SIncerely, I just watched an hour long introduction to linux. I looked around a bit, and I'm very intimidated. I'm personally waiting for W10 and wanting to check out Linux in the meantime. If I like Linux, I might have to buy a secondary boot drive to get saucy with it occasionally ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Anyway I heard Mint with Cinnamon, besides sounding delicious, was good for people coming from windows.
So what do you think?
Yeah, linux mint is a very nice OS, and I highly recommend you start there.
And do not worry, it is stupid simple to play around with linux and get some work done.
With linux mint, you have an app store, and you can download and run .deb files just like you would with .exe files.
All you need to do is avoid arch and avoid gentoo and you will be fine.
Isn't Gentoo that aggressive hipster distro?
Triggered ?
It's okay, you did not need to respond I'm a Gentoo bearded monk too :p
I just find it funny that whenever there's someone asking for an easy distro there's always someone to say Gentoo/Arch even though they perfectly know that the OP does not know/care.
If someone asks for a Walmart alternative you probably won't appreciate that a group of people debate that classic on-street mini farmer market place are for hipsters or enthusiasts/amateur cooks/chefs and wether ironically making a joke about them is bad for the chefs community and restaurants or childish and not relevant to the topic...
Hey @friendlydeathray
You can try Open Suse which is an easy to use and sustainable distro (you won't need to reinstall or troubleshoot every time you upgrade as it is a smooth process.) Good luck in finding your drug of choice :D
Linux Mint Rebecca with Cinnamon or XFCE is indeed a good OS to start with.
Its very complete out of the box allready.
You are basicly go to go with it,
Its based of Debain / Ubuntu 14.02, so it does run on an older 3.13 kernel, But still its a very stable OS.
You can download 3 diffrent versions of Mint 17.1.
- Cinnamon desktop
- XFCE desktop
- Mate desktop
You could also go with one of the Ubuntu variants of course.
Distributions that encourage users to take full control:
- Arch Linux
- Debian (base install)
- Gentoo
- Linux From Scratch
Noob-friendly distributions:
- Ubuntu
- Linux Mint
- OpenSUSE (YaST is nice, I initially found it repulsive but grew to appreciate the work put into it)
Uhhhhhhhhh wat? If someone feels intimidated by linux, then arch and gentoo are not the distros to start with.
End of story.
If someone were just starting out and they really wanted to jump in and get their hands dirty, then fine. Otherwise, no.
I don't think any of those words can describe gentoo ..., its a distro for folks who don't mind compilling stuff & also want to do everything on their own. I have a friend that uses Gentoo with E17 and it looked ok last time I checked, but I don't think it's a good distro for beginners, unless you used some Unix, Solaris or FreeBSD before or you want to learn really fast. I personally use arch Linux with bspwm it's kinda simple and also very flexible, well maybe a bit simpler than Gentoo since it has precompiled binaries and Arch User Repository filled with scripts to compile stuff easily.
But I guess that you are just a newcomer so I'd rather recommend those:
regular distros:
Ubuntu .. if you like Unity
Ubuntu GNOME .. it looks cool, but I personally never liked gnome 3, but Logan likes it .. so I guess its cool :D
Linux Mint w Cinnamon.. It's much like windows xp & based on Ubuntu
Elementary OS .. if you like apple
rolling release
Linux Mint LMDE .. based on debian, cool I guess
Manjaro .. if you like the arch way but are too lazy to install bare arch linux
slower devices
Archbang
Puppy linux .. I use it as a backup
I think the problem mainly comes from conflating 'simple' and 'beginner' together. Simple != beginner. To former and existing Arch/Gentoo users, their respective distributions are simpler because they know exactly what's going on in their system, after all, they built it for their personal use cases.
I mostly subscribe to the KISS principle that Arch embodies having been an Arch user myself. I find it simpler to troubleshoot Arch if any problem arises, unlike other distributions such as Ubuntu where large numbers of packages are installed by default.
The almost evangelistic nature of Arch/Gentoo users stems from this realization: That most issues posted on Helpdesk subforums could be solved if users would just take the reins and get to know their systems. However this is also unrealistic and impractical for many people.
I understand what you are saying to a degree.
However I already know that this user is probably not very keen on learning linux to that kind of a degree that quickly.
It would be one thing if he came in and really wanted to get under the hood of linux and really play around with stuff.
But for someone who just wants to play around and get a taste for what it can do, then arch and gentoo are not the distributions for him.
He will be much more at home with an ubuntu based distro or opensuse where you have some app stores and some more advanced settings gui so that he can avoid the terminal until he is ready to start messing around.
Listen. THIS is part of the reason a lot of us n00bs are intimidated. There is so much disagreement in the Linux community. We couldn't even have a thread about easy introduction Linuxs without getting in an argument about the true definition of blah distro. We complain about the fragmented community but we continue on our tendencies of elitism and segregation.
WHY CAN'T WE JUST GET ALONG?!
just stay ontopic, and recommend some Distro´s.
Starting a discussion war about 2 particular distro´s is totaly offtopic,
and does not make any sense at all.
Topic starter asked for an easy to use distro.
The only thing you can do is just recommend a distro which you think is easy to use for him.
In the end we are all individuals, so its just a matter of trying things out.
Install Virtualbox, download some distro´s and go and play arround with it.
Is my advice.
I would run the big name distros (Ubuntu, Opensuse, Fedora, Mint) in a Virtualbox and find what you like and don't and then learn to customize or find a specialist that meets your needs.
I'd recommend Linux Mint or Ubuntu. It's pretty and super user friendly. It's intimidating at first, but once you install it, I think you'll find it's a lot easier than you expect. In addition, if you decide you want to dive a little deeper, you totally can because it's still Linux.
I use Linux as my daily driver (Fedora and openSUSE at work, Ubuntu at home) and my recommendation would first be to find a display manager that you prefer. Not that all distros are the same, because they aren't, but for an introductory user I would think that the display manager would be the primary determining factor of how well one perceives the Linux experience. For example, GNOME drives me insane, I cannot be productive in an GNOME environment, but LXDE for VMs and KDE for physical machines and I can work. You can easily play around with this as many distros come in flavors with different display managers and then you can worry about finding the right distro for you.
As a beginner, I think that Mint is a good choice, I personally like Ubuntu (once you remove the junk and ad crap). Both are easy to pick up and have just worked for me. I will say playing with Arch and Gentoo taught me a great deal but they wouldn't be my go to choices for a first time Linux user.
If you are referring to Ubuntu based distros that would not boot or freeze when booting then there is a issue with the swap disk space if you do an automatic install on Virtual box. For some reason the VM requires more swap space than the automatic install and the boot behaves erratically. I always had this problem on VB with ubuntu and could not understand why until I just made one with a lot of swap space manually and it worked.
Install the OS manually and add a lot of swap space on the VM disk (5-6GB+) and it should work fine.
ALso check your motherboard and CPU virtualization capabilities. That might also be the problem.