I feel like 75% of Mastodon are people talking about Linux. If you don’t care about Linux you feel alienated. I enjoy Mastodon and Lemmy, but the lack of more diverse subjects gets to me if I browse for too long.
Update: I took your advice and purchased a laptop for Linux, and now I care about it! Problem solved.
Before Lemmy, the last time I had touched Linux was back in the 90s, when it was Red Hat on a dozen+ floppies, minimal GUI, and almost all command line. It wasn’t bad, I just didn’t feel like working that hard and there weren’t all that many training resources for it, so I just slid back into to Mac and Windows. No loss.
But over time things change, and I’m not much of a Mac user anymore – their hardware is far too overpriced to keep reinvesting in it, IMO – and after aging out of regular updates on the last version of OS X that will run on my 2016 MacBook Pro, and then trying and failing to build a fully operational hackintosh on a newer Intel NUC, I just gave up and went back to Windows.
But now I’m here on Lemmy and it’s all Linux all the time, oh and Microsoft sucks but lets talk about Linux again, which was a bit much at first. But the truth is that I just hate Windows 10 anyway, always have, and am only using it because it’s pretty much the default now. So I guess I started listening.
After a few weeks of this Lemmy non-stop Linux
promotiondiscussion, I decided to load it up on a 13 year old MacBook with minimal hardware and see if it was any better than what I remembered. If that old MacBook can run it, I thought, maybe I’ll just set it up as a spare. It’s free, why not?Man, it screams. This is nothing like the Linux I remember from the 90s. Holy shit. Even setting up a Linux printer from a Windows share is almost effortless, and I have never been able to do that with only Windows machines. These are full-fledged, well-supported, well-documented operating systems with great video, audio and even peripheral support. And almost all free and open source (I haven’t paid for anything yet myself, though). I was shocked.
So now I’m trying out Linux distros one by one, wiping and then loading another, seeing what there is to see, and when I’ve tried out all the distros I want to try, I’ll install one and bring the rest of my hardware over to Linux. And not only that, but hardware that was just sitting on a shelf collecting dust is now back in full service, and I can think about things I would not have spent money on before, like building a Plex server or a pihole, because now I have a bunch of available hardware. Win/win/win.
TL;DR: People are praising Linux for a reason. Tune out if you want, but don’t be surprised if it ends up working on you anyway, lol.
I’m so glad I joined lemmy because it made me try out linux too. Haven’t touched my windows partition for months. Used nobara for a while, didn’t play nice with nvidia. Mint has been working almost perfectly.
I got my first real start on linux on Mint, too! Really fond memories of using it with the Cinnamon DE.
Favorite distros so far? For someone who doesn’t want to touch the terminal.
I am absolutely loving Zorin Core as a no-command-line, works out of the box Linux OS.
I don’t mind a bit of command line, but I don’t think I’ve had to open Terminal at all in Zorin, and I’ve had it loaded for about three weeks. Printer installs were painless (HP), and what Windows support there is for Linux is largely built in already. I’m not a gamer, so I couldn’t tell you about that, but so far it’s superb and it has worked for me straight out of the box, everything intuitive and easy to find. There’s also a paid version of Zorin, but I haven’t decided on a distro yet so there’s no point.
Mint (Cinnamon desktop) was fault-free and zippy as hell on minimal hardware, and Pop! OS was also no command line for me, but I didn’t play with it very much and intend to reinstall it when I have more time because I don’t think I gave it a decent shake. (At this point I’m not only looking for distros for myself but also for the BIL, so I am making and testing LiveUSBs for both of us. I didn’t want to give him a LiveUSB for something I’d never installed myself so I wiped Pop! OS to be able to give him another distro I hadn’t already tried.)
I’ve tested over a dozen so far, but those are the most noob-friendly, command-line-free distros I have touched so far, if that helps.
EDITED for clarity
Gentoo, you never half to look at a terminal in that distro. Just white text scrolling on a black backdrop for infinity! The people who like to sit through the end credits of a movie would be ecstatic.
Gentoo is great for two things: Firstly, learning about all the parts that go into a Linux system and how they interact. Secondly, typing
emerge worldinto a shell and feeling like a god raising the continents from the ocean.I love Gentoo but I just can’t live with the compile times. Gentoo does a good job of letting you know how little you know about Linux and how deep the rabbit hole can get.
Gentoo is great if you know how you want things to work and know Linux well enough to make it happen. Gentoo gives you flexibility, transparency and great tooling to help you get there.
I tried Linux for years but always have to go to the terminal for something. There’s a reason it’s a default application on every distribution. The CLI can be daunting for the unfamiliar but it’s actually very powerful.
I love the CLI as it’s more powerful and efficient, but to be honest i can’t rememeber a time when i actually needed it for something basic. Browsing (including mail and movies), editing documents, printing, and most changes in configuration can be done through the graphical interface.
But… why?
Just kidding, I get it. It’s definitely more approachable, and can be more intuitive, for sure. I just loved the whole terminal aesthetic from the first time I saw it, so that’s the hammer I hit every nail with.
I think that’s one of the main differences between users, though we get distracted talking about “productivity” or “control” or what-have-you, when it’s mostly just a matter of taste, deep down.
It’s actually amazing how far it has come even for someone who mained Linux all the way to where it has gotten. I put all my family oldies that aren’t able to tech support themselves on Kinoite and it was seamless even for my grandparents and I haven’t had to service the computers since. No more complaints about things taking longer than before to load either. I wish I had this 20 years ago.
Kinoite Fedora? This OS?
https://fedoraproject.org/kinoite/
I tried Fedora but it was a couple of the built-in spins, KDE and Budgie, none of the forks. This is the first I’ve heard of Kinoite, looks intriguing. I’ll have to give it a shot. Thanks!
That’s the one. I personally use bazzite which has a bunch of gaming stuff and distrobox ready to go. It’s also possible to switch to or between it and any of the other ublue spins with a couple lines in the terminal. I’m not sure if the silver blue based ones like kinoite are included in that. It’s neat being able to try out some other DE’s like hyprland and switch to something else without doing a reinstall or losing personal data.
For my non gamer family members kinoite has everything they need though.
The downsides I’ve noticed so far to these immutable systems is mainly with things like messing with kernel modules and other deep system stuff. I wanted to enable undervolting without disabling secure boot but that seems to require building the kernel with a couple patches and signing modules with a mok and installing the mok to uefi. Annoying. The ‘workaround’ is seemingly to make your own ublue spin which sounds like a pain but I’ll try it eventually.
Other than that most things that aren’t in flatpak or fedora rpm repos via rpm-ostree can be installed using arch Linux via distrobox. It’s a bit janky at first but it’s seamless after going in the distrobox and doing ‘distrobox-export --app (name of program to launch via terminal)’ I didn’t like it at first but I have come to enjoy being able to use the software availability of arch without updating everything every other day.
Thank you for taking the time to write that, because I still have a few more distros to try and getting used to the various repos and installers is part of what I look at: having broad access to whatever apps I may need in the future is a big deal, so that is very valuable information for me anyway; and Fedora having access to all things Arch was a main selling point when I was trying Fedora spins and also EndeavourOS. This is much appreciated. Thanks!