#Km91#Live Dangerously
RustyNovaThis but new Linux users. They get attracted to the worse newbies distros every time
Pommes_für_dein_BalgWhat’s the best one, apart from Mint?
SkullgridThe typical advice is:
- Mint
- ElementryOS
- Fedora
- Pop!
- Ubuntu (unpopular with Extremely Online people, but is pretty good at the Just Works for normies)
Fedora
really? I haven’t touched regular fedora, how is the “vanilla” version different to derivities and other “vanilla” distros like debian or arch?
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community.
I have never installed Arch, but I guess it doesn’t; but debian does come with various DEs , including KDE and Gnome.
Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops.
ah ok, so fedora is generic and more up to date for new hardware, but debian lacks … cutting edge support, otherwise, it’s just as good for newbies.
And arch is still wiki based to install, even if you use archinstall.
That’s pretty much it. The most obvious difference between Debian and Fedora is that Debian uses apt with deb files for package management, while Fedora uses dnf and rpm files.
LimeranceFor Arch, I’d go with something like EndeavorOS. The installation is easy for someone who knows what a file system or software repository is and I absolutely loved that you can install a bare bones system: just the desktop and almost no apps and you can go from there and install what you like (I wish fedora offered this).
I ended up not using Arch/Endeavor because of rolling releases and I found the AUR dangerous. I mean, its not dangerous, but anyone can put anything on there and its your job (and the communities) to make sure its good. I think a “build all the software yourself” is a great philosophy, but it only fits computer geeks (and I mean this in a good way). We cant all be Richard Stallman.
I ended up not using Arch/Endeavor because of rolling releases and I found the AUR dangerous. I mean, its not dangerous, but anyone can put anything on there and its your job (and the communities) to make sure its good. I think a “build all the software yourself” is a great philosophy, but it only fits computer geeks (and I mean this in a good way). We cant all be Richard Stallman.
Fedora’s philosophy is free software only. So vanilla Fedora ships with FOSS only. Imo, they’re really good at this, but I personally couldn’t live with that. The community maintained fusion repository is essential because of Nvidia drivers and full ffmpeg. Steam is in a separate non-free repo as well.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.
As usual OpenSuSE gets totally forgotten. Tumbleweed is 5the most stable rolling release I’ve ever seen.
Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.
Min- oh.
I don’t really know a bunch of distros, but I helped convert some normies so here’s a list of pain points I rather not have as a first experience
- No rolling distro. While some people may never see an issue in their life, some may see it right away. Bad first impression (Someone insisted on starting on fedora, then noticed the hard way that the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel)
- easy Nvidia driver install (only for gamers on Nvidia)
- Has a gui app store
- has a common package manager that is often shown in tutorials (like apt. You always see exemple apt commands)
- sudo is configured (Sorry Debian)
- doesn’t have a DE that tries to revolutionize UX
New users are dumb, so it needs to be easy for them
Sudo is configured in the Debian installer, if you click the “root not allowed to log in” checkbox. So it literally checks all your boxes.
Just checked, and sadly it’s not as straightforward as that.
Sudo is configured if you leave the password field blank for the root user.
Which is of course documented in the installation guide, but hardly anyone ever reads that.
Sudo is configured if you leave the password field blank for the root user.
Which is of course documented in the installation guide, but hardly anyone ever reads that.
the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel
A more common issue with Nvidia is older hardware no longer being supported by Nvidia’s current drivers and the kernel not supporting the old drivers. For older cards, you need to run kernel 6.8 or older for the binary drivers to work. The open source Nouveau driver is noticeably slower and getting hardware accelerated video to work can be difficult. So you can easily end up with mesa-llvm, meaning your CPU emulates OpenGL.
The easiest way to get this to work is to install Linux Mint 22.1.
Pop was mine,
Yep I outgrew it and moved on to better and worse distros. But pop helped me kick windows to the kerb