me too

welcome

My Surface Pro 7 was perma nagging me about going to W11. Screw it, just installed LMDE 2 days ago, chose Mint Debian Edition as I use it on my desktop for the last 13 months.

@PagingDoctorLove @mugdad1 I’m thinking Ubuntu, Mint, or MX Linux. But any Linux will be at least a little different from Windows. It’s not hard to get used to, and it’s worth it.

Mint is the way I went (13 months ago). Linux Mint Debian Edition in particular.

Mint.

I’ll be very honest with you. It’s not fancy, it’s not snazzy computing. It’s simple, designed with a graphical interface in mind, and a good operating system for someone who A) does not know Linux, or B) does not want to fiddle.

Endeavour OS. It may be a bit more hands on than something like Ubuntu/Fedora but there are ways less abstractions, better document and community support that makes it simpler over all.

Pick up a note-taking application like Joplin or something and write down solutions to problems and you’ll be fine.

I’d recommend against Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint etc. tbh, they are simpler on the surface but there are no ing parts that make it more complex when things break.

Play around with distrobox and docker too, that makes a lot of stuff easier.

Stick with something popular. People like to argue about distros, but beyond their package manager and some settings, it’s the same thing under the hood (not saying these difference are nothing, but still). For a beginner, or really for anyone just looking to use their system instead of tinkering with it endlessly, a popular, well supported distribution will do the job.

Ubuntu fits that bill, although they made some very weird decisions recently, so I’d suggest starting with Mint if you’re new to this. Most everything should work out of the box if you have common hardware, and there’s a decent community around in case something goes wrong.

I’d also advise jumping to anything too new, flashy, or promising stuff that should really, really not be distribution dependant. My position on things is that if there’s a common tool that’s available everywhere to do something, and some distributions decides to make “their own” which does the same thing but is very specific, that’s just wasting time. Hence the disdain for raw ubuntu, among other.

I like Kubuntu tbh

I didn’t like Mint all that much.

If you have an old laptop you can try a few out and see what works, they’ll run faster than windows. If you’re on windows you might have access to Hyper-V Virtual Machine and then you can just run some Linux Distros in a virtual machine to see if they’re nice. You can even try moving some files into the VM and see if you can still work with them after a migration from windows.

I’ve been using Pop!_OS, and I’m quite pleased. I would definitely recommend it for Linux newcomers.

If you do ANY gaming at all: Bazzite KDE

If you don’t: Fedora KDE

Mint, some people will criticize me for sugesting it but I belive it’s the most user friendly distro that you can just search an error on google and get a solution instantly since it’s so widespread. I was going to say Ubuntu but they have made some questionable decisions regarding ads.

Or when an insurance company CEO somehow transitions to an “unalive” state…

idont think so mac is closed source

The servile corporate wageslaves who disregard their rights and throw a fit whenever they need to troubleshoot something,

This is what drives me fucking nuts. Somehow everyone seems to forget that they are constantly troubleshooting “the computer” for the people that they would have to troubleshoot “Linux” for. And why is that such a complaint? After all:

and asking users to click a button or type a word “is just too much.” It’s freaking sad.

Nobody who has had to deal with computers has gotten away from going through some esoteric help website with commands like “win+R,” then “sysinfo” or “regex” or whatever, clicking through a five layer deep directory, and changing something. Alternatively, you might have been forced to uninstall a driver and reinstall an older version, or update bios with a usb. The only difference with linux is the instructions you’ll be following will be for a terminal line, MAYBE. Just as an example of what you’ll find if you’re searching for help with linux. They have instructions for if you have no earthly idea what you’re doing. No one can tell me that you had that much hand holding when you were having to figure out why the hell the windows update wouldn’t install without giving you a bluescreen of death.

Yeah i still use reddit alongside lemmy as well, and i started noticing that the pcmasterrace subreddit had more and more post complaining about linux users. It got so annoying that i ended up leaving the subreddit. It was kinda ironic because they kept complaining about how linux users bring up the fact that they use linux, but it seemed to me like i saw more posts of people complaining about it instead of actual linux users talking about linux lol

I’m more of a proponent for running some Linux distro for my main OS and then virtualizing Windows if desired for things that are broken in WINE/Proton somehow but work fine in Windows, at this point.

I don’t trust Windows enough to run it baremetal in a dual-boot anymore though, virtualization at least isolates it from the host where it counts, where in a dual-boot, even if it generally doesn’t happen, there’s still the looming threat of Windows screwing up the Linux install somehow, where that isn’t a problem when virtualizing since, as I said, it’s isolated where it counts, even if paravirtualization is a thing for storage drivers and networking and the like, and hardware passthrough is a thing for things like GPUs.

@mugdad1 @gandalf_der_12te,
at the very least, it seems to me that the height of the picture in header is too high. I think that height enough:

Getting an SSL protocol error on that link.

I also did dual boot for ‘da gamez’… but then found that I’ve never had to boot into Windows for any game whatsoever. It’s been a few years now. So apparently I didn’t need dual boot after all.

If you want Steam OS on a desktop, install Bazzite. It’s the closest your going to get and it’s great.

It wasn’t shit from the start though, was it.

Back when Windows 95 was a new thing it blew everything else out of the water. Suddenly there was an operating system that even regular people were paying attention to and getting excited about, and it actually deserved the hype.

Windows was a product at that time, where Microsoft made their money by people purchasing the operating system. And so the incentive was to make a great product that people wanted to buy and use.

This was true all the way through the Windows XP and 7 days, and only with the release of 8 and especially 10 did we start to see things change.

Microsoft - who used to put so much effort into trying to prevent people installing cracked Windows - suddenly didn’t seem to care so much anymore about enforcing that. They’d realised that the true exploitable value was in the online ecosystem and the data, not the product, and that was the turning point for everything.

I installed Pop!_OS on a Thinkpad and made it my main work computer. It is the most boring computing experience ever. Nothing ever breaks. It just works.

They say they’re the distribution for humans. Apparently, it is so!

The Steam Deck was the reason I changed. Used the Deck as my only PC for a couple of months and liked the experience so I changed.

I’ve had OpenSUSE on my PC for over a year now and really like it… But I’ll be honest, the move and troubleshooting problems for setup was a pain in the ass. But it’s stable and steady since I’ve gotten over setup pains.

no you would miss a day