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
Ubuntu, Ubuntu is fine, it gets hate but tbh it's fine. It's well supported, issues getting fixed and there's plenty of info on how to fix stuff when you inevitably find something that doesn't work.
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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.
Mint has so many drawbacks these days and so few advantages that I wouldn't recommend it anymore.
Sadly.
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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 mainly game: Nobara (and I get less and less convinced of that - Fedora original is almost as good by now)
If you mainly work on it: Fedora.If you need broad support: Ubuntu. Sadly. But read up on the drawbacks.
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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.
My fault, I should have been more clear.
Yeah, I've mostly noticed the issue working on projects with people sharing builds.
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I've been using tumbleweed for awhile and I would be hesitant to suggest it to a new user unless they are comfortable with solving technical problems and learning how to take advantage of its recovery features. (Such as btrfs snapshots)
It's got some out of the box issues where you're expected to research and understand how to solve them. (Like many other distros) Where I've found Ubuntu just simply works or its just a few clicks away from working.
Things like the backlight on laptops not responding, codec support (needing to use packman repo), Nvidia support (has improved significantly over the years).
And with the nature of tumbleweed there's so many frequent updates, plus you're expected to understand how to resolve zypper package concerns.
Great OS, most issues I've had, have been solved.
I am currently battling with it to properly support my 9070xt /w rocm. (Mostly working but unstable)I specifically bought an AMD GPU when building my PC. So I've successfully avoided all this Nvidia driver nonsense.
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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
Cachyos, I swapped from windows with it, og dualbooted, ended up never wanting to open windows agaun
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Cachyos, I swapped from windows with it, og dualbooted, ended up never wanting to open windows agaun
Ubuntu is an alright first pic, id prob reccomend something fedora based instead since I prefer flathub/flatpak to the snap store, bazzite if you game, imo the best default app store bazaar (can dload anywhere I have it on cachyos but it may be hard to figure out at first)
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Cachyos, I swapped from windows with it, og dualbooted, ended up never wanting to open windows agaun
You cant really go wrong, de is more what decides the desktop experience, like theming/look ,etc. Kde plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce , etc. or tiling managers like hyprland (id stick to des for now coming from windows)
Ive mostly tried plasma and gnome
Kde plasma is windows on steroids, customizable and snappy, tons of settings, most customization built in and not reliant on extensionsGnome is like chromeos/macos futuristic opinionated, I like it a lot with extensions, slightly better than kde plasma with a lot of extensions imo
Cinnamons like closer to a simple windows experience
xfces lightweight but I think plasmas caught up there?
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You cant really go wrong, de is more what decides the desktop experience, like theming/look ,etc. Kde plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce , etc. or tiling managers like hyprland (id stick to des for now coming from windows)
Ive mostly tried plasma and gnome
Kde plasma is windows on steroids, customizable and snappy, tons of settings, most customization built in and not reliant on extensionsGnome is like chromeos/macos futuristic opinionated, I like it a lot with extensions, slightly better than kde plasma with a lot of extensions imo
Cinnamons like closer to a simple windows experience
xfces lightweight but I think plasmas caught up there?
Deepin and elementary have unique des I think, and pop os with cosmic in alpha
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Mint has so many drawbacks these days and so few advantages that I wouldn't recommend it anymore.
Sadly.
How do you mean? I recently installed it and now I'm curious. What other distro would you recommend instead?
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You cant really go wrong, de is more what decides the desktop experience, like theming/look ,etc. Kde plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce , etc. or tiling managers like hyprland (id stick to des for now coming from windows)
Ive mostly tried plasma and gnome
Kde plasma is windows on steroids, customizable and snappy, tons of settings, most customization built in and not reliant on extensionsGnome is like chromeos/macos futuristic opinionated, I like it a lot with extensions, slightly better than kde plasma with a lot of extensions imo
Cinnamons like closer to a simple windows experience
xfces lightweight but I think plasmas caught up there?
They all come with different preinstalled apps, which are a mix of os and de dependent, like mint with cinnamon may use nemo for files, cachyos with gnome may use nautilus, but I like nemo so on cachyos with gnome I have nemo installed and set as the default.
