Choice of Linux Distro

[Ithanul]

On 12/16/2018 at 11:45 AM, Meet8939 said:

Is Linux mint 19 a good OS, because I saw comments on its page that it has some bugs and people would like to stay on its 18.3 version 

 

18.3 is pretty solid, use it myself and very friendly to new users as that distro tends to have GUIs for most things.

Best action to do is download each flavor of Linux you want to try out and load them all on an USB stick to try out.

 

A tool like MultiBootUSB does the job fairly well for setting up such an USB stick.

[ZacoAttaco]

5 hours ago, jpenguin said:

The UI is the only difference in Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubunt & Ubuntu.

Ok, thanks. But Ubuntu doesn't use LXQt does it? Or does LXQt simply refer to the UI?

[Koeshi]

LXqt is purely the DE (Desktop Environment).  It is not part of the underlying operating system.

[Dat Guy]

On 12/16/2018 at 3:46 PM, Meet8939 said:

Please share me a name if distribution I should try.

Gentoo.

 

(Also, more seriously, try OpenIndiana at least once. There is so much more than Linux in the world. - The last "sufficiently newbie-friendly" Linux distribution I liked was Void Linux though. Amazingly fast!)

[jpenguin]

4 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

Gentoo.

Funtoo's where it's at

 

https://www.funtoo.org/F2FS_Install_Guide

I wrote this guide

[Koeshi]

9 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

The last "sufficiently newbie-friendly" Linux distribution I liked was Void Linux though. Amazingly fast!

While Void is rather nice, I really don't think it is something that should be recommended to new Linux users.

[Dat Guy]

Why not? 

[jpenguin]

7 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

Why not? 

Not the simplest installer

Being one of the few systemd holdouts is a bit confusing

Last time I tried it, there weren't GUIs to configure much, I doubt this has changed as the mostly vanilla experience is what they want

 

Suse, Rosa, pclinuxos, openmandriva & mageia have GUIs for just about everything.

[Dat Guy]

shitstemd-based distributions like these will fall on your foot when you only know how to use a GUI...

Also, Void is even with terminal-based tools still incredibly user-friendly. There is an optional XBPS GUI if you absolutely want to click through things though. (But wouldn't it be easier to just stay with Windows then?)

[jpenguin]

@Dat Guy

I didn't care for systemd either, but it's here and it's unified some parts of Linux

 

It's easier to do 'systemctl enable gdm' across distros than figure out a different cmd like 'ln -sr /etc/sv/{gdm,dbus} /var/service' for each distro

[Dat Guy]

12 minutes ago, jpenguin said:

I didn't care for systemd either, but it's here

If that is your only reason to use it...

 

13 minutes ago, jpenguin said:

It's easier to do 'systemctl enable gdm' across distros

How many times do you need to do that?

[wasab]

Arch is quite good if you can get past the pain in the ass installation. So far Ubuntu has been my favorite. I am still distro hoping. 

[Matt Kirby]

I'm really liking ElementaryOS 5 so far. I'm used to MacOS and this already feels very familiar! 

[captain_aggravated]

Don't get married to your first distro; in fact, go all pickup artist and try out a whole bunch of them.  I once installed Arch on a Raspberry Pi purely for the hell of it.  Manually installing sudo was a trip.  Puppy Linux is also fun to play with. You'd be surprised how handy having an itty bitty Linux distro on your keychain can be.

 

When I was picking out a daily driver, I ended up sticking to the Debian/Ubuntu side of town.  Hey, I got used to typing apt-get, leave me alone.  I tried out Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary, and probably a few others.  Download some ISOs and try 'em out in VirtualBox.

 

ElementaryOS looks and feels so much like MacOS that I'm surprised they haven't been sued, right on down to the little bounce icons on the dock do when clicked.

 

Unity (RIP) and Gnome have a fairly unique look and feel to them, and you'll either like it or you don't, I personally don't so I don't tend to use vanilla Ubuntu.

 

You'll find a lot of them that look a lot like Windows, what with the taskbar (panel) at the bottom, with a menu of applications, etc.  Most of your lighter weight DEs from xfce to MATE are that way.  Chief among them I feel is Cinnamon.  Cinnamon feels the most complete and polished to me.  You open up the Preferences menu, and there's a lot more stuff in there that you can do graphically.  They also give you a lot of tools to customize the desktop.  For example, you can configure the location and function of the little buttons on windows for maximize, minimize, close etc.  Having used Cinnamon for so long, many other distros feel incomplete.

 

If you use Mint, go with 18.x.  I recently tried Mint 19, and there's a lot broken in it at the moment.  I had problems with text boxes, it wouldn't pipe audio to my bluetooth headset, when set to the headset it would still pipe audio to my laptop speakers, graphics were more broken than usual...I just gave up after awhile.

 

Don't have much experience with KDE, so I'm gonna burn a live USB and spend the evening trying it out, just because this thread got me thinking about it.

[MSpiritual]

I'd suggest Knoppix or Crunchbangplusplus.

 

Very light yet complete GNU/Linux distros.

[BlockedTheShot]

Arch Linux or Gentoo or go home lol

[jpenguin]

It is quite normal to try many distributions. OPENSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Mint, Ubuntu, Mageia, Fedora...

There all Linux.  IMHO- choosing a DE matters more

[lyiriyah]

On 12/16/2018 at 2:46 PM, Meet8939 said:

Please share me a name if distribution I should try.

For a new user to Linux I'd try feren OS.

[lyiriyah]

1 hour ago, jpenguin said:

IMHO- choosing a DE matters more

a new user to linux wouldn't know how to do that...

[captain_aggravated]

On 1/4/2019 at 12:28 PM, lyiriyah said:

a new user to linux wouldn't know how to do that...

I disagree.  When I was new to Linux, I chose my first distro based on the desktop environment.  I did that by running several in Virtualbox and just horsing around for a second.  Settled on Mint (Cinnamon) because it was familiar.  A new user is likely to pick a distro based on it's characteristic DE and not mess with it rather than install something and swap the DE.

They might not be aware of all the choices out there, but there are some cool videos out there comparing several of the major players.

[shahaan]

With hardware like yours I would recommend Debian 9 Stretch with Xfce desktop. Debian supports older hardware well and Xfce is lightweight. Installing additional software like LibreOffice, VLC, Firefox, etc. after the OS installation is also quite simple via the GUI-based "Software" application. If you want to dive a bit deeper into Linux, then you can even try installing those using APT via the command line in a terminal. Just do a quick search and you will find loads of info on how to do so in Debian. Hint: Most instructions for Ubuntu also usually work for Debian, since Ubuntu is based on Debian.