I started with mint, but the more I see about Bazzite the more I wish I had started there. It just seems slightly more aligned to my needs.
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markko@lemmy.world 1 week agoAs someone who was in your exact position several years ago, nice!
I’d recommend Linux Mint to newcomers though. It’s based on Ubuntu and is even easier to get comfortable with (much better GUI for updates and app “store”), but it strips out all the Microsoft-like stuff that Canonical have been doing in recent years.
Pop!_OS (also based on Ubuntu) and Bazzite are also meant to be beginner friendly, and are particularly geared towards gaming on Linux, especially the latter.
eronth@lemmy.world 1 week ago
markko@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Great thing about Linux is you can change your distro whenever you want.
If you’re uncertain, or not ready to go through the process just yet, you can always just boot Bazzite off a USB drive and play around with it for now.
eronth@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Wouldn’t that wipe my current data? Like, sure I can install Bazzite, but there’s more setup to be done once again, and if I dislike it then I’m going through the setup once more. I understand it’s not that hard all things considered, but it’s not necessarily easy to just go mucking around with it with limited free time.
markko@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Oh yeah there’s definitely a bit of effort involved, but most distros have very similar directory setups, so it’s often just a matter of copying across the relevant folders, with the “home” folder being the one that typically contains most or all of your user data.
Being able to test run distros off a USB drive is a great (and easy) way to see if it might be for you without making any sort of commitment.
Another option is to install the distro to a second hard drive so you have a more permanent environment to test it. I’ve done this before, and when I was content that I wanted to switch to it I just copied all my stuff across.
BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I actually went with Tuxedo OS, which is based on the Ubuntu kernel but has a very noob-friendly desktop environment.
My daily driver laptop is a 12-year-old Hackintosh MBP that I’ve been repairing for years, but I’ve priced out a Tuxedo laptop for when it finally kicks the bucket. So I started dual booting Tuxedo on that as well to get my bearings.
Once I’m a little more experienced, I’m definitely interested to check out other distros! Right now it’s a lot of looking up terminal commands and learning the architecture. The firmware fan control in the MacBook is shot - fans blasting at full speed due to a failed GPU temp sensor that makes the computer assume it’s overheating - so I’ve already learned how to write to /sys/ with a custom fan control based on the working sensor in the CPU die.
It’s been really fun so far. You get the sense of just having vastly greater control over the hardware at a low level and the ability to control how it functions in a way that Windows and MacOS completely obfuscate. I still have very little idea what I’m doing in the terminal, but I’m starting to pick it up.