So that very important day is almost upon us.
October 14th is the day set for when Windows 10 stops security updates (no consumer is going to pay for extended) and begins to really push people to Windows 11. Windows 11 has strict hardware requirements that a lot of “older” devices that most people have do not meet.
And so, I am sure many individuals and companies may be getting rid of their old laptops and even desktops to recoup the vost of new devices.
What is the plan, when should we move in? What kind of deals should we be looking out for?
I want to find a great deal on a great laptop just for the fun of it. Some of my friends (converted to Linux) are waiting to get new laptops and score a deal. I have been waiting years for this day and I hope it can feel like a special day.
Any good places to look for these kinds of deals?
No.
Mint works ootb but that is just one criterium. People can help you with setup. What about
why should an underdog nieche distro with ¼ the maintainers of KDE or GNOME (rough approximation, may be way worse) be better for beginners than the actual standard?
You just had a very bad experience because you are already very tech savvy.
No not true, dont pretend you know me lol XD
Mint was my first distro, fine but random crashes.
Then I dealt with it on some occasions, as everyone installs it. Nobody needs to advertize that small extremely overhyped distro, as everyone always uses it!
Timeshift has nothing to do with hard upgrades. It might not break, but it will not upgrade as it has complex issues with package conflicts and whatever that need to be figured out.
Try Fedora Atomic desktops please. This discussion is senseless. They are very easy to use and extremely stable.
What? PPAs are unofficial repos meant for developers to test their software. They shouldnt be added to your system and will introduce breakages that will then give you a pain when upgrading.
And this is not about “bleeding edge” but security fixes.
What? Linux mint is based on Ubuntu because that is supposed to be the great distro. If tutorials for Ubuntu suddenly dont work, that is bad.
LMDE was reported to work way less well than regular Mint. But for sure that is a good path onwards.
First you tell me that I am tech savvy and thus have issues with mint. Then you assume everyone should evaluate if updates are needed or not? People are not distro maintainers. Distros apply updates, and users should not need to press buttons and wait all the time.
On Atomic desktops you reboot to apply an update and you are not forced to reboot. Updates are done in the background with no user interaction, as it is pointless. If you rely on users manually pressing a button, then your automatic updates are bad.
Updates should not be done
If you detect that and include it in the system (like uBlue does for theirs!) users dont need to press buttons. There is no decision, you update or you are behind on security fixes.
Introducing decisions for things that are not in question is bad UX and leads to people randomly ignoring upgrades. Updates should not annoy you or break the system, or the system itself is not well made.
Man, please just try them, you dont know what I am talking about.
You dont know how Flatpak verification works or dont care to understand it.
All Ubuntu/Mint packages are “unofficial” as they are packaged by maintainers and not the devs themselves.
Only exception are external repos for things like Firefox.
Normal flathub is the same, while flatpaks are more up to date and containerized. It is a silly and harmful decision to prefer unverified .deb packages over unverified flatpaks.
Deb packages have access over EVERYTHING. Literally and deb package could be a virus, as they dont have any isolation apart from some weak Apparmor profiles.
LOL you call XFCE and Mate modern desktops ? XDDDD
also, we are talking about beginner friendly distros. Installing Plasma on Mint will result in an ugly frankenstein, that might also suffer from being “stable” with unfixed bugs.
Yes. GNOME and KDE, as well as many window managers, support Wayland perfectly since years. On Mint with Wayland last time I tried it, even keyboard input and scaling were broken.
A small downstream distro using a nieche nonstandard desktop environment is not the beginner friendly distro people should use. The best experience will come with GNOME or KDE as they get the most work done.
And additionally, as I clearly separated, a package based distro is not suited or needed for most workflows.
Try an image based Distro first, then argue about them.
i ALREADY tried image-based distros. Several of them. In both VMs and bare-metal.
And also, are you too lazy to update your system occasionally, which is a simple command or a few clicks? Because how is needing to click a few buttons every few weeks/months “bad UX”?
Besides, whatever atomic distro you mention has a small repo; you can’t find shit. (Unless you’re talking about NixOS, which i doubt since you need to reboot to update.)
if you REALLY want an atomic distro that you can rollback, and having packages that are secure, use NixOS.
No, as said. This is about recommending distros for people switching from Windows. Not my personal hobby machine.
That is too rare. You should update at least weekly.
And yes it is silly
Why? Updates dont need a GUI and can go fine in the background. An update notification to reboot once done works too.
And NixOS as well as Ostree or bootc based distros offer you multiple boot targets, so if something breaks you can go back.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll are my go-to if I want something more messy (if I want to do changes to the system without caring about packaging), as they have snapshots by default.
No idea what you mean. If you search for “universal blue”, “bluefin”, “aurora”, “fedora kinoite” or “HeliumOS” you will absolutely find it.
Nixos supports fully atomic updates which should be used. The live updates always break stuff.
I am on NixOS, but for beginners I would recommend uBlue or CentOS-Stream based atomic desktops. Fedoras biggest issue is that they have no longterm kernel
typically the default is autoupdate to be activated…
Where? How?
Fair question.
It is something I turn off so I don’t remember for sure. Typically it comes up during the installation process. If your distro is using “Software Updater” it should be an option in it’s settings called “automatically check for updates”. This is on Ubuntu 25.04. Although it has been updated a few times from the version it was originally.
But whatever program is being used for updates should have options that will probably get you there.
why do you care about stability so much?
Because… people need systems that work??
Not everyone can fix a broken system every month
Bro, when is the last time you have booted a recent build of Mint Cinnamon or other ‘flavors’ of Mint? I feel like you tried it like 10+ years ago and have just complained about it since.
Half a year ago or so
Ah, did you use a specific ‘flavor’? Or the default, Cinnamon. What kind of machine was it installed on?
Default Linux Mint, ubuntu based.
Installed on an old laptop, 2 old macbooks, one crazy powerful PC of my uncle.
This is a cinnamon issue. Maybe their wayland session is better now, I can hope so. Still, due to the modular nature of Wayland, either they make their own stack or use something else.
Would be nice to join XFCE, Budgie etc, but they prefer their own thing.
Cinnamon and Mint are fine projects for what they are. Small, pretty outdated community projects. But it is incredible how the ratio of users/developers explodes on Mint compared to anything else.
Probably because it is targeted at non-developers.
Ah, ok that is all reasonable. Yeah, I started using mate or debian version I never had problems since. Something odd about Cinnamon.
To be fair I had Linux Mint installed recently and audio broke on the first update. Never could fix it. I had to reinstall. I’m a total noob on Linux but my experience doesn’t seem that unusual based on the huge number of troubleshooting steps I tried from users experiencing similar issues.
Was this a super new lastest gen computer or? Wait did the reinstall the fix issue? That’s a bit weird. Did you verify iso hash after download? Im perplexed it worked after a reinstalled.