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All you need to know is that, whatever you pick, you made the wrong choice and you will be roasted if you ever attempt to explain your decision.
Unless you use Arch, then you have chosen correctly.
Urgh! Why did you choose Arch? It is just the worst!
Actual reenactment:
Screams in Debian…
There are many correct distro choices (except Ubuntu), but the only correct desktop environment is KDE Plasma.
If Cosmic keeps evolving, it could win me over.
I’ve now gone down this rabbit hole several times now and installed several of them many many times over now just figuring it all out and finally getting a stable setup which took a few months.
From my perspective after doing all of that : Chances are if you are not a developer, high end cgi artist, or specialized in tech, you might just need something safe like Ubuntu. At least just grab it to start. It gets you up and running, nice interface. Easy to use. Works for basic out of the box stuff making plex server, basic computing, house hold stuff. Could set it up for your technophobe friends and family and find it easy to just update and run. Big colorful app icons. Looks and works like an android phone for usability and easy to learn. Stuff even installs from a gui similar to how windows does.
You’d only go deep on something like fedora/nobara with some serious intentions with a high end computer where you just couldn’t reach some goals on Ubuntu. You just wouldn’t go to these ones if you didn’t have to. Those reasons also rhyme with kde plasma reasons/Developer reasons where in you absolutely need specialized software. And you have to be comfortable with swimming in the bios often.
If you don’t know and it sounds weird just googling it then just stick with Ubuntu.
I’ve talked to people in the Linux community gatekeeping hard on others who don’t even know about why someone would need kde plasma. So that should tell you everything you need to know about the fanboys. And I’ve taken heat from them only to have them breaking their own brain on the idea that people actually use computers for simulations or just use computers for anything other than what they would use a computer for.
so Take what they say with a giant truck of salt. Not even Mac users are as annoying as the Linux assholes I’ve met on lemmy.
what’s with the weird white lines in the image?
This is like people, they are all different, so annoying! /s
I have to choose people i like?? Gaaah.
Around 500 flavors.
There are four main flavors
- Debian - For every day
- Red Hat - For work
- Arch - To tinker and learn
- OpenSuSe - To German
Well I’ve been using openSuse for a while and habe noch keine German influence gesehen.
Also the additional flavours of
- Nix – whole OS determined by 1 file
- Gentoo – Arch but it takes longer
- Alpine – small and simple
- Slackware? – for old people
- Void?? – like Alpine but not small and simple
- LFS??? – like Gentoo but takes longer
- AOSP??? – not even really Linux anymore
Gentoo really has nothing to do with arch. Gentoo in my opinion is more like Debian with compiling and rolling release.
And what about Fedora? Last I checked it was wildly popular.
Gentoo is just frequently cited as the “next step up” from Arch and also funny.
And Fedora is bucketed into the Red Hat flavour.
- Void - the most BSD Linux (according to BSD people)
also …
Debian - for when you want to wait two years
Alternatively: when you want to not worry for two years.
Definitely a brick of an operating system, boring as hell, but reliable and has been that way since ancient times.
The popular Debian based distros are up to date. That said, core Debian stable is indeed boring, but sometimes boring and stable is what you need.
yeah no hate for debian here
I use Kubuntu LTS for that exact reason. Even though I am an experienced Linux user for over 20 years, I don’t have time to fuck around fixing my PC when something goes wrong. It’s stable and it works. And, yes I game on my PC and it’s doing just fine with my 3070 RTX NVidia card with the drivers provided by Ubuntu through their 3rd party driver system. No hassle, no crashing, just me using my computer doing the things I need to do.
Its not even stable though😭 I spent 6 hours fixing my networking on my debian 13 stable server, after it randomly got 90 percent packet loss with no explanation
What was the issue?
KDE plasma gas been braindead easy on my ancient laptop as a first time linuxer! My next experiment is gonna be Bazzite on my desktop. Kinda seems like I’ll find the differences as I try new distros, then be better suited to form a preference for myself. Then eventually I’ll be on Arch btw…
Proceeds to use it exclusively for browsing the web.
That is a kinda sane order tho
Normally people just install Ubuntu or Linux Mint (because it has Linux in the name or something) and use modded GNOME or some weird niche desktop, thinking this is peak Linux experience.
(Needed to do Mint tech support over the holidays again… yeah it is strange)
I’d expect that most brand new users install Ubuntu or Linux Mint because of how often they are recommended.
Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with Canonical/Snaps removed and some added polish. The default DE is laid out like windows before 11 (“start” button in lower left) which seems to make sense for new users.
