Posted on 03/21/2023 4:22:02 AM PDT by ShadowAce
If you’re new to the Linux world, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of distros available to you. On the surface, it may look like an endless maze that leads you through a bottomless rabbit hole. However, even the most avid distro hopper has a daily driver they eventually settle on. This guide aims to help you find your new home in Linux while making the experience as enjoyable as possible.
Before beginning your journey, you have to know what you want out of your system. This involves finding a balance between how you want to use the distro and what you can expect to accomplish with your machine. Although many Linux distros can help you “breathe new life” into older systems, it’s important to note that your machine will still limit what you can do with the operating system, regardless of the distro you choose to settle into.
You should not expect any Linux distro to be a magical pill that will solve your machine’s constraints. If all you have is 256 MB of DDR2 memory on your computer, you’re going to have to live with extremely limited functionality.
When you’re looking at what to aim for, it’s important to consider two things:
Given the varying rates of these two factors among several different groups of people and other things that could come into play when making a decision, we are making recommendations based on several broad groups:
If you’ve never touched a Linux system, you’re better off trying something that’s popular, highly supported, and an easy-to-use desktop environment.
If you’re coming from Windows, you would get along well with a distro that uses KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, or Xfce. They all come with a familiar-looking desktop layout with an application menu that sits on a panel at the bottom of the screen by default with persistent icons showing favorite applications and those that you currently have open.
If you’re coming from macOS, you’ll find distros featuring GNOME, COSMIC, and Pantheon to be the most familiar, each coming out of the box with a dock for your favorite applications, always within reach at the bottom of your screen.
Generally, you should be looking at systems that share a code base with Debian or Ubuntu. It’s no surprise that the majority of distros in our recommendations for beginners are based on these two.
Most, if not all, Linux applications support the Debian APT architecture, and the majority of guides written for Linux include commands that operate with the Debian APT package manager. All of these make it easy for any newcomer to get started.
If you go on a Linux forum asking for help, most people will reply with commands and instructions that work perfectly on these types of distros, and you’ll find this as well when you’re searching online for answers.
The Debian/Ubuntu world is always ready to receive beginners with open arms and has many ways to hold your hand while you get acquainted with Linux. You can also gain easy access to a very powerful package manager known as snap.
If you’re running a computer with 32 GB of high-speed dual-channel memory, an NVMe drive, and a CPU/GPU combo that lets you have carte blanche over everything you run, you do have some bleeding-edge options at your disposal.
For high-spec machines running the latest hardware, your experience in Linux will largely be determined by the kernel and repositories available to you. This is especially true when you’re gaming, as some very important features like Fsync and Esync that improve the performance of non-native games need to be up to date.
For people who want to squeeze every bit of performance out of powerful machines without a lot of headaches, the Arch world will be very attractive. Even though installing Arch is no simple chore, there are plenty of Arch-based distros that can set up your computer quickly and easily. Arch-based distros offer an immense catalog of applications from the official repositories, dwarfed by an even more gargantuan user repository (the AUR) containing the latest applications.
The only major caveat to using an Arch-based distro is that you may be stumped by minor stability issues. But what you get back from it in terms of sheer performance and flexibility usually compensates generously for the small bugs that occasionally appear in some applications.
It might be instinctive to install Windows on a computer for your elderly relatives and for those who have little else to do than browse the Web and write the occasional email. However, you may be surprised to find that Windows is not really that easy to use (like regular updates breaking the system), but there are variants of Linux that are far easier for them to use and offer far fewer opportunities to damage the system.
When it comes to the choice of distro, everything mentioned in the section for those who are new to Linux applies here, with a few minor changes:
Besides distro choice, it’s very important to make sure that other parts of the environment (applications, browser extensions, etc.) that the person operates in are sufficiently prepared for ease of use and accessibility.
If you’re a developer, you may find yourself becoming more selective depending on your niche. If you’re looking to make the most out of your development experience in Linux, distro choice is about as important as what code editor or IDE you use.
When it comes to which codebase you should choose, the world is your oyster. Distro recommendations for the avid developer range all the way from Debian to Arch Linux, depending on your personal requirements.
