wrong way to install stuff and a major cause of problems for new users.
A note about the package manager: Mint, and most other distros have a GUI software centre. Kinda like an app store. So you can search for an app there, find it, and install it.
Linux mint also comes with flatpak but apps installed from the software centre default to the .deb version.
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I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
My recommendation is, don’t go with any of the distros you haven’t heard of before.
At some point, you will need to google “<distroname> how do I…” many many times. It is much better if you have something popular and common to do that in.
I have tried to approach this off the basic principle of “Oh, it’s basically Fedora!” on a few distributions but it doesn’t work as reliably as you’d like.
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I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Put Linux Mint on an USB thumbdrive and play with it until you are comfortable. Be wary it would be somewhat slower than a system installed on the laptop's drive.
Then, if it is a spare laptop, go ahead and install it. Avoid dual booting, it is more hassle than worth at this stage in your journey. Disable secureboot before installing, or Windows will try to hijack the laptop. You can always re-enable it later if you really want to, but it's such a bad implementation currently that it doesn't actually provide much security.
Alternatively: if all you want is to use the computer, without having to worry about the technical details of managing an OS. Try something like Bazzite (for gaming) or Aurora (general productivity) instead. They just work and will (practically) never break.
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Let me explain, the current version of pop is based on the 22.04 branch of Ubuntu. They've been in dev hell trying to update to the 24.04 branch.
As a consequence it doesn't have full support of more modern hardware and you can run into libc issues trying to run precompiled binaries.
Fair enough, but assuming you’re using any of several package managers, seems like libc shouldn’t be an issue. Nevertheless, I clearly misunderstood you. Anyway, alpha 7 for 24.04 is out now.
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So what distro is Mac without a concussion? I dont want windows
Ubuntu?
Distros don't define the UI.
That's the desktop environment's work. Many distros will look and feel exactly alike, because they use the same DE.
These are:
- GNOME
- KDE
- Cinnamon
- a long list of etceteras.
GNOME is their own thing, with very opinionated and authoritarian devs. They are not very flexible in their design and development philosophy. That said, Gnome is a very good and quality DE that does have customization, but is also very different to everything else UX wise.
KDE Plasma is very Windows like, because their thing is to be extremely flexible and customizable. But, with sane defaults that look like Windows as closely as possible. So it is very familiar out of the box, though it can be made to look and work into very unique ways. It is also very good and quite polished, aiming to have virtually everything into a GUI or menu, minimizing the need for terminal commands.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint's continuation of what Gnome used to be like. Which means that it is very similar to pre-Windows 10 but with modern quality of life upgrades and functionality.
Most distros will use one of the first two, and Mint champions it's own Cinnamon. Other DE's are for more specialty or niche distributions.
Very few DE's capture the macOS experience. Mostly because there's little interest on it from the crowds that use Linux, so they get abandoned quickly. The closest thing currently is Budgie, which had died for a while, but is now revived by a different group of developers.
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I'm a big fan of PopOS.
Most people advocate for Mint, but when I run Mint, I don't feel like I've made a step forwards in terms of UI. I'm a huge fan of the design choices around PopOS. It just feels much more modern than windows.
I've been working on "moving in" to Linux Mint, and I've been annoyed and frustrated by things like how hard it is to pin a program to taskbar, or find my recently used folders, or how it seems most installations disappear into a mysterious void and don't let me put them in directories of my choosing.
How is PopOS in the context of being able to do most things through a GUI or at least menus that don't involve terminal usage, or hotkeys I have to constantly look up? Is the general desktop environment polished and thoughtfully designed? I think I'd be up for a drastically new interface after a lifetime of Windows if it at least was intuitive, navigable through menus and made sense.
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I've been working on "moving in" to Linux Mint, and I've been annoyed and frustrated by things like how hard it is to pin a program to taskbar, or find my recently used folders, or how it seems most installations disappear into a mysterious void and don't let me put them in directories of my choosing.
How is PopOS in the context of being able to do most things through a GUI or at least menus that don't involve terminal usage, or hotkeys I have to constantly look up? Is the general desktop environment polished and thoughtfully designed? I think I'd be up for a drastically new interface after a lifetime of Windows if it at least was intuitive, navigable through menus and made sense.
How is PopOS in the context of being able to do most things through a GUI or at least menus that don’t involve terminal usage, or hotkeys I have to constantly look up?
