Advise on a good Linux distribution based on my needs.

[ivanrcks95]

Hey everyone, so to start of im not necessarily "new" to Linux, most of my high-school studies and IB Diploma were done on Linux systems, and i personally have had Ubuntu on some of my laptops. However, im "new" in the sense that i only know about Ubuntu, so i was wondering if people could give me some feedback on good alternatives. The rig im gonna be installing it on is powered by a i7-3632qm, 8gb of ram and a Radeon HD7670M, its my work laptop, its fine, and actually quite "fast" even on windows 10, but i know it can be a lot faster. Most of the work i do on it are through chrome, so i usually have like 10-20 tabs going at the same time, otherwise i do a bit of microsoft office work and zoom call meetings, most of the time i have all 3 running at the same time. Given this information, what would you advise is the best distribution to go for? Any and all feedback and suggestions will be appreciated, thanks!

[mahyar]

manjaro is a good choice keep in mind ms office is not native on linux and the latest that works with wine is 2010 ( and 2013 with a lot of work arounds)

[Master Disaster]

3 minutes ago, ivanrcks95 said:

Hey everyone, so to start of im not necessarily "new" to Linux, most of my high-school studies and IB Diploma were done on Linux systems, and i personally have had Ubuntu on some of my laptops. However, im "new" in the sense that i only know about Ubuntu, so i was wondering if people could give me some feedback on good alternatives. The rig im gonna be installing it on is powered by a i7-3632qm, 8gb of ram and a Radeon HD7670M, its my work laptop, its fine, and actually quite "fast" even on windows 10, but i know it can be a lot faster. Most of the work i do on it are through chrome, so i usually have like 10-20 tabs going at the same time, otherwise i do a bit of microsoft office work and zoom call meetings, most of the time i have all 3 running at the same time. Given this information, what would you advise is the best distribution to go for? Any and all feedback and suggestions will be appreciated, thanks!

Do you specifically need Microsoft Office?

[ivanrcks95]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Do you specifically need Microsoft Office?

Not really, i didnt mind using Open Office before, i do have a legitimate copy of office 365 that my university gave me that still works after i graduated, so i wouldnt wanna let that go to waste haha, but no im not fixed on needing microsoft office.

[ivanrcks95]

3 minutes ago, mahyar said:

manjaro is a good choice keep in mind ms office is not native on linux and the latest that works with wine is 2010 ( and 2013 with a lot of work arounds)

You can see my reply above, but im more than happy to use Open Office.

[Master Disaster]

Just now, ivanrcks95 said:

Not really, i didnt mind using Open Office before, i do have a legitimate copy of office 365 that my university gave me that still works after i graduated, so i wouldnt wanna let that go to waste haha, but no im not fixed on needing microsoft office.

Cool,  as @mahyarsuggested, Manjaro is a great choice.

[SupaKomputa]

Ubuntu is the best if you want better support.

Manjaro is good to but too technical, worse documentation, smaller communities to do diy troubleshooting.

I can't even setup a gaming machine right with that OS, after a day with no progress, i quit.

[ivanrcks95]

2 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Cool,  as @mahyarsuggested, Manjaro is a great choice.

Perfect, ill do some research into that thanks!

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, ivanrcks95 said:

Perfect, ill do some research into that thanks!

One thing I would point out, you have an Nvidia GPU and in general Nvidia's Linux GPU drivers are pretty terribad. Since you said you only do office type stuff it shouldn't be an issue but I wouldn't bother trying to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers on Manjaro.

4 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Ubuntu is the best if you want better support.

Manjaro is good to but too technical, worse documentation, smaller communities to do diy troubleshooting.

I can't even setup a gaming machine right with that OS, after a day with no progress, i quit.

How is it more technical? Linux is Linux, the majority of learning you do in any distro is almost directly transferable to any other distro. I recently set up my own Arch install and the only thing I had to learn was the switching differences between APT & Pacman.

[SupaKomputa]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

How is it more technical? Linux is Linux, the majority of learning you do in any distro is almost directly transferable to any other distro. I recently set up my own Arch install and the only thing I had to learn was the switching differences between APT & Pacman.

Well the fact is i've setup Ubuntu many times without any issue,always smooth.

The first time i've setup manjaro, i had to redo the installation 3-4 times just to get it to boot.

After it entered the desktop, multiple problems from audio output, network issue etc (mostly drivers) that i didn't encountered when using ubuntu.

And i'm not a novice users, i've used centos (server) for a very long time, so troubleshooting linux is not a new thing.

Well, i may experience different result with another pc, yours probably better than mine.