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They all come with different preinstalled apps, which are a mix of os and de dependent, like mint with cinnamon may use nemo for files, cachyos with gnome may use nautilus, but I like nemo so on cachyos with gnome I have nemo installed and set as the default.
Kden lives technically kde app, gimp is based off gtk, and so on, but yeah you basically pick a starter for yourself based on what you priortize, I like gaming so cachyos helps me grab packages id otherwise not know about, makes it easy to tweak scheduler, kernel, etc. setup btrfs snapper support and pick different bootloaders grubs, refined, limine, etc.
There are other distros meant to be closer to windows by default, with their theming, de, app picks, etc. just look around distrowatch
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How do you mean? I recently installed it and now I'm curious. What other distro would you recommend instead?
Mint is often "slow" in the adoption of things. It has its benefits,as this makes it fairly stable. But it also has its drawbacks - hardware support is a hit or miss, especially with newer hardware (it either works out of the box or you are screwed for years), has still not adopted wayland fully and will likely not be there before Mint23(2026).
That is all fine and dandy if you can live with that. If it works and does what you need it to do you will have very little issues with it.
That's what once set Mint apart, it simply worked when others did not and was bloody easy to set up.Nowadays that's no longer something other distributions don't manage to do.
I have recently switched my family and company to fedora(and some Alma/Rhel VMs on my Proxmox cluster) from Windows and tbh: It was as smooth as fuck and as smooth as Mint is, but has a lot of advantages in terms of "up-to-dateness" of a lot of things. (And KDE Plasma is indeed nice)(We only have two issues that are more KDE based and less Fedora based and that are already being addressed - and only apply to domain networks)
There are other Debian based distributions that are similar as well.
In other words: Mint has, in my eyes, lost it's unique selling point a bit over the last years.
Even my most "tech illiterate" employee found herself "at home" in Fedora (as she would have done in Mint), something that was not the case when she trialed Linux 4 years ago.So in the end: If you are happy with Mint,go with Mint. Be aware of the downsides. If they don't bother you then it's perfect. If it does, well,there are alternatives.
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Mint has so many drawbacks these days and so few advantages that I wouldn't recommend it anymore.
Sadly.
I installed it and it's running. Even plays games well.
Are these drawbacks that anyone would care about if they're not a Linux geek?
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I installed it and it's running. Even plays games well.
Are these drawbacks that anyone would care about if they're not a Linux geek?
If you're a gamer with variable refresh rate monitors that differ, you'll really want Wayland. As others have said Mint is good and easy, but not the most up to date and lacks features compared to Windows. I'm liking Fedora KDE spin for this reason.
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Mint is often "slow" in the adoption of things. It has its benefits,as this makes it fairly stable. But it also has its drawbacks - hardware support is a hit or miss, especially with newer hardware (it either works out of the box or you are screwed for years), has still not adopted wayland fully and will likely not be there before Mint23(2026).
That is all fine and dandy if you can live with that. If it works and does what you need it to do you will have very little issues with it.
That's what once set Mint apart, it simply worked when others did not and was bloody easy to set up.Nowadays that's no longer something other distributions don't manage to do.
I have recently switched my family and company to fedora(and some Alma/Rhel VMs on my Proxmox cluster) from Windows and tbh: It was as smooth as fuck and as smooth as Mint is, but has a lot of advantages in terms of "up-to-dateness" of a lot of things. (And KDE Plasma is indeed nice)(We only have two issues that are more KDE based and less Fedora based and that are already being addressed - and only apply to domain networks)
There are other Debian based distributions that are similar as well.
In other words: Mint has, in my eyes, lost it's unique selling point a bit over the last years.
Even my most "tech illiterate" employee found herself "at home" in Fedora (as she would have done in Mint), something that was not the case when she trialed Linux 4 years ago.So in the end: If you are happy with Mint,go with Mint. Be aware of the downsides. If they don't bother you then it's perfect. If it does, well,there are alternatives.
I see now, thank you!
