I'm on the market to buy a new laptop, and Lemmy has successfully coaxed and goaded me to give Linux a serious try.
I've never used *nix as my personal OS.
Which hardware/laptop do you recommend? And which OS to pair it with for a Linux newbie?
I'm a software engineer, and quit my job to pursue an MSc in AI. So my uses will be:
- programming
- study
- browsing lemmy
- gaming
Get some live distro first and check it out without installation. You will be able to test some basic desktop environments very easily. Most of the distros will have live image. Even better run it in a virtual machine and play around. Test KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon and XFCE. Look at some themes and plugins. I think customizing your desktop is a nice, visual way to see how flexible it all is and get the feel of how configuration files work. If you will like what you can achieve with a bit of work you will just keep going. If you will find it 'stupid and useless' it's probably not for you.