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
I might be a little late, and this might be a little controversial, but I’ll recommend to you what was recommended to me years ago. Ubuntu. Though the interface is different than it was in 2013 (they use a different desktop environment (DE) now), the spirit of ease-of-use is still there. Ubuntu is a rock-solid Debian based distro, which of course, there are a lot of. Ubuntu however (and I’d assume it’s derivatives) go a step further for usability. Coming from Windows XP back then, everything just made sense. Software came from a place called Software, updates came from a place called Updates, and LibreOffice (OpenOffice branch; MS Office equivalent) is a pre-installed app. It also makes driver install (at least for Nvidia, not sure about AMD) easy, a single click will switch you from the nouveau (rather poor open source drivers) to nvidia’s latest proprietary drivers, in the Software and Updates menu.
Out of the box, Ubuntu is set to handle it’s updates semi-automatically (prompting you for permission). It’s install process is a breeze compared to some distros, not being a several step process, but simply a boot-from-disk, follow instructions, process (pre-UEFI, it was arguably even simpler; openSuse also has this advantage). If you only have experience with Windows, Ubuntu is the place to go. If you want something that’s similar enough to Windows’ interface, but has it’s own Linux-isms, I’d say your best bets are KDE (and relatedly, Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu with KDE out of the box). Some other people would recommend Cinnamon or MATE, which both have their own versions as well.
But if you want the Ubuntu experience, GNOME is bulky and sometimes annoying, but very charming. It’s certainly better than Unity, which was the previous DE, that had a charming interface, but even more bulk than GNOME. I hope whatever you pick, you come to love (or at least not dislike) Linux. If you find that too much of your software doesn’t have a Linux version, make sure to give Wine a go. It’s not perfect, but it’s nearly so for a lot of modern apps. Valve’s equivalent to Wine (Proton) is even more effective, especially for games.
(As a side note, after several years of distro hopping on a secondary computer, my daily drivers changed to Arch earlier this year, which is lovely, but very involved.)
I agree with some of this point, as Ubuntu is a fair option to start off with. I used to stay pretty exclusively to GNOME, even sidestepping the more “touch-friendly” style of GNOME 3 by adding extensions to re-add a taskbar and such.
Alternatively, I’ve poked with KDE (such as through Kubuntu: https://kubuntu.org/ ), which has actually been a lot more performant and slim than GNOME (in stock Ubuntu), and generally what I desire out-of-the-box versus having to pile on more GNOME extensions (which probably drag down performance) just to get the same.
The main downside with Ubuntu is the ways they try to slip in some ways to commercialize their distro sometimes, such as having small text ads when opening a console, or integrating Amazon search (before Microsoft forced Bing into their Start Menu, even) into Unity long ago.
I’d reasonably recommend ‘easier’ options (such as Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc), versus the trend where I see people that are new to Linux try to take the “hard” option first, because of handling it like a self-image thing, that they’re “more advanced/knowledgable than to bother with Ubuntu”, but end up failing miserably, and blaming it all on “Linux is total sh’t” etc when they fail miserably and can’t be bothered to ask for some seasoned advice.