Yep. Stay in those.

I second everything above. If you use Fedora be sure to follow a post install guide, there’s plenty more of them out there. Otherwise, Mint, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS are great options.

If you want a little more challenge, EndeavourOS and CachyOS are great introductions to Arch. Avoid Manjaro.

I’m really sick of everyone suggesting Bazzite non stop. I’m a serial distro hopper because I love learning about various distros as they grow and change, and bazzite and other immutables have always been problematic and janky for me, and their immutability makes it difficult to problem solve with tried and true resources and methods.

The correct way to refer to the left lane is “the passing lane”

Get in it. Pass someone. Get the fuck back out. If you aren’t passing, you have no business in the passing lane, simple.

I’m not recommending Nvidia. I’m making a point by giving an example of the procedure for installing drivers for the most common GPU (by a wide margin, amd and intel market share accounts for single digit market share) being far more difficult on Debian than other distributions that are more beginner friendly.

Did you even bother to read the thread?

I get so frustrated hearing this take over and over again.

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

This is the process for installing the DKMS Nvidia GPU drivers on Debian.

The process to install said drivers on Ubuntu, Pop, Mint, etc, is literally clicking an icon.

Yes, following the manual is easy for you, and easy for me. It’s not easy for the tech illiterate elders in our lives. And it’s not easy for me to drop in weekly to solve their problems either.

I’ve ran Fedora on and off for years, by my measure, it’s not old man proof.

I run CachyOS with Hyprland, after using EndeavourOS for quite some time. I definitely recommend either one, if you’re willing to learn to do things via terminal.

After a fiasco with my 72 year old father in law’s laptop, I no longer recommend Linux Mint to people. On a fairly new Asus, multiple attempts at installing were needed to get it running, and he had constant issues that pushed him away from it. Installed Ubuntu for him, no issues over the past year. Sure it has snaps. He doesn’t know the difference and everything seems to be working fine. The goal is no IT support calls from the old man and Ubuntu achieved it.

I’d say RAM is going to be the largest performance bottle neck for a desktop environment on an older machine. 4gb of RAM? don’t bother with cinnamon, you’ll likely have a much better experience with Mate or XFCE. 8gb is about where I’d even bother to test out cinnamon.

And yeah. It’s still extra steps for a worse experience. Just wait a few hours. You already waited 7 years.

If you don’t mind not having steam achievements.

Yep, I have the same story verbatim dude. Fuck Rockstar, permanently. Haven’t played one of their games in like 5 years, and I never will again.

Precisely. I’m a millennial, and this place has a decidedly millennial vibe. Linux nerds, privacy advocates, people seeking an alternative to the slop of mainstream social media. I would imagine people under 25 are a rarity here.

I know of a structural steel contractor in my area, and their ironworkers have shirts that say “erection specialist”

Sometimes the jokes write themselves

Years of using gnome is why I finally got the gumption to try and eventually stick with Hyprland. It’s so much easier to get the aesthetics I desire in a functional and minimal desktop than it was in gnome, which I love, but used to break frequently.

lol, my riced out EndeavourOS install running Hyprland could probably be considered aggressive modification, but with the right wallpaper and settings it looks pretty clean and minimal. I’ll see about getting some screenshots when I have time for a post.

But yeah, I like the idea you’re running with. I’ve been all over the linuxsphere distrohopping and there are a lot of very pretty desktop environments out there. Even just Linux Mint Cinnamon without any modification is a gorgeous desktop.

I’m gonna get some screenshots together for a post, leaving this comment as a reminder to myself.

But yeah, if this community could have a few less chibi anime waifu wallpapers than UnixPorn does, I’m totally down to support it.

Those are called Zerks. Zerk fittings. My god if I called them nipples at work I’d never live it down.

“Linux for me, not for thee”

They need the serfs to be hapless surveillance targets, not power users with technological agency.

https://youtu.be/nIbY6lo0RIw?si=OQl71KDEAGq8krK8

Here’s an expert explaining it better.