I’m a knowledgable enough user, being a developer on embedded linux products, and I also stuck with Mint long term. It’s still a Linux system that I actually control. The fact that it was very user friendly and full featured it off the box doesn’t take away from that. It just meant that it wasn’t the learning experience you’d get with something like Arch.
see heres the problem, youre doing that in the wrong order.
first figure out your DE/WM preference, THEN choose a package manager with the repos that will best support that for your use case and update cycle preferences. (the distro)
It depends.
ok true
How many are there?
It depends.
See, that’s not helpful. The right answer is to direct someone to this GitHub project:
https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline
The releases page contains a 3420x12488 PNG to provide a simple and concise answer.
That picture is also hosted on Wikimedia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
Edit: just pasting the link now, making it into an embedded picture lagged and crashed voyager??
Doesn’t even have CachyOS. Smh
“Simple and concise”
i am not religious, but oh god…
I can see my OS from here!
I see the one I like! :-)
JFCLM
Just Fucking Choose Linux Mint.
lol no. Completely failed to run 90% of my games and had audio popping no matter what I did with pulsewire or whatever. If a noob encounters that they’re never using Linux again.
how long ago was that? what GPU? what kernel version?
is something odd
mint doesnt even offer kde, i dont see the point.
cant use gnome after realizing all the terrible usability choices/lack of customizability options is deliberate, people really will powertrip/gatekeep the weirdest shit
I think Zorin OS did a really good job at customizing Gnome to make it the way it should have been. As for limiting customizeability, I don’t think that’s necessarily bad. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by KDE’s customization options. Vanilla Gnome has too little. Zorin’s desktop is just right.
But that’s my opinion.
yeah i dont hate gnome users or even if i have to use gnome, but i do hate the conceptual approach to functionality they take, as you mention.
They can try Kubuntu (or whatever) live whenever they’re ready. Beginners just need something that works with minimal configuration.
kubuntu is trash. you have to wait forever for kde updates and not everyone wants to use ubuntu / derivatives. it just seems like everyone is so stubborn and just says mint. tons of distros “just work” out of the box with minimal configuration, even some based on arch.
really i only have one opinion here that im strong on, and its that i feel cinnamon is a waste of time for many (new people).
kubuntu is trash
That’s like… your opinion, man.
true
If you know what KDE is you can make an informed choice. Mint is the recommendation for people who just want something easy to get started with.
this touches on my point exactly. i find that due to the “over recommendation” of mint/cinnamon, that many new people will inevitably “waste time” with cinnamon. this is a feeling i have that frustrates me, is all. KDE is exactly as easy to get started with as is cinnamon.
anyway cheers :)
Exactly. I never see people actually liking Cinnamon as a DE, but everyone keeps recommending Mint. It’s so frustrating, and perplexing.
If Mint would just treat KDE as first class like it used to, I would be inclined to recommend it more often. Not as often as Fedora KDE — which has always seemed to have the best hardware support of all major distros — but at least I wouldn’t feel the need to fight people for recommending Mint to new users. Blindly recommending something as clunky and outdated as Mint and Cinnamon to new Windows expats is a great way to earn Linux a bad reputation just as things are looking up.
Cinnamon >>>>>>> KDE, you can install KDE regardless, but cinnamon is plainly better IMO.
Why is it better? KDE has more features and first-class Wayland support. If I wanted an X11 DE, I would choose XFCE because of its general clean code and performance.
it comes to personal preference i guess, but i find KDE clunky at times and not that ergonomic, even when you customize it a bit, like adding centre spaces to put things in the panels.
Cinnamon feels polished and relatively simple while still being highly customizable.
You’re not wrong. I think there’s definitely room for some improvements.
And sometimes too many customizations can become confusing. I tend to keep everything vanilla to avoid things breaking, except for a few things. I installed a Win 10 theme and even a Win 10 style Tile start menu because I love the concept so much.
I know it’s controversial in a Linux community, but I absolutely LOVED the Windows 10 ergonomics. Square, flat, predictable, and your eyes can quickly pick up the necessary information and you can navigate faster with a mouse. Plus with the Powertoys that added the fancy zones feature, that was perfect. I get all of this in KDE.
is reasonable to say, that W10, specially years ago, was one of the good windows, specially with a debloater.
there were a lot of shit in the middle but yeah, Cinnamon feels like “what if the windows desktop was made with love and passion”.
wdym by ergonomic in this context, may i ask?
you get to develop muscle memory faster, configurations are easier to find, and things start simple and become complex when you need them to get complex instead of always be kinda complex.
