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.
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.