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

  • arcanicanis@were.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.