Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?
Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 weeks agoWell, Mint is still one of the top recommendations for new users. It gets support for the newest hardware at a bit of a delay, so if you wanted to follow suit with your new gaming PC, it might not be as great of a choice for that for now, but for your laptop, that’s what I’d recommend, if you’re not looking to experiment.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
I’m probably not going to be doing much gaming on my laptop, if any. I could be persuaded to experiment if you have any other suggestions.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Well, that was kind of a general statement. Mint is boring. That’s what it’s good at. That’s why it’s loved and why it’s recommended for new users. Specifically, it’s similar to Windows in many ways. It’s somewhat more customizable, but that’s about it.
With you having used Linux twice before, you could consider something less Windows-like, less boring. I’ll be talking about the desktop environment (DE) rather than distro, because it has much more influence on this. You can use these DEs on various distros.
Xfce isn’t necessarily what modern beauty standards would get flustered by, but many folks like it for its simplicity and because it is perhaps even more boring than Mint (without being Windows-like). There’s a good chance that it still works a lot like back when you used it.
Perhaps also worth mentioning that Mint’s DE is called “Cinnamon”, although it’s developed by the Mint devs, so if you like that a lot, it’s typically worth sticking to Mint.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 2 weeks ago
I did used to use xfce back in the day, yes. Never had a problem with it, but those were maybe simpler times. Might look into KDE this time, why not.
I was really thinking less of the DE and more along the lines of if you had any recommendations that weren’t Ubuntu- or Debian-based, as that’s pretty much all I’ve used I think. But maybe that’s too much experimenting…
Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I always hesitate to recommend distros. 😅
There’s tons out there and they all exist, because some smart person decided to put in lots of work, as the existing ones didn’t match what they wanted.
If we exclude Ubuntu/Debian-based, that narrows it down somewhat. The other major distros are:
It’s the most “maximalist” mainstream distro, in that it preinstalls relatively much software. Personally, I think the other distros are a bit silly with their minimalist tendencies, but yeah, I’m biased. And well, downsides of openSUSE are that it is somewhat niche. You’ll find a helpful, tight-knit community, but it’s less likely that guides mention how to do things on openSUSE. Similarly, you’re less likely to find pre-packaged software for openSUSE. May have to compile from source more often, although SoS has a good amount of software, too.
As for whether a different distro is too much experimenting, if you do jump into it, you’ll understand why I talked about the desktop environment instead. 🙃
The DE makes a much bigger difference. Some people conflate distro and DE, because certain distros will have certain default DEs.
But if you used the same DE on two distros, honestly the main difference you’d notice is a different package manager. Where Ubuntu Studio and Mint use
apt
, openSUSE useszypper
, Fedora usesdnf
and Arch usespacman
. They handle somewhat differently, but largely do the same things (i.e. install/update/remove packages).Obviously, there are more differences to the distros, like how quickly they update and some of the default configuration, like the snapshotting I raved about, but ultimately it’s still a Linux system with much of the same software running on both…