It’s also worth mentioning that you would also benefit from going on a journey to learn how Linux works as an operating system. If you have the stomach for it, check out Linux From Scratch to learn more.
If you’re struggling to find the RAM to spare for anything, you will find most popular distros to be a bit heavy. Even some distros that advertise themselves as “lightweight” have the look and feel of something light but don’t generally do much to truly slim down the system’s overhead.
To truly choose a slim distro for Linux, it has to either come with or allow for the installation of an appropriate window manager or desktop environment. Given these criteria, you can be as creative as you want with your choices.
For the lightest experience possible, ditch the idea of using a desktop and just opt for a window manager like bspwm. Be warned that you’ll need to get very comfortable with the terminal, but once you do, you’ll notice that you can do just about anything a fully-featured desktop Linux distro can offer!
If you don’t quite have the stomach to go commando with a window manager, choose a feather-light desktop environment like LXQt or MATE. They may look dated and difficult to navigate, but they’re designed to work in very restricted environments, like old machines with severely limited resources.
Most distros will include these desktop environments. Once you install them, just select them before you log in to make the switch.
Every developer has a vision of what their ideal system looks like. When you have an open-source community, you’ll often find that software tends to fork in multiple directions, many times leading to innovative pressure in different directions. As chaotic as it may look, it also gives you the flexibility to choose something that ideally fits your particular scenario. People have been getting Linux to run on several different platforms for decades. This is what came out of all that effort.
So-called “security-oriented” distros are often hardened for particular niche use cases but won’t often make a difference on the consumer level. Any Linux distro will be as secure as you allow it to be. If you plan to run SSH, for example, learn how to secure your SSH properly before you dive head-first into trying to run your own home server!
Absolutely! Every Linux distro mentioned here will run a live version of itself on a bootable USB thumb drive (which is the medium you should be using to install distros anyway). This lets you “try it before you install.”
I tried pop on and liked it pretty well. Another that was ok and small was peppermint os- I have that on another drive and use it from ti e to time. It’s mainly for,whenever my main drive craps out and I need to get online- it’s all set and ready to go- I just pop out the main drive, and I stall the peppermint os and off I go.
Question for Linux users: I have been a Windows user forever. Currently running version 7 and have no desire to advance further.
Am considering Linux and generally all my questions have been answered except for one: printers. Is there a place I can go that will list printers that have Linux drivers?
All help appreciated.
All the media creation tools needed come installed and integrated, ready to use. Ubuntu Studio also uses the Low Latency kernel for fast speed. I can't even tell it's running as a VM. Going to port it to a physical VM on its own NVME drive to see if I can notice a difference in performance.
Please consider adding Ubuntu Studio to your list for media creators / podcasters with its ease of installation and use.
As always, thanks for your posts and supporting the Linux community here on FR.
And pay an arm and a leg for it, sure.
With that said, I'm looking at an M2 Mac Mini, for no reason other than to run Linux on it.
The only good version of linux for gamers is the Steam Deck :-)
Seriously it’s amazing.
I have a dual boot divided between Linux Mint and windows. Been running the mint for several years and it’s very good. For a few things you still need windows. Mac OS is also a very good system.
CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) is a cross-platform printing solution for all UNIX environments. It is based on the “Internet Printing Protocol” and provides complete printing services to most PostScript and raster printers.
Try This Link and choose your printer manufacturer.
I run a Windows 10 Professional desktop on VMWare under Ubuntu. Still fast, works 100% and oddly, seems more stable this way. Eliminates the need for dual-boot (unless you want dual boot.)
That will work too and has advantages. I actually run virtual box on the windows side with several os machines just because l can lol.
I'm not thinking about anything primary at this point, but a backup situation for the what if actually went down.
With run away inflation created from the Fed escalates, we may have a rude awakening some morning. These people truly want to destroy the USA and the USA Dollar.
I have solar panels that I have had a long time and am seriously considering wind generator for 12 or 24 volt backup system for backup. To me it makes no sense to use an inverter. It makes sense to have the load in low voltage DC. Lights and many electronic devices can easily easily switched to DC operation. My ham shack has a mixture of AC only and 12 volt power.
