hi,

I have had to use windows for a long time because of school (word and excel, the ms version, was like mandatory, tho free), and I have been interested in trying or at least learning linux more.

I tried once before on Manjaro but I messed up the install and I was having annoying issues with the graphics drivers with an nvidia card (having to manually change the settings for two monitors and the refresh rate every time i rebooted, for instance). That was around 4 years ago now though.

My main question was what distro I should try? I am fairly experienced so I know my way around things but not in linux, and I am okay with learning curves.

It seems like everyone has a different answer for this so I wanted to hear suggestions. Thank you

  • piusbird
    5·
    2 years ago

    There is an aspect to this that I’d like to mention, and that is you should consider the community of people around your distro, when makling this choice. There’s a point at which online guides won’t suffice, or you won’t know what what to Google, and you’ll have to reach out on forums or IRC or something, although i hear kids these days like Discord. I have long sense learned to pick my distros based on the people around them. I was Debian/Ubuntu foir years but switched when they started giving me bad vibes. Fedora has been great, i just wish there contributor documentation and onboarding was a bit better. And on community factors I’d recommend Gentoo over Arch any day and twice on Sundays.

    this is a point I think most newcomers to Linux/Fediverse/Indieweb/etc. fail to grasp. To use these technologies, puts you in a far closer relationship to the people making/maintaining the software, then you would otherwise be. To Microsoft/Google/Random Cooperation. You’re just an inconvenient expense. You’re probably not even the primary customer. But to your instance admin, your linux distro people, you can be much more, and you’ll have a better experince if you at least pop by and say hello occasionally :)

    Anyway sorry for the length of this response, tl:dr check the forums and chats before you pick a distro see how they treat people, see if you vibe because you’ll depend on those people to keep your stuff running