You think LM being “too old” is a problem for newbies? I’ve been running some distro or other since RedHat 5. I it took me 6 weeks of waiting for Fedora to sort out most of the issues, (and I STILL have some minor ghosting issues and I ain’t no gamer), and 4 tries to get Fedora 40 to successfully take the nVidia drivers for the GTX1650 chipset in my laptop.
You think a new wannbe convert is going to put up with that?
I only just switched to Linux this past week and I use Mint. It was suggested to me by someone here on lemmy. It was easy to set up, customize, and get all my stuff working on it. I have World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Elden Ring and a few other games all working on it. The only issue, and right now it’s a minor one, I’m having is the 535 nividia drivers can cause random stutters/lag every now and then but nothing major.
My point is for people like me who are new to linux and don’t want to get overwhelmed I think Mint is great. I know eventually i’ll change to a different more “advanced” distro, right now I have my eye on CachyOS, but I don’t think I’m there quite yet to confidently install it.
I agree with @trolololol@lemmy.world here. Could you describe what issues are people having? What is their user profile (programmers, writers, …)?
came here to spread the good word of endeavor os
It’s my favourite distro because of three reasons.
- Arch worth lightweight with minimal QOL improvement
- best user community 3 ) who doesn’t like space theme distro?? lol
I just setup on my T480 with BTRFS and BTRFS-Assistant and snapper last night. It’s working well
You are right, I wanted to do some nodejs and realized that the package in the repo was Node version 12.something while latest node is version 20.something.
Also they still ship Python 3.10 which is ancient technology by today’s standard, luckily nothing major is added between 3.10 and 3.12
Their mirrors are worst, ALL OF SELECTABLE OPTIONS FROM MIRROR SELECTOR which shows up at 47 KB/sec which just hurts your area spanning from asshole to large intestines.
I use bridgetide linux mint mirror btw
Because for most use cases, Mint works flawlessly. It changes little from time to time. It has all the drivers to get started with a wide range of common hardware. It has all the codecs to play common media formats.
Of course if the package update is too slow, it’s not for you, but then unlike you, most people don’t need the latest and greatest. They just need something that works from the get-go with predictable behavior.
The software I use doesn’t get significant updates often. Kennel, vi, grep, find? They’ve been around for decades.
I’m genuinely curious what kind of things people can’t do because of lag on package updates.
The only major issue I ever had with mint running relatively old packages was when I got my current laptop. Nvidia 4060 required a really new nvidia driver, which in turn required a really new kernel. I sorted it out by adding a few unofficial repos, and it worked like a charm afterwards.
Whenever old versions are giving you grief, they can usually be sorted out in a similar manner.
It usually has something to do with programming. Again, most cases, the versions in the packages included in your garden variety stable distros should cover most use cases.
However, once in a while one would encounter the need of using the cutting edge features on certain compiler or interpreter. Rust comes to mind. I know Python introduced some features that could drastically alter workflow (e.g. switch statement). NodeJS is another one known to be lagging behind from time to time.
In other cases, hardware support might be taken to consideration, especially for newer machines. However, with Mint including the optional newer kernel, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Because you’re dealing with lifelong windows users who want a reassuringly familiar looking OS not fucking linux techs
Jesus christ learn to tailor to the user
Fedora does have a Cinnamon spin. The advantage of Mint is that all the Ubuntu tutorials work on it
Edit: plus Fedora’s philosophy about non-free software makes it less than ideal for people who don’t care
Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.
That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.
I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.
We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.
I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.
AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.
Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.
Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.
For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.
Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.
I’ve been a lifelong ms admin, and always stuck to their desktop environments because they “just worked”. Often use Linux on containers, devices (handhelds, rpi etc) and webapp servers.
That win11 recall stuff though is a step too far. So I looked at which distro was likely to be easiest to use and just as you say - mint is the overwhelming consensus. And now it’s my daily driver. I needed to learn a few new tricks, but the mint forums are filled with windows refugees so finding forum posts is easy (e.g. I thought had a problem with my “task bar” not my “panel” but since others called it the same thing I found what I was looking for).
My biggest reason for staying on windows was that I could search for something and almost always find an answer - that’s become worse over the years IMO (often get these useless forums posts when they’re basically advising the user to reinstall with five paragraphs of pasted/generated text). The mint forums are genuinely friendly and helpful, and searching them is as useful as searching for win stuff used to be.
I don’t know if “this is the year” but I can’t imagine I’m the only one who has had enough of the MS ecosystem. My experience has been great so far, and I hope there are others who give it a go.
because redhat smelly.
Also fedora is hella configured out of the box, which is nice for new users, and a good reason to just use it. But at that point i think you should just use something like debian while figuring out how to properly do the whole linux thing because it’s going to positively benefit you quite a bit.
Which is why I ask people one simple question: do they plan to game. If they plan to game, I don’t recommend them Mint. If they aren’t, I recommend them Mint.
What do you recommend to them if they do want to game?
Nobara is a good choice, it’s based on Fedora, and is maintained by Glorious Eggroll himself, it has out of the box features like proprietary driver installation, game mode, gamescope, etc. That’s what I run on my gaming PC and my HTPC, where my work laptop runs Kubuntu.