PopOS is hotkey dependent, for certain, but its really only the 'option' key that you need. The option key, which gives you access to many things, including what I consider its greatest feature, which is the multi window desktop view.
Its extremely intuitive. And it gives you something that if you've been on windows for a long time, you haven't experienced, which is like a "many desktops" view of the world. I have a desktop view with my programs I'm running for utility purposes (terminal, system monitor, and a text editor.) I have another desktop set up with my work firefox windows and tabs. I have another with my communications (signal), and another with lemmy, and random stuff for shit posting/ entertainment. I hit the option key and scroll to get to any one of the desktops. If I need a program, I just tap option and start typing the programs name.
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So what distro is Mac without a concussion? I dont want windows
Ubuntu?
Probably the closest to "Mac without a concussion" would probably be ElementaryOS with the Pantheon desktop, but I don't really recommend it.
Linux is modular in ways you're probably not used to. Windows looks like WIndows and that's it, you can't just uninstall the taskbar and install someone else's taskbar. In Linux you can do pretty much exactly that. The GUI is a separate system that sits on top of the OS like Windows ran on top of DOS back in the 90's and at airports today. There are several Desktop Environments (DEs) you can choose from.
For example, if you go to Linux Mint's website, you will find it offered in three main flavors: Cinnamon, MATE and xfce.
The vast majority of DEs you'll find in Linux are set up out of the box the way Windows is, in terms of basic UI elements. Most have a panel at the bottom with the application menu on the left, a window list next to that or centered, and system tasks and the clock on the right. A window has the minimize, maximize and close button at the top right, etc. Stuff you have muscle memory of using.
Gnome deliberately does things like that differently I think out of a sense of grudge. I used to hear Linux newcomers say things like "I tried Linux for a few hours and found you can't even rename a file. Like it's impossible to rename a file. Linux is completely useless." And I didn't understand how it was they could come to such a bafflingly dumb conclusion until I tried using Gnome and caught myself saying the same things.
Gnome also deliberately doesn't implement a lot of features because they expect you to use the terminal for them. Other DEs like Cinnamon and KDE are actually finished.
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How is PopOS in the context of being able to do most things through a GUI or at least menus that don’t involve terminal usage, or hotkeys I have to constantly look up?
PopOS is hotkey dependent, for certain, but its really only the 'option' key that you need. The option key, which gives you access to many things, including what I consider its greatest feature, which is the multi window desktop view.
Its extremely intuitive. And it gives you something that if you've been on windows for a long time, you haven't experienced, which is like a "many desktops" view of the world. I have a desktop view with my programs I'm running for utility purposes (terminal, system monitor, and a text editor.) I have another desktop set up with my work firefox windows and tabs. I have another with my communications (signal), and another with lemmy, and random stuff for shit posting/ entertainment. I hit the option key and scroll to get to any one of the desktops. If I need a program, I just tap option and start typing the programs name.
Thanks for the info
That does sound nice, but often I find myself using my computer with a drawing tablet in a weird position, which means getting to my keyboard can be a hassle. I can program some hot keys into my tablet but it's limited. If it's just one button to press to bring up menus that's fine, but if it's option+a key per function I need, I wouldn't have enough buttons basically. I guess I'm looking for a user experience that would let me do all of my everyday functions using only a cursor or a mouse, and maybe 5-8 hotkey combinations/macros. -
Thanks for the info
That does sound nice, but often I find myself using my computer with a drawing tablet in a weird position, which means getting to my keyboard can be a hassle. I can program some hot keys into my tablet but it's limited. If it's just one button to press to bring up menus that's fine, but if it's option+a key per function I need, I wouldn't have enough buttons basically. I guess I'm looking for a user experience that would let me do all of my everyday functions using only a cursor or a mouse, and maybe 5-8 hotkey combinations/macros.wrote on last edited by [email protected]So I run a 2-1, and I like the 2-1/ tablet form factor (I actually just ordered this for my new machine) and will 100% be running PopOS on it. You don't need any hot keys and its tablet mode is dreamy. I have a bit of criticism on the onscreen keyboard (it should be bigger and easier to get to).
You will need to learn the gestures (three fingers swipe up), but I found that easy enough to learn. I would actually say that the PopOS tablet mode is among the best, maybe even better than windows. I use it about an hour to two a day in this way.
