hey nerds, I’m getting myself a new personal laptop as a treat, but I very much do not want windows 11 shitting it up. Is there a linux distro with caveman-compatible instructions for installation and use? I want to think about my OS as little as possible while actually using it.
I’ve got one friend who uses mint, but I’ve also seen memes dunking on it so who knows. I actually really only know what I’ve seen from you all shitposting in other communities
I dare you to install Gentoo
What spec of laptop are you thinking of getting?
Still shopping around, so nothing’s set in stone. I’m not much of a hardware guy either, so the best I could tell you is just that I’m looking for something a step or two above ‘bare minimum’ for 2025. An SSD, fair bit of ram, ports for external storage so I can actually boot with another OS, maybe enough guts to run skyrim modded to the gills. Somewhere in that ballpark.
If you’re getting a laptop with a graphics card, make sure you go with something by AMD. Nvidia cards will work fine enough, though for a whole host of different reasons, AMD is generally preferred for Linux.
good insight, thanks
mint
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generally a solid choice
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you have a friend who uses it! big advantage
people who make memes about linux distros are in a lot deeper than you want to be. they have different goals.
True for the friend benefit. Fun and useful to occasionally chat about it with someone who knows what’s up.
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Mint is the best distro for the average user who doesnt want to tinker with their OS or doesnt want to waste time fixing issues.
IF Mint doesnt go well with your laptop, I would try out Fedora, which is more up to date with stuff and also very user friendly choose Fedora Workstation if you’re feeling adventurous. choose Fedora KDE if you want a Windows like experience.
To add, if OP is looking to use the laptop for gaming, I can recommend Bazzite. Built upon fedora with some quality of life things and very stable as it’s immutable. Very hard to fuck up.
I’m not sure about recommending immutable distros to noobs, I’ve read enough reports from people that want to (or because of some hardware crap, need to) install or mess with some low-level stuff that just won’t work on the immutable distros, plus a bunch of online advice or help will just not be applicable.
Universal Blue OSs (Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora) are actually way easier than immutable is made out to be.
For one thing, there is no such thing as keeping the system and packages up to date. That all happens automatically as long as you restart your computer every now and then.
It is true that if someone is looking up how to install something online it could be confusing. But anything in Flathub is obviously dead simple.
I think if there were better demos and tutorials, it would seem a lot easier.
For instance, if you can’t find something in Flathub, and the only instructions you can find are for installing in Ubuntu, all you have to do is use Boxbuddy/Distrobox and use an Ubuntu container and install it there using the instructions.
It really is the best of almost all worlds. Granted, this setup doesn’t work for 100% of software. But it works for the vast majority.
Listen to yourself. What’s a distrobox? Boxbuddy? I’m already annoyed about someone expecting me to learn about this and I’ve used Linux exclusively for 25 years. I actually did Linux from Scratch and used that for 6 months for actual stuff. Telling a noob who wants to do normal things that work on a normal Linux distros that because of the (recommended by you) immutable distro they have, they need a container which has an actual normal linux distro inside it to run the thing they want to run, they’ll want to run away and probably never speak to you again.
And about flatpak: I had so many bugs that somehow only happen when you get the flatpak. And you can’t install command line tools over flatpak, you can’t install servers or drivers. Regular users (especially windows power user types) are likely to run into these things and curse you for recommending the one distro where you can’t just
apt install theclitoolineed.And you sound like the entrenched Windows user who doesn’t realize all of the little things they’ve internalized to keep their system working the way they want to. I should know, I was one of those Windows users until recently.
Regarding other tools, they really aren’t necessary for most users. I don’t even use Distrobox. Flathub for UI apps, and Homebrew for CLI apps serves all of my needs.
I believe that Jorge Castro is right about the Linux desktop. It has failed, and it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. And that’s what they’re doing. Universal Blue is a completely different mindset from traditional distros, and I think it’s the future.
And that’s the great thing about Linux. You can continue to use the old methods you’re used to and have built up 25 years of muscle memory around.
It certainly has downsides in that regard, I will not deny that. However, if you want something that Just Works™, it is a very good option in my (admittedly limited) experience.
Pop OS has been pretty pain free for me
PopOS or Mint are probably the best for new users.
memes dunking on mint are irrelevant. use what works for you & ignore the noise.
personally, mint lmde, based on debian, might be worth a once over. sounds like the stability aspect might be up your alley.
I’ve been using Mint and Pop!_OS on two different machines for a few years.
Neither has really required much from me as the user, although I have needed to use the terminal once on each of them.
Personally, I really like the way Pop does window tiling and workspaces.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say fedora silverblue or bazzite
Basic user? Use flat packs and enjoy easy graphics support, as well as all of the windows compatibility for gaming
Advanced user? Learn to do things in pods/containers or distrobox, it’s easy even if the quick start docs aren’t great (I can find my cheat sheets if anyone is going down that road)
Pro: most stuff just works, and it’s harder to config yourself into a corner you have to research your way out of
Cons: normal Linux install guides need to be modified a bit, it’s not hard but you do have to learn how to do it
Install a few and see which one you like the most. You can install several distros at the same time and they’ll all appear in the boot menu. When I was deciding which distro to use on my laptop, I was dual booting Debian and Fedora, with one /home partition shared between both of them.
Mint and Fedora are good choices IMO. Everyone is different though :)
Some caveats, though: To share the same home folder safely, it’s best to use the same desktop environment on both distros. Debian paired with Fedora makes it difficult to match the release numbers of the desktops, though, and there might be discrepancies with respect to user config files in the home folder, when you’re trying to configure features in Fedora that aren’t yet available in Debian.
Also the system folder setup (locations of libraries and include files) is different between the two, so if there’s anything in the home folder that’s linked against libraries in one distro, it won’t work in the other. Especially if you’re going to compile anything in the home folder – including stuff that package managers of scripting languages like lua and python themselves compile – that could lead to major heaadaches.
Good points. I was using KDE with both and didn’t have any issues (even though Debian’s version of KDE was older) but that might not work in all scenarios.
I don’t have compiled things in the home folder - they go in either
/usr/local/binor/opt.
I can’t disagree with mint being a good distribution, because it is.
I personally think for someone just starting out in Linux that an immutable distribution like fedora silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde) is the safest route to take. They’re difficult to break. I personally use bazzite on my framework laptop and it’s basically hassle free. Not for everyone, but they work well.
I opened this thread to type out this exact comment but somehow you typed up the exact same thing before me?
I would beg to differ. Maybe things will be different once things have mature more. At the moment, just quickly trying out a most of them, I’d easily see rough edges within first few minutes. Some would have more subtle issues, but it’s still far from foolproof.
Simple config stuff that would usually take simple file editting on /etc comes to mind.
Pop!_OS is neat. I’ve been running it on my desktop and laptop for over a year now. I like that it doesn’t look like Windows and has enough difference to it to not be a macOS clone either. Plus I think System76 is doing some great things with hardware design.
Pop_os is the best
TBH Ubuntu, or if you have an older/lower spec machine xubuntu
Linux mint (Cinnamon is my fav). You can never go wrong.
Maybe
I’ve never noticed any hate for Mint, it seems to be a pretty good option. It’ll easily run on anything that was able to run Windows 10 (probably 8 too) and the default desktop environment Cinnamon is easy to navigate if you’re coming from Windows. Even if you have some obscure piece of hardware with Mint being based on Ubuntu there’s probably a tutorial you can follow to get it working.
Debian is one of my favorites and one of the easiest to use if you are new. i haven’t tried mint but they are very similar.
