The choice KDE likely for functionality and familiarity for windows users and linux users alike, it’s meant more for a “Desktop mode” rather than as a mobile GUI/OS so basically when docked and or for use with keyboard and mouse, Something else would have totally been better for a mobile OS though but even windows sucks on that front.
Most start with Ubuntu based distros but a warning on that, You may well face issues with newer hardware and or older packages / waiting longer for support of new hardware than on a rolling release based distro or something like Arch or Arch based.
I’d say try a number of different distros and see what you feel more comfortable with, Mint, Fedora, Even Arch, Maybe play around with VMs and stuff so you can test an OS within another OS for some OS inception.
I know it’s just for Desktop mode but I suspect this is an age polling stat at work. When I think about converting Windows users to Linux I maintain XFCE or something like LXDE or all the offshoot variants is more in line with what they expect. However this is based on my years of working with “older” office workers. People who in some cases started with DOS and WordStar iirc. LOTS of people spent at least a decade on Windows XP…KDE likely appeals to what I’d guess are younger people who only know Win10/11…maybe the a_s end of Windows 7.
Anyone who lived the Win95/98/2000/ME[Vomit]/XP/Vista[Vomit] years I have put in front of countless XUbuntu installs and they never even noticed they weren’t on Windows anymore. As long as you install what they use tweak the colors/look a bit and a small explanation of installing things and updating and they hit the ground running with minimal issue. They hear Linux, think “TERMINALS OF TERROR” then I show them and they are like “So I click here like in Windows but everything is nicely categorized?” heh.
Despite all that it’s still odd to me. All those “cohesive” features make my beefy workstations feel sluggish…god help a mobile user heh. I know despite that KDE has become pretty dominant with lots of love…it’s just not for me workflow wise or “weight” wise. That said I’m over here running CTWM because it’s light, fast, insanely customizable and still works on Multi GPU setups.
As a comical throw back OP calls Win 8 an abomination and I’m not saying it wasn’t…but OP go try Windows ME or Vista haha. Vista you will want some period correct hardware so you can feel the pain of an OS that needs 4GB of RAM in an age when machines still liked to ship with 512GB. (Swap swap swap goes the likely still 5400RPM PATA33/66 hard drive.) Worse was there were still a lot of 32 machines so the PME/PAE didn’t exist on some low end things even if it had 4GB of RAM it couldn’t use it all and ViSTA did what it did…make your hair fall out. ME sucked no matter what. No drivers, nothing worked when it worked and it crashed more than OS9…and I still say OS9 was more unstable than Win95 [Fight Me].
Ha! Yeah I get you, I remember the 95/98/XP (C64, Amstrad, AmigaOS, DOS etc too). And i agree i still do really like XFCE.
I’ve used linux installs with XFCE(and even KDE) / LXDE etc for elderly relatives and it was such a good choice for that, they couldn’t do anything weird or break it so it was great for them and waaayyy less of a headache for me.
For a beefy desktop / main machine KDE is my goto but that’s just personal preference, gnome just turns me off these days and I have to get away from it or it ends up irritating me.
I lean more to the Net…BSD But yeah, love me some BSD, just best for heavy iron since all the fancy desktop/userland/driver stuff takes a while to show up from Linux. (Stink eyeing those SMP kernels 20+ years ago hehe.)
I get the KDE thing. There are actually a lot of K applications I like but I won’t use because they require so much cruft. I used to be Fluxbox on BSD but Gnome on Linux…but then Gnome 3 came and that ended like a 51 car pileup. Gnome is now a mess. GTK in general has destroyed their entire eco system for multiGPU people like me but Gnome went from a light straight forward DE to being something like a exclusive club. If you don’t know the handshake…F___ Off. I remember trying Gnome 3 and nothing worked. It took a while before I figured out all the old things were hidden behind special key presses and “handshake/passwords” to do even basic crap. No longer could you right click the task bar and add/move/edit something. You had to magically know to Ctrl Click now. It still makes me nuts how to this day you have to install crap like Gnome Tweaks to get basic functions back…Gnome is the open source version of Apple douchebaggery to me…yeah I said it.
But back on track for OP even if KDE was blazing fast I find it has option paralysis for new users. Some things are really hard to find when you are searching for how to change basic stuff. It works well, just there is SOOO MUCH. It’s also got some incongruent issues where this thing you need to hit apply but that thing is a single click. That said some people are very complacent with things outta the box. So for them KDE’s weird or overwhelming bits is something they might never see. I know lots of people that never think to change mouse speed, double click times, icons, colors…some weird people out there. That’s why I stay in here…(rocking furiously) Weird people out there, that’s why I stay in here, weird people out there that’s why I stay in here…
Linux, is a LOT friendlier, compared to years on back [installation / interface / software]
With that being said… nVIDIA, [still] hasn’t been ,exactly a friendly entity to deal with
Now… Looking past that smidgen annoying news [yes, I’m victim to nVIDIA, with an SFF build]
The distribution underpinning, will dictate some qualities [update windows / software mngr / …]
Some extremes are from VERY dated [HIGHLY stable], to bleeding edge [aka, chance of br!cking itself]
Something a toddler can sop on to… To needing a book, of specific terminal scripts + prompts
My three (3) safe points of trying out, via a LiveUSB stick, would be the following:
Linuxmint – low resource OS; VERY clean and stable underpinning [LONG Term support available]
Pop_OS! – custom build of Ubuntu; Native support option [for nVIDIA]; Gamery friendly from jump
Manjaro – native support option [for nVIDIA]; Strikes balance of fresh enough, but leaning on maturity
+Whenever Valve hosts, their formal release of SteamOS, may also be a strong contender
It was mine back in 2003. Or at least it was the first distro I actually learned how to use past the install and running what was given because of the handbook. Gentoo still has a lot of pros for the noob that wants to dive right into the deep end but still stay in a maintained pool. LFS for anyone wanting to learn to swim in the river/ocean.
