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
Fedora’s KDE spin
I really hope more beginner distros switch to kde from GNOME. When I was first getting into linux and did not know about what a DE was, GNOME put me off from fully switching to linux and themeing it was hell with it not playing nice with qt applications, of course as a newbie i did not know what “qt” or “Gtk” was and did not understand at the time why some applications were not following theme.
while kde default is not pretty it can be anything you want it to look like and its easy to customize and plays nice with gtk applications. GNOME IS very customizable that you might even be able to make it into a usable desktop.
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.
ITT: 100 people naming their favourite distro and making that fit whatever OP needs.
So far, people are being pretty reasonable. Most are recommending mint, ubuntu or similars, and no one recommended arch to someone with basic linux/computing skills. I have to say I’m impressed. Restored my faith in the community.
It’s hilarious how uncool it is to suggest Ubuntu but it often just works, including very recent hardware if it’s from Canonical partners like Lenovo or Dell. And the kerfuffle about things like snaps are way overblown.
The process for installation is more or less the same for all of them.
Linux Mint and PopOS are the “go to” suggestions. I really don’t like the way either of them look. I’m partial to GNOME for aesthetics and ease of use.
Bazzite comes with most of the stuff you will want pre-loaded, and also the cool Steam Deck Gamescope interface. It’s the only one I’ve used with seamless background updates like you might be accustomed to on Android or iOS. That’s my recommendation.
Currently using Bazzite as my main OS on my laptop, and it works pretty good, the ostree setup has prevented me from manually installing several things though :/
That is the fun part about Linux is installing anything that’s not a Flatpak 😵💫