…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I appreciate how thorough that reply is. My experience with Windows is either expert level or, given my job, should be. I don’t really want to have to fight with my system at home, which is why I was looking at ease of use. I stayed away from really working with Linux for a while because there was a time when it had a reputation for being finicky with AMD hardware (which I often have at least a processor of) and problematic with game compatibility.
It is my understanding that neither of those are much of a problem these days, assuming they ever were (I never actually verified either one). That mixed with Microsoft’s audacity with Recall is enough for me to learn the transition. I might take you up on that offer for troubleshooting assistance, but I think once I commit to a Linux flavor I’ll be capable of figuring it out. It’s more laziness that has caused me to procrastinate than lack of skill, but thank you!
the hardware / games compat problems were definitely real, at least for me. the number of times I’ve had to dive into config files to fix a hardware problem has dropped way off since I first started using linux. It’s very much better now.
I disagree with your take on gnome, I think it’s super simple and easy to understand, especially with how similar it works to phone OSs. My uni has gnome running in the computer pool and none of the hundreds of win and mac people coming in have problems with it
as someone who does one on one troubleshooting, people have a lot of problems with gnome, honestly if they did would they tell you?
Gnome is just a very fundamentally different experience than windows out of the box and while some, many even will love it, it is not the best default choice for windows converts.
It’s Ubuntu so with the permament dock tbf. They only came to me with problems stemming from the fact that we were forced to use the deprecated AFS with hacky workarounds, or them trying to install software which they didn’t have permissions to do, or the printer being out of paper
Finding the activities button in the top left on default gnome is the only hurdle I can think of. The all apps button, the calendar/notifications and quick settings are all obvious things to try clicking which will immediatly reveal their purpose
these are hurdles that exist for enterprise users not ones that exist for typical desktop users who want things like “why can’t i see the names of the windows on the bar”
enterprise users expect to not have things be exactly the way they want and don’t complain as much about customization needs