Even on 10-15 year old hardware, compiling is MUCH less painful than it was on 90’s and early 2000’s hardware. On <5 year old hardware, it still feels stupidly fast to me.
Now that I think about it, Proxmox, TrueNas, etc. with a half dozen distros on top of it to try them out is probably the way to go.
I did say it’s gone down hill…but it’s better than suggesting Gentoo As a pure Arch user I’d be more apt (see what I did there?) to say go Endevour or Manjaro but “arch is so dangerously on the edge…” Bah, debian is slow and stupid heh.
I’ve been on Fedora since about 2022ish. For my homelab, I use Red Hat’s developer program to use RHEL on it. I love it tbh. (I work in the US DoD industry and RHEL is pretty much all they use, so I am quite comfortable on a RHEL system these days).
However, I recently moved my Linode from Rocky Linux to OpenSuse Leap and I moved my desktop NUC from Arch Linux to OpenSuse Tumbleweed (which I use in place of my desktop for low-power computing as it consumes like 12 watts on idle vs my Gaming PC’s 90 watts). I am loving Tumbleweed.
I am going to move my gaming PC over to Arch Linux though. I also have a PC that I use for ripping media to my homelab’s NAS/Jellyfin server. It used to run Arch, but I got frustrated with some of its quirks and moved it to Fedora. I’m now thinking of moving it to Tumbleweed.
I mentioned Win 8 because it was relevant to the machine I have. Otherwise, thou doth assume too much about the depth of my experience. My first home computer was an Apple IIe. I’ve operated every version of Windows, to one extent or another, since 3.1.
Though, I never understood the hubbub over Vista. I had a Vista laptop and it was a perfectly serviceable machine as a daily driver, up to handling some light to medium duty music production operations (I’m an audio engineer by trade). I watched plenty of people fight with their Vista rigs, but I almost never had a serious issue. Admittedly, I never dealt with it on anything like an enterprise scale.
I’m nearly as comfortable on Mac OS as I am on Windows. It’s a hazard of the trade.
My big issue with Win 8 was actually the fact that Microsoft was pushing this unified OS concept mirroring the experience across mobile and PC devices. If I wanted the same experience on my PC as on my phone or my tablet, then I’d just buy the phone and save myself a ton of money.
I’m not actually against having a different experience with Linux from Windows or Mac OS. I just didn’t want to end up smooth-headed in getting there.
Vista’s hubub was because they lied about requirements and allowed it to be sold on machines way under powered for it…that said it would have been fine had it not been a bloated pig of a truck stop along the way of Windows versions. I maintain Win 2000/XP/7 were the best versions.
I am also an old OEM. I serviced Win, *nix and MacOS…which is why I keep ragging on OS9. Not only was it as unstable as your X but the machines power was on the keyboard…which didn’t work if it was locked up. I spent a lot of time yanking power cords. Apple…power off different…morons. heh
This was and still is a blight on lots of software. I call it the Lego Duplo look. Everything is stupid over sized and wastes screen space JUST INCASE someone needs to TOUCH it…ug.
All this is learning so just dive in and bring some antibiotic ointment and bandages. As you can see there are a lot of views and opinions here. Differing experiences, different choices…in a way you might as well have ran a poll about what ice cream flavor is best.
My experience is from audio. I was always into computers (started coding in the 80’s) but I really got into them when my studio box was always F’d up and got sick of calling a buddy to get it back in working order. From there I was down the drain pipe to where I had a recording studio and IT firm both. Having said that I will also say I love Linux but audio is its weakest link. Despite that I make music just fine with it.
I’m sure someone reading that last bit will chime in with “ACTUALLY…Pipewire is…” shut up. Pipewire is still lacking feature parity and -every- Linux subsystem since OSS claimed to be the be all end all…and none were. ;p I will say it is stupid nice for some things…but the lacking feature/application parity for what I need is a deal breaker. Plus it borks a lot of games audio for me. Now that might just be because of my interface and plebo “I use my mobo’s sound” people might be fine…but not so with “fancy” audio interfaces heh.
I must have just had the magic hardware build for Vista, ha ha.
I’m definitely keeping my studio rig as is. It’s stable. I’ve had all the fights one can have on Windows already.
My ultimate goal is to use a low risk, not-really-needed machine to learn about Linux, and if all goes well, migrate my data server/home lab over to a Linux build.
Yeah once it’s dialed in… I play the audio thing pretty fast and loose but man I’ve known so many guys who bought into the Mac+Protools stuff and it gets set up, never goes online, never updates…then it dies and they need $60K. I had a friend who did this dumb crap for it to die after Apple did a platform switch so he couldn’t buy a new Mac because the outboard stuff was all for the older PPC MacOS and had no x86 support. Hey why not gut your whole studio for funzies! New Mac, new audio interface, rebuy all your plugins for the new platform…cost effective! hehe.
It will go well given time and learning. Linux runs the world, there’s nothing really you can’t do.
I kept one of my rigs running off line so long that when the mobo finally died I had to replace interface, computer and software at once because it was all so old!
Well like I said, once it’s dialed in heh. That said I don’t treat my Linux DAW that precious but I’m also not doing commercial crap anymore. I just do sound FX and various little things here and there. I used to still write and record my solo stuff but age has quashed musical inspiration. Now it’s a lot of fancy gear that sits and sounds pretty.
Another reason I don’t worry DAW wise is because when shit goes south I know I can get things back up. Linux is soo much easier to fix. IT wise I spent a lot of years fixing Windows boxes with Linux live discs…and eventually flash drives.
