The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.
The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.
C’mon, microsoft. What are you DOING with your life???
I’m no linux apologist. I BARELY understand what I’m doing. If ANY task needs terminal, then that task just isn’t going to happen for me.
All that said, it’s time to switch to linux. And for anyone asking where they should start with all these distros…Mint. If you’ve never used linux before, start with Mint.
Now I’m a bit of a hypocrite for saying that, because I’m on Zorin. There’s nothing wrong with Zorin. It is perfectly fine as a starter distro if you’re coming from Windows. It’s almost equal to Zorin in usability. Mint has one edge that cannot be overlooked for newbies.
Userbase.
EVERYONE uses Mint, which means there’s going to be a broader range of support. There are times I wish I had started with Mint. But I chose Zorin when I was new, and now my heels are dug in.
That being said, YOU should use Mint.
Ugh…I can’t believe this is where we are in this world. Where I have to reccomend linux, while still not knowing what the hell I’m doing.
Anyways…use linux. Fuck microsoft. It’s the only way to take back OUR hardware. They want to go full greed mode? I’m now using software which they don’t make a dime on, and never can. As much as I hate the structure, I can’t say anything negative involving bloat, or spyware, or anything else that I classify as “modern day bullshit”.
sigh Just use linux.
What’s the difference between Zorin and mint? I’m on zorin right now to get my feet wet on linux. I am not a terminal user as I’m not technical.
I mean with every day passing there’s less and less desktop users anyway. Most teenagers know significantly less about windows than you know about Linux. They’re on iOS and android.
As an admin i see it as an opportunity to switch to Linux but the boomers are refusing to let go of microslop office so it’s a bit of a fight still.
I’ve been recommending Endeavour because its “Arch with a nice installer” and it seems to go down well with modestly technical people.
Especially since they can then pick their DE.
Arch? For people new to Linux? Dude seriously …
Please do not recommend Arch-based distros to newcomers. At some point, something minor or major is going to break, and they’re not going to be able to fix it. Give them something Debian-based to learn the ropes (or not). It’s not going to break down on them as easily.
EndeavourOS was my first distro, and I had a great experience. Learned a ton (sometimes by completely breaking everything. Time Shift saved my ass many times).
I’m sure not everyone learns things the same way, but breaking shit and having to learn how to fix it was the best way I could have learned about how Linux works
I’m happy that things did work out for you, and indeed, “breaking shit and fixing it” is part of the rites of passage on Linux.
That said, I guess you’re part of the “tech-savvy tinkerer” crowd. This demographic will handle these things gracefully and take every breakdown as a learning opportunity.
Coming from this demographic, it’s easy to forget that there are people out there that deem computers mere tools, not a hobby. These people expect things to “just work”, and any breakage is an annoyance, a road block, a “this Linux thing sucks”. Set them up with a tinkerer’s distro, and you will make them thoroughly unhappy. Not because they’re wrong. Not because we’re wrong. Just because of a mismatch of expectations.
So, dear penguins: let’s not blindly advertise our pet distro to whoever asks (or doesn’t). Let’s look at who is before us, and provide them with the best experience possible. In a lot of cases, due to the influx of “just works” users, this may mean something stable in order not to put them off.
I dunno man, less shits broken here than on Ubuntu.
Debían based except Ubuntu, Even Ubuntu flavours like kubuntu are fine just not Ubuntu.
Wait, why did you use “í?” It’s just “Debian.”
Autocorrect does weird things.
I’m out of the loop, Ubuntu has been broken/unstable?
No but they have been steering towards practices that makes people uncomfortable.
They are slowly replacing part of their ecosystem with proprietary modules or modules with permissive license and people have seen this behaviour enough to know what the end goal is
*yet
How old is your system?
I’ve put endeavour on a bunch of desktops and various thinkpads of a variety of vintages, including very modern.
I dunno man, it just works. I buy conservative technology choices and vendors and shit just works.
The hardest thing in my life is getting WWAN to work reliably OOTB on thinkpads with cellular.
Edit: No, the hardest thing in my life is asking people “Is wayland in the room with us right now?” because I’ve yet to have a machine running wayland.
You misunderstood my question. How old are those installs? Chances are they’re not very old.
Arch-based systems like EndeavourOS are rolling releases with minimal testing. They’ll work fine at the start, but errors will accumulate over time. Breakage is not a question of if, but when, and when that happens, Arch assumes you’re a savvy user who knows what youre doing and able to fix your stuff. If you aren’t (and newcomers to Linux normally fall into that category), you’re going to have a bad time.
Whatever the hype around Endeavour or CachyOS is: I wouldn’t recommend any of them to Linux newcomers for this very reason. Instead, it’s wise to give them a stable Debian-based OS to make themselves comfortable with Linux. Once they have arrived, they may or may not experiment with other flavours of Linux.