[ivanrcks95]

14 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

One thing I would point out, you have an Nvidia GPU and in general Nvidia's Linux GPU drivers are pretty terribad. Since you said you only do office type stuff it shouldn't be an issue but I wouldn't bother trying to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers on Manjaro.

My main rig yes, but my work laptop, which is what ill be installing this on has a Radeon HD7670

[ivanrcks95]

23 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Ubuntu is the best if you want better support.

Manjaro is good to but too technical, worse documentation, smaller communities to do diy troubleshooting.

I can't even setup a gaming machine right with that OS, after a day with no progress, i quit.

Well, looking at my requirements i dont think any of that will really matter too much, as long as it can run chrome im pretty much 90% sorted.

[Master Disaster]

6 minutes ago, ivanrcks95 said:

My main rig yes, but my work laptop, which is what ill be installing this on has a Radeon HD7670

Perfect, the open source AMD drivers work great.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

48 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Perfect, the open source AMD drivers work great.

eeeeeeh on a card like that they have limitations. due to the age it'll use the Radeon driver, not AMDGPU. the main difference between the 2 is that the older Radeon driver does not work with Vulkan. so Proton and all that cool stuff will not work. 

[Sauron]

Your system is powerful enough that you won't notice a performance difference between most distributions. You don't seem to have any unusual needs so all major distributions would work fine for you and Ubuntu isn't a bad choice. If you just want to switch out of curiosity I would just try a few distros out in a virtual machine.

 

As for what, if it's mainly for learning purposes then I would definitely recommend Arch Linux - it "forces" you to become familiar with a wide collection of command line tools and system configurations.

[Giganthrax]

If all you need is Chrome, you can always get Cloudready. It's a free version of Chrome OS. I tried it and it really is extremely lightweight and easy to use, and it boots the fastest of any OS I've ever seen. 

 

That being said, I doubt you're going to see much improvement in performance regardless of which OS you use, since Chrome itself isn't going to get any less demanding in a different OS. 

 

I'm in a similar boat as you. I have an old laptop that I use when I work away from home, and all of my work is done through Google Docs and Sheets. So far, the best "solution" I found to this problem is to use Opera instead of Chrome. It appears to be able to do everything Chrome can at pretty much the same speeds, but uses a lot less RAM. Which OS you use it from doesn't appear to matter from my experience. 

[ivanrcks95]

1 hour ago, Ashley xD said:

eeeeeeh on a card like that they have limitations. due to the age it'll use the Radeon driver, not AMDGPU. the main difference between the 2 is that the older Radeon driver does not work with Vulkan. so Proton and all that cool stuff will not work. 

This all sounds gaming related, which this laptop will not be doing anyway haha As long as the driver installs and can use the gpu for some heavier rendering tasks im happy. 

[ivanrcks95]

21 minutes ago, Giganthrax said:

If all you need is Chrome, you can always get Cloudready. It's a free version of Chrome OS. I tried it and it really is extremely lightweight and easy to use, and it boots the fastest of any OS I've ever seen. 

 

That being said, I doubt you're going to see much improvement in performance regardless of which OS you use, since Chrome itself isn't going to get any less demanding in a different OS. 

 

I'm in a similar boat as you. I have an old laptop that I use when I work away from home, and all of my work is done through Google Docs and Sheets. So far, the best "solution" I found to this problem is to use Opera instead of Chrome. It appears to be able to do everything Chrome can at pretty much the same speeds, but uses a lot less RAM. Which OS you use it from doesn't appear to matter from my experience. 

You may have a point here, ive never actually considered just switching browsers and see if it helps. But honestly im tired of windows to begin with so i wouldnt mind going with something different. 

[Giganthrax]

45 minutes ago, ivanrcks95 said:

You may have a point here, ive never actually considered just switching browsers and see if it helps. But honestly im tired of windows to begin with so i wouldnt mind going with something different. 

Why not both? Get a Linux distro that can run Opera and see if that works out for you.

 

Personally, I'm kinda thinking of trying out FerenOS. It's a Linux distro that looks almost exactly like Windows, to the point where it even has the same Start Menu tiles and the like. Cloudready as I said earlier also works quite well, although I don't like it because it can't really run anything except Chrome. 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

4 hours ago, ivanrcks95 said:

This all sounds gaming related, which this laptop will not be doing anyway haha As long as the driver installs and can use the gpu for some heavier rendering tasks im happy. 

fair enough, just keep in mind you will not have access to Vulkan which will severely limit the amount of Windows programs you can run through Wine, not just games.