Yet another help to choose distro

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Hey knowledgeable people,

I am getting tired of privacy intrusion of Windows 10 and are expanding my view to a Linux distro.

The computer I’m using is a Dell XPS 15" (9560) with an i7 7700HQ, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1050 and 512 GB SSD. Yes, a laptop and I do enjoy the long battery life of the machine (~8 hours).

I am in the progress of testing different distros (CentOS, Debian, ElementaryOS, Fedora, Linux Mint, Manjaro, OpenSUSE, Parrot Desktop, Ubuntu, Xubuntu), but this is far from over. I am in the process of installing other distros after some research (Antergos, Neon KDE, PCLinuxOS, Mageia) in a virtualized environment.

So far, I have not done any proper application testing. As for desktop environment, I have Gnome3, Pantheon, Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE and Unity available. So far, I am not fan of Gnome.

Then, my usage of the computer will mainly consist of web surfing, some gaming (mainly CS:GO via Steam), writing (currently working on my master thesis) and more generic but simple use as communication (Skype, Slack etc) and watching movies, listen to music (I am a BIG user of spotify).

I am a big fan of cloud storage, which is where I keep documents etc. Today, I mainly use OneDrive, but am looking to create my own cloud storage in the future.

I am aware that more and more applications can be run through a web browser, so this is probably a case of adaptation and getting used to access these resoruces via the browser. (As you probably understand, I am an easy guy with a ton patience and understanding.

TL;DR: I am looking for a Linux distro which support Steam and daily use for browing.

What distro would you recommend for me? I will run this via virtual box to begin with, and when money allow me, I will buy another SSD. This means I can fall back to Windows, which would be stored on another SSD. No dual-boot.

2

My thought.

Get a SSD now, Install Fedora and use it for a good month before thinking about trying anything else.

It supports what you want, works with steam, has a browser ( :stuck_out_tongue: )

Gnome supports nextcloud, Google drive and a few others.

Feodra also supports the XPS, and gets firmware updates naively through fwupd (this comes through gnome-software by default you don’t need to mess around with crap on the command line)

What you want is to get stuff done, I think feodra is a good place for that it’s on the leading edge so your not behind of packages and software and new stuff in Linux, but also pretty stable (quite so on the XPS from everything I hear).

What puts you off gnome? Have you used it extensively?

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3

Thanks for the recommendation Eden!

The reason for why I don’t get a SSD now is simply lack of money :disappointed:
It’s nice to hear that Gnome supports the XPS and also receives firmware updates natively.

I must admit I haven’t used it extensively by any means. But I find the “Application” tab in the upper left corner to be a bit messy and I don’t like the design of the sidebar when one opens the “application”. Probably me that’s being a bit quirky :laughing:

But you are correct that I just want to get stuff done, instead of tinkering to fix small pieces of things.

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You can get a plugin for the application bit for it to be the default or a more classic menu type for example.

Fwupd works below gnome-software, so it works without gnome. It just happens that they integrated it with gnome-software nicely. Fwupd is a red hat / fedora project I think so it came there first and got integrated with gnome obviously

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I’ll check out the customization possibilities then!

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I love fedora, Eden got it. however if you find it too challenging and can’t find answers to your problems online, I usually suggest Ubuntu for first timers just because there’s a lot of help for it online, whatever you want to do on Ubuntu, someone already wrote an article about it or it’s been already discussed on a forum and it’s one or two clicks away from an internet search

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You don’t have a good experience without addons, and addons make it slow and crash, and crash means work. That’s why KDE is better.

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That’s super vague, and not really the OPs answer. I’ll agree that the quality of addons varies if this is what you are wanting to say, but you haven’t provided anything about them making anything slow or crash. (KDE heavily relies on addons, though i think they do the implementation a little better)

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Thanks for the answer as well. To me, it seems like there is a lot of information available on Fedora as well (their own forum, guides and documentation on the website). I will check out Fedora and its spinoffs related to DE.

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10

This is one of the reasons I went with Solus for desktop. You give up some features and inherit some quirks, but for me, the Budgie DE is intuitive to use and customize. There is Budgie on Ubuntu as well, but I don’t think it’s as stable.

Fedora is my second choice for desktop/laptop.

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What kind of features is missing out in Solus compared to Fedora?

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Okay here’s my less vague answer - Gnome shell runs on a single thread. Guess where addons run too … in Gnome shell… the more addons you have even if they are well written the slower the experience feels. And sometimes the shell crashes … which mean extra work. I am lazy so I am skipping Gnome as a whole.

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The disk options at installation are often cited as the most limited. You can set up LVM and LUKS but no MD or EFI, and no separate partitions. You can technically get all of that working, but it can involve varying amounts of headache to do so. However, if you have a single disk and are OK with good old fashioned BIOS booting, then it won’t be an issue for you.

Additionally, Solus has its own package manager which has fewer things available than apt/yum/dnf. But it’s really case-by-case as to whether or not they’re missing something you need.

One advantage is that it’s rolling release, so you never have to worry about upgrades, just updates (that’s the gist anyway).

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Way over my level of understanding (lack of hands-on, I guess)

I see. I guess I have to check out Solus myself to see if the apps I need (basically Steam, most other can be run via the web browser) is able to run.

I don’t mind, as long as the system feels stable.

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If that is the case, then it will be fine. No problem installing Steam and Chrome.

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It actually does systemd booting. But since its automatic most people won’t know what it does unless they look post install.

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Interesting. Mine definitely doesn’t have an EFI partition, but it’s on a smallish drive. I thought there was an extra step for EFI/systemd, but I guess not.

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fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sdd: 238.5 GiB, 256060514304 bytes, 500118192 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 5C60F393-17C9-4122-8554-1ED3EDBA2EE1

Device       Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sdd1       64   1000063   1000000 488.3M EFI System
/dev/sdd2  1000095   8812594   7812500   3.7G Linux swap
/dev/sdd3  8812626 500116238 491303613 234.3G Linux filesystem
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Disk /dev/sdb: 118 GiB, 126701535232 bytes, 247463936 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x58a483f8

Device     Boot  Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1  *        93    586029    585937 286.1M 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2       586061 247461982 246875922 117.7G 8e Linux LVM

:man_shrugging:

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Might be LVM related?

I get the point of having a ‘just click next installer’ to make it more newb friendly, but I do wish there were an ‘I know what I’m doing’ toggle switch.

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