It feels like you’re just gate-keeping Linux because you apparently had a bad experience. It doesn’t sound like you’ve used an Arch-based distro in a while (or if you have, it was Manjaro - there has been a host of problems over there that will take a lot of time and effort to rebuild community trust, imo).
We’ve got 2 desktops and 2 laptops in our house all running Arch-based distros, the oldest being a little over 4 years old without any “breakage”. Two of the users had not even seen Linux prior to this, and one of them is not at all what I would consider “computer savvy”.
I can’t speak for vanilla Arch, but all of the “Arch with helpers” distros I’ve ran had pretty simple buttons to deal with system maintenance. Additionally, I’ve seen firsthand the difference a rolling-release distro can make over a “stable” release for game and hardware compatibility. It’s generally much easier to get (and keep) all the hardware working correctly on a gaming laptop in one of those arch-based distros than Debian or Mint, especially if it has an nvidia gpu. I couldn’t in good conscience recommend anything debian based to someone in that boat personally.
The use of the system matters A LOT when recommending a new distro. For some grandparents that just browse facebook and send e-mails - yea I’d probably just put Debian or LMDE on their system. I’m not sure I would make the same recommendation to anyone else though.
As a new user I tried all the “easy” distro and they all just fucked me over really hard, they favor ease of use by restricting the user so anytime I went to do anything I just kept running into repeated minor problems. When I tried endeavor it #just works and with snapshot software you can always rollback most distros as far as I know so there is no reason to not reccomend a Linux distro that doesn’t hold your hand unless there is something suepr specific the person needs that for some reason is the only thing capable of doing it reasonably well.
Never ran into anything like that. I’m hungry for more details.
It sounds you’ve never done that yourself. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing, but it’s not trivial either and may require use of a boot stick, dealing with disk encryption through the terminal, chrooting… and that is not the kinds of hoops I’d expect a newcomer to have to jump through just to fix their system.
I don’t expect a newcomer to set up the snapshotting themselves, we have technology for this.
I don’t mean they literally restrict you as much as they give you more hoops.
There is also cachyos, they are sooooooo smooth on kde plasma desktop environment.
As an arch user this is a terrible suggestion. CachyOS is a distro for enthusiasts who are ok with dealing with the Arch way of doing things. This is a distro that no beginner should be using unless they are prepared to learn how to use the terminal and learn how Linux works. Anyone else is likely to be scared away because it is “too difficult”.
OP is right, just use Mint.
And while at that, I recomend regular Mint (which is based on Ubuntu).
There is Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), but I have found it harder to use (while I can manage, I’m not that experienced with Linux to bother to troubleshoot and solve it [at least at the time], but I think it was dependency, incompatibility, or driver issues).
Plus, the main Mint version is still the Ubuntu based one, LMDE is kinda a side project and usually isn’t as up-to-date, as far as I know.
LMDE would indeed be a bad recommendation for a newbie. Regular Mint benefits from Ubuntus better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates, PPA support and if you have AMD graphics it’s not a newbie nightmare to get the most up to date Mesa.
Do more people use Mint than Ubuntu these days? I’ve been on Arch for a decade now so I don’t know the popularity of distros as well as I used to.
I don’t know but it seems that Mint is pretty popular: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Anyway, Mint is the closest to Windows 3.1/98/2000 by its simplicity. It shows windows, you can move your files and run applications, it’s all I need.
Arch at around #15 btw. I would have expected it to be a little bit more popular than some of the other ones on this list but I guess I don’t know what the metric is based on here. Downloads?
Page hits. Good ‘ol clicks baby.
Arch, 150 million page visits, 0 installs.
Debian, 1 page visit, 1 install.
Arch more popular than Debian. 😎
Could you imagine?
Sounds good enough for average people. 👌
I switched from popos to manjaro and later mainline arch about a year ago for the AUR. It’s a lot more streamlined then all the terminal stuff needed to install third party software on Ubuntu
I remember mucking about with all these custom PPAs when on Ubuntu. The AUR is a dream compared to that. I even made my own packages because it’s so simple and well-documented.
Eh, I’m a sufficiently advanced Linux user (been using it on and off since the mid to late 90s) and I use zorin. It just works and it also looks pretty good too
Mullvadvpn is my vpn of choice. Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora are the recommended distros if using Mullvad.
Mint isn’t for everyone. A lot of picking a distro, at least for me, is will it work with the services I want to use.
To use mullvad on mint, download the .deb file. Double click on it. Click ok to installing it.
Done.
Edit (Download it off mullvad website if not clear)
It’s just wire guard. You can download the config file and import into the native vpn settings
True. But the app makes it easier for noobs to configure. Anyone with basic CLI skills wouldnt be trying to infer Mullvad doesnt work on Mint anyway.
You don’t actually need the official Mullvad program either, although there’s nothing wrong with it.
I prefer to just load the wireguard config directly with network manager (or whatever your distro uses).