Noob trying Linux :)

Hi all,

I’m a noob trying out Linux. I’m here to learn.

Have been trying out Distros for about a week now.

I was inspired by the Level 1 videos and your crossover videos with Linus about gaming on Linux.

I’ve been a long (30 + year) MacOS guy who has on and off built Windows gaming PC’s.

I hate how Win10 has become pure spyware. And a little upset at apple for going through another let’s get rid of all the connectors and upgradeability stage. So I’m learning Linux!

Currently I’ve got an old WIn7 Dell triple booting Win7, Elementary, and Mint.

I’m loving Elementary, it just feels like home. Mint has been giving me hassles, but I finally got it up and running. I’ll have lots of questions in other sections about problems I’m having.

I’m here because one of your videos talking about how unfriendly some of the Linux community can be (I’ve had a mixed bag so far of good and bad) and this was a friendly place to call home.

So hi :slight_smile:

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Hello bro, welcome to the community!

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LOL. The Linux subreddit. And the Arch forums.

you forgot every canonical sponsored media provider

Welcome!

Yep, we try to be as friendly as possible. Regardless, we’re here to help with anything.

We’ve seen some major strides in terms of Linux gaming in the last year or so. I’m excited for the future. :smiley:

You mentioned currently using Elementary and Mint. Were there any others that stuck out at you?

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I started on an even older WinXP machine with Puppy, Bodhi, and then was suggested AntiX… Puppy I couldn’t get to install, only run from CD. Bodhi I couldn’t get running right. AntiX was running until 2 of the 3 ram slots stopped working. That was day 1-3 of my Linux experience.

Then I switched to the Win7 Dell which was a great leap forward in computing power. I tried Deepin but it was crashing and messing up in various ways constantly. Then I tried Elementary and fell in love. Everyone was like try Manjaro, Mint or Ubuntu. I just don’t like the looks of Manjaro and the proprietary nature of Ubunto, plus the default install looks ugly to me.

Mint has been nothing but hassles. Elementary has some quirks but it just feels like home.

People were getting upset at me for not liking Manjaro and Ubunto… guess I’m stepping on holy cows or something???

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Bro. I loved puppy. I had a hard time using it. But it was amazing, because of how fast it was.

MX Linux or Antix are better RAM based Linux Distributions in my opinion.

I didn’t read your whole post yet. Just replied when I saw you mentioned puppy.

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Manjaro and ubuntu are bad, you shouldn’t feel bad for disliking them.

Try solus maybe, very good UX and up to date packages.

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I like puppy and use it to reformat the hard disks when I mess up installing other distros.

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if you install your /home on a separate partition you don’t need to worry about losing data when swapping distros. Just set your uname and password to the same thing on the next install and all your documents etc. will be there.

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People get super opinionated about things. (Personally, Mint doesn’t do it for me, but Fedora does, for example) The difference is that some people turn into distro zealots. Don’t let that get to you. You’ll find that here as well, but it’s just a side effect of being passionate, in my opinion.

Yep, Mint has its difficulties. There are design philosophy reasons for that.

Linux works on a lot of cool old hardware and often it doesn’t become unusable until you encounter hardware failures. That’s the beauty of it. :smiley:

I’m going to second @tkoham’s recommendation to check out Solus. If you like the simplicity of Elementary, you might like Solus as well.

Like I said above. Zealots. Each person has their niche and you just need to find yours.


Anyways, I’m off for the evening. Enjoy your newfound addiction and have fun all!

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I’ll put Solus on my list. I think I remember liking it when I saw some of the “top distros for 2018” videos.

First I’m going to try to get my head around Elementary and Mint for a while :slight_smile:

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thing is, practices on ubuntu based distributions (mint, elementary) aren’t really applicable anywhere else. You’re learning how to trick ubuntu into working rather than use a sane linux system. Just my 2 cents.

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I switched to Linux around a month ago. (Already that long, heh).

It was the best decisions I’ve made in years. Increased my productivity, and among other things. As someone who works with computers IRL, and spends a lot of time in my desktop, you could argue it’s even improved my quality of life.

I know Linux community makes jokes about it, but I decided to go with an Ubuntu-based distro. Nearly everything works on it, and it still gives you nice quality of use tools for new users.

Since I wanted a KDE environment, I went with Kubunto. Hope it helps, and welcome!

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I thought Elementry was it’s own little thing, didn’t realize it was a Ubunto distro.

AsimpleRadio. No clue what a KDE is… lol I’m a noob’s noob.

It’s the desktop environment.

Linux doesn’t have a Desktop like windows where each one is the same. There are a few different options, and unless you install something like Arch most distros make that choice for you.

KDE is an environment I liked quite a bit the few times I worked with it, and in VMs. Kubunto is a distro based off of Ubunto that uses KDE, as Ubunto uses… Gnome maybe?

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It’s a desktop environment. Manages how the GUI looks and how things interact with each other.

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ubuntu used to use unity (sort of a kludged together fork of gnome 2 iirc.) now they use a kludgetomized Gnome by default.

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Ok, so it’s like Windows on top of DOS. That’s why Mint has Cinnamon and others listed I guess??

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Elementary is based on Ubuntu 16.04 with the Pantheon desktop as default.

If you haven’t already, check out https://distrowatch.com/ for other distros to try. And an fyi, if you find a desktop environment you like, you can install it on any distro. In the past I’ve seen people install Mint Mate and then do a total reinstall for Mint Cinnnamon when they only had to just install the Cinnamon desktop.

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