The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.

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[–] 162 points 3 months ago (67 children)

C'mon, microsoft. What are you DOING with your life???

I'm no linux apologist. I BARELY understand what I'm doing. If ANY task needs terminal, then that task just isn't going to happen for me.

All that said, it's time to switch to linux. And for anyone asking where they should start with all these distros....Mint. If you've never used linux before, start with Mint.

Now I'm a bit of a hypocrite for saying that, because I'm on Zorin. There's nothing wrong with Zorin. It is perfectly fine as a starter distro if you're coming from Windows. It's almost equal to Zorin in usability. Mint has one edge that cannot be overlooked for newbies.

Userbase.

EVERYONE uses Mint, which means there's going to be a broader range of support. There are times I wish I had started with Mint. But I chose Zorin when I was new, and now my heels are dug in.

That being said, YOU should use Mint.

Ugh......I can't believe this is where we are in this world. Where I have to reccomend linux, while still not knowing what the hell I'm doing.

Anyways.....use linux. Fuck microsoft. It's the only way to take back OUR hardware. They want to go full greed mode? I'm now using software which they don't make a dime on, and never can. As much as I hate the structure, I can't say anything negative involving bloat, or spyware, or anything else that I classify as "modern day bullshit".

sigh Just use linux.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I mean with every day passing there's less and less desktop users anyway. Most teenagers know significantly less about windows than you know about Linux. They're on iOS and android.

    As an admin i see it as an opportunity to switch to Linux but the boomers are refusing to let go of microslop office so it's a bit of a fight still.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The gaming PC sector is just fine however

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (33 children)

    I've been recommending Endeavour because its "Arch with a nice installer" and it seems to go down well with modestly technical people.

    Especially since they can then pick their DE.

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  • [–] 66 points 3 months ago (25 children)

    Please do not recommend Arch-based distros to newcomers. At some point, something minor or major is going to break, and they're not going to be able to fix it. Give them something Debian-based to learn the ropes (or not). It's not going to break down on them as easily.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    I dunno man, less shits broken here than on Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Debían based except Ubuntu, Even Ubuntu flavours like kubuntu are fine just not Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I’m out of the loop, Ubuntu has been broken/unstable?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago

    No but they have been steering towards practices that makes people uncomfortable.

    They are slowly replacing part of their ecosystem with proprietary modules or modules with permissive license and people have seen this behaviour enough to know what the end goal is

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    EndeavourOS was my first distro, and I had a great experience. Learned a ton (sometimes by completely breaking everything. Time Shift saved my ass many times).

    I'm sure not everyone learns things the same way, but breaking shit and having to learn how to fix it was the best way I could have learned about how Linux works

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    I'm happy that things did work out for you, and indeed, "breaking shit and fixing it" is part of the rites of passage on Linux.

    That said, I guess you're part of the "tech-savvy tinkerer" crowd. This demographic will handle these things gracefully and take every breakdown as a learning opportunity.

    Coming from this demographic, it's easy to forget that there are people out there that deem computers mere tools, not a hobby. These people expect things to "just work", and any breakage is an annoyance, a road block, a "this Linux thing sucks". Set them up with a tinkerer's distro, and you will make them thoroughly unhappy. Not because they're wrong. Not because we're wrong. Just because of a mismatch of expectations.

    So, dear penguins: let's not blindly advertise our pet distro to whoever asks (or doesn't). Let's look at who is before us, and provide them with the best experience possible. In a lot of cases, due to the influx of "just works" users, this may mean something stable in order not to put them off.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    As a new user I tried all the "easy" distro and they all just fucked me over really hard, they favor ease of use by restricting the user so anytime I went to do anything I just kept running into repeated minor problems. When I tried endeavor it #just works and with snapshot software you can always rollback most distros as far as I know so there is no reason to not reccomend a Linux distro that doesn't hold your hand unless there is something suepr specific the person needs that for some reason is the only thing capable of doing it reasonably well.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    they favor ease of use by restricting the user

    Never ran into anything like that. I'm hungry for more details.

    with snapshot software you can always rollback most distros as far as I know

    It sounds you've never done that yourself. It's not hard if you know what you're doing, but it's not trivial either and may require use of a boot stick, dealing with disk encryption through the terminal, chrooting... and that is not the kinds of hoops I'd expect a newcomer to have to jump through just to fix their system.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    Do more people use Mint than Ubuntu these days? I've been on Arch for a decade now so I don't know the popularity of distros as well as I used to.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    I don't know but it seems that Mint is pretty popular: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

    Anyway, Mint is the closest to Windows 3.1/98/2000 by its simplicity. It shows windows, you can move your files and run applications, it's all I need.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago*

    Yeah Mint is pretty good for a "starter" Linux OS. This is subjective, but of all the Desktop OSs, I found myself fixing shit in terminal and nailing down obscure issues a lot less often in Mint than other distros. Also, whenever a friend/family member came to me with a very old and "broken" laptop that needed saving that's what I'd throw on there. Modern Windows is way too much for the 4GB RAM dual core or whatever bullshit on those old machines. The only complaints I ever got out of them were that they couldn't run .exes and had to use LibreOffice instead of desktop Office apps, but that's about it. No crashes outside of legitimate equipment failure.

    I ran it on my personal machines before I got more comfortable. Now my ideal setup is KDE/Debian though playing around with cachyOS in VMs has been pretty fun.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I switched from popos to manjaro and later mainline arch about a year ago for the AUR. It’s a lot more streamlined then all the terminal stuff needed to install third party software on Ubuntu

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    And while at that, I recomend regular Mint (which is based on Ubuntu).

    There is Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), but I have found it harder to use (while I can manage, I'm not that experienced with Linux to bother to troubleshoot and solve it [at least at the time], but I think it was dependency, incompatibility, or driver issues).

    Plus, the main Mint version is still the Ubuntu based one, LMDE is kinda a side project and usually isn't as up-to-date, as far as I know.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    LMDE would indeed be a bad recommendation for a newbie. Regular Mint benefits from Ubuntus better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates, PPA support and if you have AMD graphics it's not a newbie nightmare to get the most up to date Mesa.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    There is also cachyos, they are sooooooo smooth on kde plasma desktop environment.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    As an arch user this is a terrible suggestion. CachyOS is a distro for enthusiasts who are ok with dealing with the Arch way of doing things. This is a distro that no beginner should be using unless they are prepared to learn how to use the terminal and learn how Linux works. Anyone else is likely to be scared away because it is "too difficult".

    OP is right, just use Mint.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    If you can use a program like Octopi I think Cachy is just as friendly as any distro. Certainly moreso than any debian derivative.

    And its bleeding edge enough to make a great gaming OS

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Mullvadvpn is my vpn of choice. Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora are the recommended distros if using Mullvad.

    Mint isn't for everyone. A lot of picking a distro, at least for me, is will it work with the services I want to use.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    To use mullvad on mint, download the .deb file. Double click on it. Click ok to installing it.

    Done.

    Edit (Download it off mullvad website if not clear)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    You don't actually need the official Mullvad program either, although there's nothing wrong with it.

    I prefer to just load the wireguard config directly with network manager (or whatever your distro uses).

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