Yet another help to choose distro

My personal, biased, potentially unhelpful contribution: Fedora, Ubuntu LTS, Mint, and maybe Solus. Not that I dislike Solus, but it’s new(ish) and can come with issues regarding stability.

I would not go with Manjaro or Antergos. I used Antergos for the longest time, and my laptop even has a sticker of the logo on it. However, whenever I ran into an issue that I couldn’t solve, EVERY TIME I asked for help I was met with “Antergos isn’t Arch” flooding the discussion. No one wanted to help me as much as they wanted to tell me I was pathetic and weak for running a “fake” version of Arch. In my experience, and this sentiment isn’t shared so take it with a pinch of a pinch of a PINCH of salt, the Arch community sucks ass. Antergos as a forum ain’t bad, but sometimes there is a communication barrier and a delay in response time. Not the end of the world, but when you’re trying to get your system booted for school and no one is around to answer, or those that do answer are pretentious prick bags, it kind of sucks.

Far from everyone else’s experience, just giving you my perspective on it. I could never get Manjaro installed, something about my board’s UEFI + NVidia.

1 Like

I’ll make sure to check it out!

Sounds good that it doesn’t kill itself! AUR = Arch User Repository?

Not sure how system.d works and neither sure if a total Linux newbie should care? What’s the difference between system.d and it oppnonents? (init?)

Thanks for the heads-up on Solus.

Damn, that sounds like one poisoned community! Not sure if I as a total noob want to jump in such community…

True, I mainly want a system that works and if the community is sort of small, it might not be a good idea for me. Thanks for sharing your experience and story.

Doesn’t sound promising.

As @Eden said get a second drive for the Linux install.

There’s lots of good distros out there. Of your suggestions I’ll say go with:

Ubuntu Mate
Linux Mint
Ubuntu (LTS)

Ubuntu will have official support from manufacturers and commercial developers. Fedora is good but as @Goblin noted its the stallman approach and needs all the good stuff installed afterward through CLI.

With the invidia card you may run into an issue at install where you need to set nomodeset in grub at startup to see the installer GUI.

Good luck.

Yup. :+1:

Korora might be an alternative for that but I haven’t really tried that myself.

It shouldn’t need this done through the cli.

I remember having to install 3rd party repos, codecs, 32bit libs and the proprietary graphics drivers that way.

1 Like

Shouldn’t need to these days for the majority of stuff.

Rpmfusion is can be installed without touching the command line. Everything is available in gnome-software, from there including Nvidia drivers and codecs. Gnome should pick up most codecs if it sees you need one and will suggest to install the right one (not 100% of the time but works quite well)

32 libs is maybe the only thing, I’ve not checked. Really you may only need to do that to install Nvidia 32 lib if needed.

1 Like

Also @wolfleben made a very nice guide for new users about choosing a linux distro.
It also comes with some screenshots of several DE’s that are arround in the linux world.

I would say check it out.

A good thing to start with, is to firstlly choose a DE that fits your workflow best.
And go from there choosing a distribution.

1 Like

I will! Thanks for making me aware of the guide :raised_hands:

I believe this is the best video to watch before picking out a distro.

3 Likes

Thanks for sharing the video. The reason for me creating this thread is to simply avoid distros that don’t fulfill my requirements, such as Steam. Other than that, I don’t favor any distro over others at this point.

I pretty much let the hardware determine what distro I use. I just got a new laptop and it took awhile for me to find the right fit. I settled on POP_OS. My old computer still runs Ubuntu Trusty Tahr with the 3.13 kernel. The people here will think that system is from the Jurassic era. I say…it works:smile:

1 Like

Fedora is very bare bones. As SudoWolf said you have to manually add all 3rd party tools to make it usable. I remember the base install of Fedora 22 couldn’t even play youtube videos or play mp3 files. It was pathetic.

And the latest version of Gnome will not let you place icons on Desktop. Which defeats the whole point of having desktop. Get something with KDE or XFCE. It doesn’t really matter what distro you use they all do the same thing.

@Faller and did you allready found something you like?

I’m still in the process of installing distros to my VM. Been busy with some other stuff.

1 Like

Different strokes for seperate folks… i hate desktop icons so im fine with that. however there is a package in the gnome extensions that allow you to do this… fyi. Also im pretty sure there is in the AUR. or at least ive seen it

Yeah well finding the right DE is very personal.
Everyone has a different workflow and way of doing things.
But it also depends a bit on your hardware aswell.
Its really a matter of finding the right balance.
Every DE will have its pro’s and con´s there is no perfect DE out there.

Or just run Debian unstable with i3 -gaps and no DE at all.

1 Like

After 3 months running Linux and Fedora/Gnome for the first time I got out my old laptop and I installed Lubuntu, Ubuntu/Unity and Ubuntu/Gnome and I just could not stand them.

Gnome is super intuitive to use, I never thought I would replace desktop icons but superkey + typing is super fast and easy to launch programs.

I also prefer dnf from the apt and apt-get mess I experienced in Ubuntu but that may be because I got used to dnf.

I got some bugs and a couple of crashes and freezes on Fedora but that is the price to pay for faster updates.

Best of all, I have learned so much and continue to keep learning, I got comfortable with the cli and ssh and I would throw away my Windows SSD if it wasn’t for Adobe.

Best of luck

In my ~/Desktop folder, I have a bunch of entries that show up on my desktop as icons I can click an they execute some program. For example, this entry executes “ssh remote” in an xterm when I click it. I have no idea how this is supposed to work, just that it does allow desktop icons under gnome.

$ cat ~/Desktop/remote.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Remote
GenericName=Terminal
Comment=ssh to remote
Exec=xterm -e ssh remote
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Icon=/home/user/svg/remote.svg
Categories=System;TerminalEmulator;
$ cat ~/svg/remote.svg
<svg width="48" height="48" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
 <!-- Created with SVG-edit - http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/ -->
 <g>
  <title>Layer 1</title>
  <rect id="svg_2" height="38" width="38" y="5" x="5" stroke-linecap="null" stroke-linejoin="null" stroke-dasharray="null" stroke-width="0" stroke="#000000" fill="#70fff0"/>
  <text xml:space="preserve" text-anchor="middle" font-family="serif" font-size="24" id="svg_1" y="32" x="24" stroke-linecap="null" stroke-linejoin="null" stroke-dasharray="null" stroke-width="0" stroke="#000000" fill="#000000">remote</text>
 </g>
</svg>