Linux mint
at least in my experienceseems to be one of those shit just works distrosI don’t use it myself, but it’s been my main recommendation for newbies for years for that reason. No complaints yet, even from the less tech-literate.
A lot of distros work really well on my laptop, but Mint has always been the only one that works perfectly
It’s been my default choice for years now, and I’ve recently switched to the Debian-based version. Couldn’t be happier.
I switched with Bookworm. It’s great!
I never used a spin-off of a unique distribution of GNU/Linux on my own computer, except the dark Ubuntu times. It seemed right at the time.
Now, I don’t see why I should recommend a distro that tries to be easier on new users when the original has sane defaults and is closer to upstream regarding all the tools and software bundled with it.
Here are my recommendations for new users in that order (regardless of their computer knowledge): Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, LFS. Friends can help with the installation and should consider easy maintainability when dealing with users who just want to use it.
My personal preferences are Gentoo and Debian.
I haven’t used Mint in years, but back in the day downstream distros from Debian often worked better for desktop users than Debian itself.
This is because of Debian’s ‘stability’ philosophy. This meant that bugs could stick around for years in Debian stable after being fixed upstream.
Of course, with each new stable release, there should be fewer bugs so this problem should become less over time.
I’ve considered switching from Manjaro to Debian on my laptop, but then I think about how great the AUR is. That’s pretty much the main appeal for Manjaro over Debian, for me.
Before switching to LMDE, I did try just using Debian with Cinnamon, thinking it would be pretty much the same experience. I did not really enjoy the experience. There were too many niceties missing that I had taken for granted with Mint. I wasn’t interested in spending my time hunting down all the tweaks and packages to make those changes.
Yea Gentoo is the go-to for new users. Are you from the last millenium?
Indeed, but what has this to do with my recommendation? ^^
It clearly depends on what the new wants to get in to. Gentoo is a smart way to learn a lot while installing it. I mean it; this is no joke!
Its common sense to learn new stuff going to most complex way. But enough sarcasm for today.
I think most mainstream distros have reached a point of diminishing returns, and that’s a good thing.
I’ve been using Mint for a few months now after initially trying Fedora and Kubuntu. Mint has been by far my favorite experience and I’ve even gotten a few people converted to Linux via Mint. Definitely my recommendation for any Linux newbies.
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I’ve been using Linux for a decade, and I think Mint is great!
I sure wish I could get off Windows and onto Linux, but as a VR developer, it really is not feasible. Sucks
I run a small business, but I’m also I’m an embedded systems developer on ARM processors for my products. Our toolchain is Windows-specific. That and the Adobe suite which I also need for my business keep my primary work machine Windows.
My laptop is Linux but even that creates occasional hassles with my work flow and presentations.
Me here playing VR games on Linux: wut?
My VR runs fine on Linux, just I cannot develop it on Linux as the tools are simply not available.
At least you get Windows and not the abomination that is MacOS.
cries in iOS developer
I’d rather use macOS than windows anyday.
What are you developing for? Hololens?
Meta Quest and SteamVR.
For a home user with recent hardware in my opinion the system to beat is openSUSE Tumbleweed. It is a stable and rolling distribution, that is, it has the best of both worlds.
Indeed! My grandmother loves it. :^)
And I love your grandmother :D
The only thing I dislike about Mint is that their forums uses that awful Sukuri(?) firewall that blocks VPN’s, and when people complain about it the forum users say that the firewall doesn’t block VPN.
I half expect if I ever needed to seek help in the forum to, say, ask for help with boot problems the reply would something like “You don’t have boot problems”.
But that’s not really a Linux Mint problem, so I guess there’s nothing I dislike about Mint.
I’ve used Linux for over two decades (red hat to Gentoo to Ubuntu to arch) and I must say it’ll be a tough sell to get me back to an RPM or a debian based distro solely due to how god awfully slow the package managers (dpkg and rpm) are.
Since Docker came along and brought with it the ride of Alpine and APK, it made me realize that system upgrades on a modern processor, fast internet, and an SSD should take seconds, not minutes.
I too think Cinnamon is a pretty great Experience. I am using KDE and heard from many people that it feels better, its more unified and has way more features.
Wayland is important for security, and Mint will need a long time to adopt that. There are already apps only running on Wayland for reasons.
KDE is a bit unstable as its a huge project. I hope that will get better in Plasma 6.
I sure wish to have something like KDE more stable. But once you are used to it, its just better. Things that are not there yet on Mint are on KDE since years.
Its a bit of a mess as its so old. Extensions need to be cleaned up. But like, Dolphin extensions are so great, I dont know an equivalent on Cinnamon.
Also the distro model is the standard one. A Fedora Atomic Cinnamon variant, with modern presets and everything working, would be a great thing to install anywhere. Automatic atomic updates, easy version upgrades, transparent system changes and resets being just one command away.
Cinnamon is more unified, but I don’t think any DE has as many features as KDE.
XFCE, XFCE, gobble gobble
You can get a Cinnamon image via U-Blue.
U-Blue in general is a nice collection of images because not only are there various unofficial options, but a lot of things like RPMFusion, etc. are preconfigured in their versions of the main editions (SilverBlue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx).
Or you can just rebase regular SilverBlue (or one of the three other official variants) to one of those images if you’re running it already. Can roll back if you don’t like it.
I doubt there’ll be an official edition until Cinnamon has full Wayland support since Fedora is going all in on that now.
In the meantime, the community has it covered.
Right! I have to try that.
Personally I dont care for cinnamon, but it is easy for users and ublue is great.
My personal wishlists are a Fedora-based TV OS, a hardened version and a rawhide kde 6 one
I have used some distros by now and I do love mint. But a few years back every major upgrade of mint lead to bugs and me reinstalling my system. So far the only Distro i tried that just keeps working is MX Linux on my old laptop.
Because I want to get rid of windows I installed Nobara. I love to play games. I works pretty good, but since only one guy ist maintaining it, it should be not considered a daily driver.
I am still not happy because it dont want to switch between distros for gaming and working.
Because I want to get rid of windows I installed Nobara. I love to play games. I works pretty good, but since only one guy ist maintaining it, it should be not considered a daily driver.
Nobara is just a Fedora remix. I’ve used another remix a bunch of years ago and converting that to a regular Fedora installation after its maintainer left was just removing that addon repo and letting dnf handle the rest. I think I only needed to switch to Fedora’s branding packages.
It was my first distro I liked it at the time, but after they killed of the KDE Edition I tried out Manjaro and the rolling release with up to date software just fits my use case much better.
I love how it’s focused on stabilty in UI/UX and that it’s supported by a lots of peoples around the world.