People who expect an effortless transition from Windows to Linux, are better off sticking to Windows. You are expected to be able to read stuff, and make some effort to understand it. It shouldn’t be any less than what you’d expect if going from Linux to Windows.
Many things will be different. You’ll get a long way with learning some fundamentals. If you make the effort, it’ll be well rewarded. If it’s not worth the effort, stick to windows.
Calling people stupid and lazy in nicer words is still calling people stupid and lazy.
Calling people stupid and lazy in nicer words is still calling people stupid and lazy.
I think that’s a bit unfair here. What I’m saying is that expectations often seems to be that “Linux should be effortless, but it isn’t, so Linux sucks”, and then we quickly talk past each other on which aspects we are referring to. Let me make up three categories:
For users transitioning to Linux from Windows, and …
- … it shouldn’t be an effort, but unfortunately sometimes is frustrating or annoying
- Hardware control, e.g. drivers. More often than not it works with less effort than on Windows, except for very new hardware, and hardware that actually requires specific software (RGB led patterns, Gaming mouse profiles, all that stuff)
- NVidia drivers can be a pain
- When dual booting and Windows manages to fuck up something in Linux, and it looks like Linux is the culprit. (E.g. restart the computer from Windows, but it doesn’t release claim on hardware, which doesn’t let Linux claim it, so stuff like the WiFi adapter might not work.)
- Specific software not available, like Adobe, Autodesk, etc.
- .… is something you can get someone else to do for you, but it’s just how things are, unrelated to Windows -> Linux or the other way around.
- Installing the OS – downloading ISO, burning a bootable USB, BIOS, etc…
- … it’s expected that you figure out / learn, and if unwilling, Linux isn’t for you
- Using the OS, which at the very least, cursory knowledge of the software/package manager, and roughly how this works.
- Familiarizing yourself with KDE / Gnome, etc.
So, I assume people who just thought I was calling people lazy and dumb thought I meant categories 1. and 2. I just mean category 3. If you expect everything to be the same as Windows, and the effort required to understand the differences is too much, then only Windows will fit your needs. The impression I get is a general unwillingness to “figure stuff out”. Not knowing shit is fine, complaining and not wanting to put in the effort to know stuff… how is that not being lazy?
It was intended as kind advice without any the implied judgement of calling people dumb or lazy. If you don’t want to have to figure stuff out related to the third category, Linux will likely not be a good experience, or even a productive or good change. If you move to another country, you should make the effort to learn the culture. It’s not a good look to complain that things are different.
If I were to try to suggest “a point” with all of this: Don’t suggest to people that Linux is effortless for Windows users. Linux is immensely better, in almost every way (though mind examples in first category). But, it requires learning the basics of how shit works. It’s not hard… the information is well put together and available.
i see no problem with that. You can’t go learn to weld without putting in lots of effort and time learning.
It’s really just that simple.
If people didn’t come out of the woodwork to tell people welding was so simple that their 5 year could do it then maybe they’d be less turned off by the time and effort it takes to learn it.
i think there is a fundamental reason why linux is a good operating system. It’s the same reason that vehicles from the 70s and 80s are so beloved, because they’re easy to repair. Hell you could probably rebuild one in your garage, sure you’d need some level of knowledge to do so. But it’s all out there, and very easy to access, and same for the parts.
I think linux is very similar in this regard, part of what makes it so good, is being so familiar with it. Windows doesn’t let you do this, because it doesn’t want you to. Linux does, because you’re supposed to, and i would argue that telling people linux is a “turn key” solution is rather irresponsible when inevitably, they’ll want to do something weird or have to fix a weird problem which will require them to go digging around somewhere.
I also don’t think the basic concepts of linux are all that complicated, two weeks and a vm to install arch and you’ve got most of the foundational concepts in your head already.
There’s a reason welding is not a common skill.
If you’re trying to proliferate welding, maybe this is a bad approach?
i mean it depends on how you define common, common among the world populous? No, common among fabrication types? Yes.
there are only a few things that are common amongst the whole human population, and none of them are learned skills. (learned as in learned from the ground up, to be able to do that one specific thing I.E. socialization doesn’t count as it’s a fundamental aspect of humanity)
For me, the systems I’ve installed Mint on for people, haven’t had any problems at this current time. While I have never had an issue using Fedora myself(never been interested enough in OpenSUSE to keep with it when I’ve tried it), I’ll never recommend Fedora in similar cases where I’ve installed Mint. The machines were older and the users aren’t Linux enthusiasts. They just want a working machine to do basic tasks without breaking their bank to get a new machine when their Windows OS reached EOL.
However I can’t confirm or explain why the people you say that are doing this challenge are having problems. I don’t know their hardware specs and I don’t know them so I don’t know what they know about Linux.
(Please note, to all Mint users, I’m not saying Mint is only for non-Linux enthusiasts. I love how Mint is good for the non-enthusiasts and enthusiasts alike).
