this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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[–] notnotmike 35 points 8 months ago (49 children)

In the spirit of these kinds of changes, I'd love to hear some honest Linux distribution recommendations. I'm leaning towards Ubuntu because it is the most widely advertised and UX focused from my perspective. But I've also heard good things about Arch. Any others I should be considering?

I'll probably not go full Linux any time soon - I want at least one Windows OS to play games on - so whatever option it should be dual-boot friendly.

[–] swordsmanluke 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If not vanilla Ubuntu, I'd still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it'll be easier to find fixes for it.

What you'll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a "family" (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

The major families at the moment are

  • Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

  • Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven't used it in a decade, so I won't say much about it here.

  • Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. ... Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros... But not necessarily in distros from other families.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

And Zorin. I don't hear much about it but it's what I switched to from Win 10 and I've been liking it.

That + Steam Proton has me playing my old Windows-only games.

[–] swordsmanluke 2 points 8 months ago

Yup. Zorin's another great Debian-based distro. I've been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I'm a fan.

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