So, I was told you can take any distro, pair it with any desktop environment, and badda bing, badda boom, unique linux in the room!
And a few years ago I tried getting into linux, and it didn't work. I didn't like ubuntu. I want something that's basically like Windows 98.
Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. Well, I had some issue with one program, and I'm an idiot on linux. Have no clue what I'm doing. So the guides tell me to update the thing. So I do that, and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!
I never got it to start working again, and I just said screw it, I'm not dealing with this. Put it in a drawer, and haven't touched it in about a year.
Well, now I'm think I'll just start fresh. Install a new distro, and since Ubuntu seems to be the one with the most support, I'll use that. Then I find out that LXDE visually is more in line with what I want.
So I figure I'll slap on ubuntu, slap on LXDE, and then install retropie. And hopefully the fan will work again. So I start researching this LXDE, and the home page wants you to download the desktop environment already baked into a DIFFERENT distro! Wait, hold on. Am I wrong in thinging you can just download a desktop environment, and slap it on any distro? Because it might be me. I have no clue what I'm doing. And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for "Ubuntu Help", there's no community named that. There's also no community named "Linux help". Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you'd think would have a linux help community! This place loves linux. Does everyone just always know what they're doing at all all times? Or am I just going crazy? I feel like I'm walking blind into a forest and bear traps line the ground. I have no idea how to even start this process....
Because nobody understands everything, but our individual areas of expertise vary from person to person. So you seek help on the things that confuse you.
There have been some helpful people in this thread. You're not one of them. Instead you're displaying the same attributes that take the most open and free operating system, and give it the reputation as being closed gated.
It would be like a mechanic rolling his eyes at you for not knowing how to replace a muffler, or change your own oil.
If I got it right, rpi-6.3.y introduced a PWM fan control bug - roughly September last year.
Other people already explained how to switch DEs.
My question wasn't driven by gatekeeping, but by tone and comparison. Linux has to deal with both modularity and UX and still be better than Windows in most topics. Granted, OP wasn't awful about this, but if we had no easy answer, for example because it hasn't been implemented yet to be easy, this community, LXDE and TwisterOS would've likely caused another "Linux is shit!", if not directly for OP, but then for those who lurk. There is a great anxiety in our beginner-friendlyness. Being open to newbies is how things got accomplished, but Linux shouldn't be the safe haven for those who were failed by other OS alone.
Maybe I shouldn't have said what I said, but I thought the valid issue itself was solved.