Anybody that already has had a computer for 2 years and is coming from Windows will have almost no problems with Mint. Stability is top priority for first time Linux users and you need some visual guide with screenshots. Mint also has a great default look and setup for people coming from Windows. Mint is probably the best distro to put on your mom’s old laptop that is “getting slow” because of viruses.
I’d recommend KDE Neon or Ubuntu also depending on the situation but if I don’t know anything about the person and computer I’d say Mint.
This is a bold statement considering how many daily Windows users don’t understand how to use Windows.
Windows users have a variety of different skills and experience. I guess the most likely ones to try Linux first are not going to be the PC-fearing ultra-causal users, who probably follow what their friends do. But the more adventurous and curious ones, or IT workers.
It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch tech enthusiasts are. How much does your average person know about their car? That’s how little they know about their computer.
They might not know what an OS even is, or how to identify where “Windows” ends and applications begin. They do what they bought it for, and if that doesn’t work, they take it to someone who knows how to get it working again. They know how to charge it, and to plug in a headset or USB key or something. If that functionality doesn’t work automatically or they encounter any issue, it might as well have exploded in their hands.
There are people who have been using Windows for 30 years that know literally nothing about it. Putting a “years of experience” metric on it is hilarious. It’s like assuming that if someone has been driving for 50 years that they know anything about cars besides how to drive it and where to put the gas.
Exactly. I know plenty of people who have driven a car for over 3 decades, and do not know what a timing belt or a spark plug does. I don’t look down on those people, but it certainly makes sense as to why they don’t know. They don’t really need to!
OpenSUSE Thumbleweed or KDE Neon.
I recommene OpenSUSE Thumbleweed for everyone, but I haven’t used it for long time and I use only Gentoo and OpenWRT on all my devices. And Android on phone, hopefully 10 years later I will replace it with linuxphone.
How does Gentoo compare to OpenSuse Tumbleweed?
Disclamer: last time I used OpenSUSE was very long time ago. Probably somewhere in 2018.
When I switched back to Gentoo, Gentoo had more packages in base repo, was more configurable and easier to fix and felt more convenient to me(especially for development). Also easier on resources in casual use. It was important to me since at the time my system had very small amount of RAM, while I wanted to host minecraft server with many mods and play on it with friends. Installing cross-compilers is very easy with crossdev. And I think there were problems with having multiple versions of gcc installed. The only downside I can think of is slower update process(especially compiling firefox/chromium/libreoffice/rust), but in return you get the system, which if breaks, you know how to fix it.
Would I recommend Gentoo to everyone who wants to install Linux on their own regular x86 computers and be what people call a regular user and doesn’t want to understand how system works? Rather no.
Would I recommend Gentoo for someone who wants to install Linux for their granny and already knows Linux or even has Gentoo? Rather yes, stereotypical granny doesn’t care about distro, she only needs browser and working sound.
Would I recommend Gentoo for any kind of developers(except webdevs, they are separate species)? Absolutely.
For gamers? It is one of reasons I choose Gentoo.
For tinkerers? You know the answer.
For wierd ARM/MIPS/RISC-V/ELBRUS computer? Very yes.
As a heavy gamer, never say those words 😂 and as IT student, this is really interesting. How well do containers, virtual machines, and flatpaks work? I was thinking about learning self hosting, emacs, and xmonad on a pi4.
As a heavy gamer, never say those words 😂
Well, recommendation isn’t based only on being gamer. But I noticed heavy gamers tend to more proactive in learning how their system works and tweak their system to their needs. I got one converted into Arch user. It’s like heavy gamers have attention and initiative.
and as IT student, this is really interesting.
It was interesting even to some school students. I think I first Installed Gentoo somewhere in 6th grade.
How well do containers
Should be fine. Long time ago I tried to use lxc. It worked.
virtual machines
KVM works really well, I didn’t try Xen.
and flatpaks work?
Didn’t need, didn’t try. There is nothing, preventing them from working.
I was thinking about learning self hosting, emacs, and xmonad on a pi4.
I am running Gentoo 24/7 on noname chinese TV box on Allwinner A10 with 1GB of RAM. I wrote device tree myself and compiled mainline u-boot. Most of packages I precompile on my desktop with crossdev, that has exactly same make.conf. Same for Rock64 SBC, but it’s sitting powered off. Also I did small modifications to devicetree for it as well. I can answer some qutsions.
TV box runs tor node 24/7 and private search of fimfarchive.
Thank you for your insight.
Because Fedora is open source only to the point of it being pathological. If there isn’t am open source driver most time you’re just boned. Someone new is going to have a tough time with it, and the community is on average a very “lol rtfm” bunch. Not as bad as Arch, but that’s not saying much.
Meanwhile, despite the problems around Ubuntu, Debian communities are much more understanding and helpful. Mint even with old packages is going to be an easier time for a newbie. Certainly a newbie unfamiliar with the way entirely too much of the FOSS community is.
To be fair arch has amazing docs, and even a rube like me can follow it decently well. I found endeavor to be the easiest distro to use. But agreed the attitude isn’t great.
Arch is absolutely divine with its documentation. There is a bit of a “you must be this tall to ride” with them though. Like the tiny
[]link. That’s not really well explained, and is even more opaque if you follow the link.