The hours I save not having to maintain or upgrade it is well worth the small premium price. As is the extreme hardware reliability. My last MacBook Pro (Intel) was bought in mid-2014 and retired mid last year. Eight years of service with very few problems. At the end, the battery had given up, the screen occasionally went blank and a couple of charger cords had frayed. But the updates still installed and it still ran with almost zero attention. That appliance ease of use, minimal maintenance effort, and consistent UI across years make it very worthwhile for me. My time is valuable (and being almost 72 years old, I want to use every minute the best I can).
Because:
1. How do you know a restaurant has good food? There's always lots of cars in the parking lot. The more people who are using a given flavor of Linux, the better the odds that it's a good one.
2. Your primary source of tech support is going to be the folks who use the same flavor as you. As the old Chinese saying goes, "many hands make light work." Most users will never experience a problem that somebody else using that distro hasn't already encountered. The more users a flavor has, the better your chances that somebody already has found a solution.
Not intending to pimp for any particular distro but sometimes a flavor has a prolific "family tree," which means there are multiple distros sharing a common file format (= common applications) and have a lot of the same problems and fixes. Which only further increases your pool of tech support.
Unless I'm mistaken, Debian is the "root" of the largest family tree (which includes Ubuntu and Mint). Red Hat/Fedora are the twin roots of the second largest tree. And I'm thinking Slackware is the root of the third largest.
Which points out one of the problem Linux has created for itself. Bewildering diversity (~400 actively maintained distros, plus a couple hundred more that are "abandonware" but won't die). Not just in distros but in desktops as well. A lot of people don't want to decide, they want to be told, and that's very anti-Linux.
Until the update that completely wiped out the sound function and broke the graphics processor handshake.
Unix produces logs as the machine boots, which no one apparently looks at. For this reason multiple 'solutions' for my sound problem ALL fail. The actual problem of hardware drivers being removed for lack of license has yet to be resolved because no one reported the load failure in the startup logs.
Only Trump is allowed to take shots at people.
Sorry, wrong thread
That's a recurring theme I hear from Mac users and is the #1 use case I've heard over the years for Macs.
The reason Mac's requires so little maintenance effort and upkeep is also due to the limited hardware stack it supports.
The "I plug it in, and it just works!" is the second most recurring theme I hear from Mac users. "It works" because the hardware ecosystem for Mac's is very small comparatively speaking and very tightly controlled.
Not so for Microsoft. With the plethora of choices Windows users have in hardware (motherboards, GPU's, CPU's, memory, disk, printers, peripherals) numbering in the tens of thousands of different components it's no wonder Microsoft has had issues with hardware compatability over the years.
I imagine if I were "coming up" in computers today I'd probably go Mac for reasons you cite. As I'm 60 and I date all the way back to Timex Sinclair ZX-80's, TRS-80's, Commie 64's, acoustic couplers, 110/300/1200/2400/9600/56k modems, and so on, I'm more used to dealing with the technical complexities of non-Mac ecosystems.
Having built my own computers since the early 1980's, dealing with all the technical challenges and complexities has at least kept my mind young even though physically I'm falling part, LOL!
Best to you and appreciate your response.
Other printers work as well, though I am not as familiar with them.
My next major purchase for this system will be a NAS, just so I don't have to connect the drives to the Pi directly.
That is inventive. I knew you appreciate things that are simple and just works. Smile.
Thanks.
My experience with Linux goes like this. I use Fedora (currently 37) for both my desktops and my laptops. I use Mate/Compiz which is based on Gnome 2, and the Compiz effects give me the control over my desktops for research that I can’t find in any other distro or MS Windows.
For my elderly neighbors, I recommend either Linux Lite (an Ubuntu XFCE spin) or Fedora Mate/Compiz.
When I set up a computer for someone who just wants something to work, I put the relevant several icons on their desktops for the things they want do: email, browsing, whatever games they want, and one or two other things - SMTube for watching youtube vids, et.
For people who don’t really want/need to know about how things work, I find it works best to just give them the basics, and not bog them down with wading through the menus or the command line. “Just use the desktop icons; if you need more, give me a holler and I’ll help you set it up.”
I’m over 70, still writing Windows-based (C#/.NET) code for a paycheck, and find Linux far more user-friendly than Windows.
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