A lot of distro recommendation threads focus on the questions that novices think are important, but leave out the questions people would have after experiencing the differences (things that distro-hoppers might ask). As such, answers vary between “use _____, I found it very user friendly” and “use whatever, you can turn any distro into any other, and tweak it to your needs.”

What are some questions that newbies should ask when deciding on which distro to use as the basis for their system. Things like “what package manager suits my needs and how do I try out different ones without changing distros?” Or “what is a desktop environment/window manager, and how do I figure out which suits me?” Or “how does an init system affect my user experience as a newbie?” Or “how what are the choices made by such-and-such distro during install?”

Bonus points for also answering the questions you propose (I don’t have answers, picked a distro and stuck with it)

    • WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today
      3·
      21 hours ago

      I’m not sure I’d be a good reference for what should be in the article as my life has been… unusual, to say the least. I used to be quite techy, albeit mostly self-taught. A couple decades ago my life changed dramatically & took me away from all that. Now I’d like to play some catch-up, but still don’t really have the time, budget, and now brain power for it (older ADHD sufferer).

      I mean I can still remember some random basics like a minimal TCP/IP understanding, my fingers still have some muscle memory on using a *NIX shell (tcsh in SCO UNIX, to show my age) & vi (supplanted by vim now), etc. I was just getting into VMs when shit went down, so I get the basics there. But I don’t fully understand what exactly docker, flatpacks, snaps, etc. are, their differences, advantage to each, etc.

      And don’t get me started on init - I cannot fathom what a monolithic systemd provides that is so much better than traditional startup systems that it was worth breaking the UNIX philosophy of small, simple programs dedicated to singular tasks for.

      But like I said, my situation is kinda unique so I don’t expect to find much info targeting former techies who effectively may as well have been in a coma for over 20 years. But some explainers that get to the point of all that’s come along in that time without treating me as if I’m clueless would be nice.

      ETA: and no, I wasn’t in prison, or anything like that. Just stuff happened that severely screwed me up.