I had a dream about windows and have decided to setup Linux on my laptop. What distro should I use?

I used Ubuntu once a few years ago but had compatability issues so I went back to windows. Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn. I’m not looking to do much gaming beyond DOOM2 and factorio. Mostly looking for privacy and a way to get back into programming (I have this pipe dream of learning Assembly). I’m not to particular on UI, I can use whatever.

Edit: distrochooser.de for anyone who stumbles upon this post with the same question

TheAnonymouseJoker,
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Debian Testing branch.

Pantherina,
@Pantherina@feddit.de avatar

Do you got NVIDIA?

pathief,
@pathief@lemmy.world avatar

Whatever distro looks good to you is a good place to start. Think of distros as default configurations, you can basically change most stuff whenever you want.

Avoid Arch, just in case.

kuberoot,

Screw you, Arch is great. It’s not for everybody, but if you want to know how your system is set up, decide what’s running on it, and don’t mind researching and maintaining your software, it’s lovely.

Sincerely, I use Arch BTW

pathief,
@pathief@lemmy.world avatar

I use Arch too, friend.

unce,

I swapped from windows to Opensuse Tumbleweed recently. Seems like a really nice distro. Frequent updates and easy rollbacks if something breaks. Luckily I haven’t had to use that feature yet but it’s nice knowing I have it. Yast is also great for changing system settings with a gui instead of using konsole for all that.

Counter Strike 2 and WoW have been running great.

loudWaterEnjoyer,
@loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Do yourself a favor and just go with Debian Stable

glasgitarrewelt,

Wanted to write the same. Normaly I would suggest Mint, but OP sounds like they are ready to learn and endure some things to end up very happy with Debian, the mother of all distros.

Franzia,

I know of Arch wiki, but are there wiki’s explaining easier distros? I’m on Nobara, because I want to game, but perhaps I could be learning to configure and install some of these tools to be able to one day use any distro for whatever I wanna do?

Liforra,

stuff like askubuntu exists

glasgitarrewelt,

When I started with Debian I found everything I wanted to know with Duckduckgo… “Linux Debian how to…” without exception. And sometimes even the Archwiki helped me. You don’t need a single place with all the knowledge, you just have to practice how to break down your questions into easy to answer bits. Doesn’t matter which distro you use.

Hexadecimalkink,

Linux Mint

possiblylinux127,

Linux mint hands down

KindaABigDyl,
@KindaABigDyl@programming.dev avatar

Mint is currently my recommendation for Windows refugees and has been for a while.

  • Cinnamon desktop environment works like Windows’ UX
  • Ubuntu-based, so you’ll find help online for basically anything
  • Not just Ubuntu; follows more popular, community decisions rather than Canonical’s (e.g. things like Flatpak instead of Snap) which will help you in the long run since you’ll be using what everyone else is using
  • Ubuntu-based, so Debian-based, so pretty stable with lots of available software (even outside of Flatpak)
  • Significant amount of work put into UX with less you have to do

If you’re not worried about high-performance gaming, you’ll be fine with whatever. For developers, any Linux distro is gonna be leagues better than what you’re used to on Windows. For Assembly, NASM + VS Code will be great.

petsoi,
@petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Clear vote for Fedora,

marionberrycore,

My vote is for mint. If you’ve been a long time windows user it should be the easiest one to get used to. PopOS is also newbie friendly if you’re not into the feel of Mint for whatever reason.

My biggest recommendation though is to spend some time with a few different OS’s and try setting things up different ways. Like if you start with Mint, try something new a month or two later. It’s a good way to get used to the way linux OS’s work under the hood.

I’m not a programmer at all, but if you have some background with computers and are willing to sink some time into learning and setting up a new system you’ll be fine.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Btw, I use Debian.

Linux is great but it isn’t for everyone, damn perfect on servers but kinda of fails for most desktop use cases, have a read at this: lemmy.world/comment/4119679

pete_the_cat,

Arch, of course.

LeFantome,

If they are asking, not discovering, perhaps EndeavourOS would be a better intro to Arch.

onlinepersona,

distrochooser.de

PRUSSIA_x86,

Thanks!

onlinepersona,

You’re welcome! I hope it was useful.

Grass,

I tried this for the hell of it and it suggested almost every distro I have ever tried, close enough to the order of how long I have used each. Didn’t suggest kinoite and similar which I have some variant of on all my old people’s computers and several of my own.

CraigeryTheKid,

Weird, it’s telling me to get OpenSuse and in never heard of it!

onlinepersona,

It’s also a way to discover distros :) Depends on what you entered, but OpenSuse isn’t a bad distro, that’s for sure.

Franzia,

Dog I just told it I wanna game and have game Dev supported distro. Guess what? OpenSUSE, Zorin, and every flavor of Ubuntu. I was assuming it would tell me Fedora/Nobara, Ubuntu, and Debian Stable.

onlinepersona,

You can game on OpenSuse… never tried Zorin, and every flavor of Ubuntu is good for gaming (or has been in my experience 🤷 ).

palordrolap,

Additional to the Mint suggestions: Mint tones down the "Ubuntu-ness" of their default distribution, but it's still Ubuntu under the hood. LMDE is the version of Mint based on straight Debian skipping the Ubuntu "middle-man" if that sounds more appealing.

Can't speak to compatibility one way or another, though.

My computer is old and made of parts from well-known manufacturers. Everything in it is pretty well-known to the open-source community at this point, so that might well be giving me a huge advantage with regard to drivers and such. (Case in point, I have an NVIDIA graphics card and Intel i7 from the tail end of the era where people wouldn't advise you against getting either, and in fact might have outright recommended them over AMD. Yes, that old. Legacy proprietary drivers work fine for me.)

Caboose12000,

does LMDE have KDE flavours yet? Ive always thought cinnamon was pretty ugly

palordrolap, (edited )

Official support of KDE was dropped by the Mint team a while back, and I'm pretty sure LMDE has only ever been Cinnamon too.

Despite this, it is possible to install and use a different desktop manager.

KDE and all the usual KDE packages remain available from the Software Manager, and a different DM can be selected at the GUI login screen (once installed, of course).

If you don't even want to touch Cinnamon once, I suspect you could jump to a text-only terminal, enter apt install kde-standard etc. and then jump back to the GUI login to see if it knows about KDE. A reboot (or similar) might be needed? That should be all though. (Very reminiscent of deliberately using command line ftp or a Windows port of wget to get Firefox back in the day when people didn't want to touch Internet Explorer, but Cinnamon isn't that bad, surely? ;) )

(FWIW I don't mind it. I switched from Win7 back in the day and Cinnamon was similar enough that I felt at home. One day maybe I'll switch to something else. KDE probably won't be it, but you never know.)

Caboose12000,

thanks for the info, I won’t hold my breath haha. I’ll probably just stick with Kubuntu for now, it’s not so bad after removing snapd

heleos,

I’ve been using arch for years, but finally removed my windows install a week ago and ended up on opensuse tumbleweed. It’s rolling release like arch (so there’s never a need to reinstall or have a big update once a year) and it has some extra fail-safes for when updates go wrong (there’s an automated QA that tries to find package breaks before they’re pushed for updates, and they have a tool called snapper that let’s you revert back to a working state if you run into problems)

Fjor,

I really liked OpenSuse when I tried it, but personally want slower releases. Very glad to hear that they just released the new Slowroll distro regarding this. Might have to switch back now… 😅

heleos,

I like bleeding edge (or leading edge as they call it), but leap is their slower release distro

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