From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I've been dual-booting Linux and Windows for a while, with Windows as the fall-back option in case I wanted to use Office for something. Now that they tried to trick me into paying a subscription for their AI slop machine, I'm finally, fully out. It was a pain to actually track down and back-up the stuff that was held for ransom in OneDrive, but now it is done.
What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?
I'm currently making a list of distros and looking at each's pros and cons, including:
I started trying out Linux a few years ago, on a few different computers. Well first, a really long time ago, but I was a Mac user for a long time, and then switched to Windows in 2018, so my modern Linux experience started in 2021 or so.
On my home PC I started with Mint, but because I was doing some programming, ran into problems because the compilers and CMake there were too old to compile a few things I needed to work on (CUDA was the problem for CMake, C++20 was the problem for the compilers). Switched to Tumbleweed, was happy with that for a while.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I switched from Manjaro to Fedora KDE spin after some stability problems, and was so pleasantly surprised by how it was both solid and up-to-date, that I ended up moving everything to that.
Edit: biggest problem I had was when I tried to install Mint on an office PC that I built for myself. Mint didn't support the on-board ethernet so I had no way of getting it online, and after getting lost in forum posts, gave up.
I used to recommend Mint a lot, but it's falling too far behind hardware wise and in the front end. Lack of default Wayland support and so many unsupported hardware is not where you want to be sending new users today.
+1 for Fedora based distros at this point. I tend to push Nobara because it has a lot of hardware tweaks built in to give a better out of the box experience, but I can't really say vanilla Fedora has had issues as long as I was on an AMD platform.
Mint is cool. But, that mint in other menu. LMDE bookworm based. Rock solid and no slugish