Also, I hate dolphin, it is quite bad, you can’t open files with sudo directly, you have to navigate trough various menus to find the button for that, is also harder to read IMO.
i think i explained it poorly, but i mean you get the hang of things faster, and usually stuff is where is more convenient for for them to be.
I don’t hate KDE, if Cinnamon wasn’t a thing, i would go for it, but as things stands now, I prefer cinnamon.
hey right on, appreciate the thoughtful reply. i cant say i share the same experience, but now i understand where youre coming from.
side note, im new(ish) to lemmy and im really appreciating the quality of the takes im seeing on here. refreshing feeling, so cheers to adding to that.
better how?
Nah. I’m a gamer and need something with more up to date packages. I can’t rely on Debian / Ubuntu base.
Fedora and Arch base are my go to.
If you know what you want then you’re not the person depicted in this comic.
I’m a gamer too and i’m not sure what is about that, everything seems fine on the 6.12 kernel LMDE is on.
Ditto. Also a gamer on Linux Mint and never once had a problem.
I’ve been gaming on Debian (granted, with the backports kernel). What am I missing? Everything works and I’ve had zero issues.
The present-day Linux kernel tree (not the Debian guys) actually has a target to build a Debian kernel package (
make bindeb-pkg) straight out of git if you want, so you can pretty readily get a packaged kernel out of the Linux kernel git repo, as long as you can come up with a viable build config for it (probably starting from a recent Debian kernel’s config). I have run off Debian-packaged kernels built that way before, if you want to play on the really bleeding edge.Yep, been gaming on Ubuntu for decades. Zero issue. Occasionally have to do a thing, but it’s Linux, so you know; everything is always do able.
maybe youve always been using 2 year or older hardware *shrug
bazzite?
I’m using Kubuntu LTS and I’m gaming just fine.
Bazzite is good now and you don’t have to spend hours trying to install Nvidia drivers
in linux mint there is a buton, that says “driver installer” you press on it, select what version (choose the recommended one) then press install.
I did not know that! I was thinking about my issues on Debian and assumed Mint had a similar process
if you use LMDE is still a bit easier because the sources are already added, “sudo apt install nvidia-driver” and then use the envy control program to configure it properly.
I appreciate the effort put into this but if answering yes to “are you new to Linux?” leads to the follow up question “apt or rpm?” then there’s a problem.
Exactly. One is a package format and/or local package utility, and the other is a frontend to do downloads and updates for that local package utility.
Should be “rpm or dpkg” — assuming that we’re excluding the other options — and then if someone chooses RPM, you can start talking about the frontend:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager
Front ends
Several front-ends to RPM ease the process of obtaining and installing RPMs from repositories and help in resolving their dependencies. These include:
- yum used in Fedora Linux, CentOS 5 and above, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and above, Scientific Linux, Yellow Dog Linux and Oracle Linux
- DNF, introduced in Fedora Linux 18 (default since 22), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and CentOS Linux 8.
- up2date used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS 3 and 4, and Oracle Linux
- Zypper used in Mer (and thus Sailfish OS), MeeGo,[16] openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise
- urpmi used in Mandriva Linux, ROSA Linux and Mageia
- apt-rpm, a port of Debian’s Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) used in Ark Linux,[17] PCLinuxOS and ALT Linux
- Smart Package Manager, used in Unity Linux, available for many distributions including Fedora Linux.
- rpmquery, a command-line utility available in (for example) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- libzypp, for Sailfish OS
Then for
dpkg, you can choose from amongaptitude,apt,apt-get/apt-query/etc, graphical frontend options likesynapticthat one may want to use in parallel with the TUI-based frontends, etc.You’ve completely missed the point. If you’re new to Linux you have no clue what those are and shouldn’t care.
Sure, but my point was that someone new to Linux can only answer that question with “what the fuck are those”
I hate myself but I don’t Gentoo hate myself.
I judge distro chooser flowcharts by whether they correctly point me to Slackware. These both pass.
gentoo for small computing power?? no offense, but that’s bonkers 😹
Lots of pro-Ubuntu propaganda in those floe charts. At this point, Ubuntu of any flavor shouldn’t be recommended to anyone. There are always better alternatives.
Redox is UNIX-like, not a BSD flavor. The kernel, init, userland, etc. aren’t BSD related.
These are magnificent. Now I can turn off my brain lol.
Just pick the yummiest option each time.
Mint.
Cinnamon.
That adds the “which windowing system do you want to use” question and under the “Xorg” option, a “do you want to use a window manager without a desktop environment”, and then under “yes”, for the “Which window manager” question, you get Ratpoison as one of the options.
sure its fine and will do. but …millions of people waste time on cinnamon bc of this logic.
