Got to keep my work laptop and just realised that I'm now free to ditch Windows and install Linux. It's a Thinkpad E14 gen 3 with AMD Ryzen 5, 16 gb ram and a 256 gb ssd. I dabbled with Mint a long time ago but consider myself a somewhat informed newbie, who now has the time to experiment and learn.
So I'm looking for tips and advice about which distro I should check out, what I should take into account and anything that can help me with this project.
@vitskapsdama I think if you have installed Mint in the past, you pretty much can not go wrong whatever distro you pick (as long as it is one of the popular ones).
Although, I caution people who have never used linux before that it is not quite windows or macosx. It can have lots of issues (or not).
@vitskapsdama Some opinions from a perhaps too old hand at this:
A lot of this is probably obvious to you, but I don't know you, so I won't make any assumptions.
Debian and Fedora are the classic, safe choices. Debian for old-ish software and stability, Fedora for fresh software and frequent reboots. (When I ran Debian as main driver, I found Debian testing a fine compromise to get newer software, sacrificing server class stability which didn't matter on the laptop which ran it anyway.) When you can download "Linux binaries", it's most often .deb (for Debian and its _many_ derivatives) or .rpm (Fedora/RedHat and their derivatives).
I guess you will get a lot of tips about whatever distro has wind in its sails these days, but I think it's better to go for something with an existing, functional organization backing it.
KDE, Gnome or something less vanilla? Pretty much all distros support both, and it's very easy to switch between them and have both installed at the same time. Same for something less vanilla, if the distro has it, just try it?
I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that distro hopping is _easy_ at your stage. It only gets hard if you have a lot invested. Throwing out a fresh install for something else, that's quick and easy.
Mint is pretty good. I used it for years (after Redhat, Debian, Mandrake, Ubuntu, …)
I’m currently using Bluefin on my laptop and Bazzite on my gaming PC. The upgrades are easier. See:
https://universal-blue.org/
Yep! It’s worked perfectly out of the box for Steam.
Haven’t tried any of my GoG games yet.
Blizzard I had some issues.
Experiment, eh? 🤔 Maybe try VanillaOS. An immutable distro (can't be borked) with atomic updates (old software only removed once new software confirmed to work), based on Debian, with the APX tool to install containers for any distro you want, integrated into the host OS, allowing you to experiment with software packaged for any distro you feel like
@vitskapsdama
Oh. And you asked which distros. Fedora Workstation / KDE Plasma, Nobara, Mint, Ubuntu come to mind.
Curious which you end up liking and why, would be happy to hear about it.
Remember to try not getting too stressed out or frustrated. Try not feeling like you're in a hurry. Typing out basic questions into search engines will be your friend. And you don't need to understand everything right away.
Vitskapsdama
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