Today, lovely Windows 11 installed an update. And since then I don’t have internet access because Microslop Wincrap 11 can somehow magically no longer connect to the DNS server - to any DNS server. No other device in my network has the same issue. I’ve been bugfixing for over an hour and haven’t found a solution. setting the DNS manually, resetting the network adapter, flushed all DNS entries (I used the commandline tool on Windows!). nothing works.
I don’t have ANY more patience with W11!
I already tried Linux. I’m using Ubuntu Server for hosting Nextcloud and Fedora just to play around.
Do you prefer Fedora or Ubuntu? I have an old Thinkpad…
(And no, I will not go down the rabbit hole of Arch ;-) At least not for now.)
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Fedora is wonderful. I would not recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Fuck Canonical, who fancy themselves the next Microsoft.
For an easy version of Arch, try Cachy.
Ubuntu? What is this, 2008?
fedora > ubuntu
personally, i like the ublue images, at least for general desktop and gaming - bluefin and bazzite.
Fedora
Im using linux Mint. no issues so far, except maybe dropbox integration. never going back to microslop
Love Linux Mint. I switched to LMDE, stable as a rock. PC came with windows installed. Removed crapware immediately.
I think the standard recommendation for people coming from windows is to try Linux Mint. It’s Ubuntu based, but the interface is more windows like, which helps easy the transition. The transition is also easied if you’ve been using open source alternatives on windows or the linux for windows subsystem. Anything to keep the amount you have to learn at once relatively low.
I wish you the best on linux, but if you find the interface differences are too much for you and decide to go back to windows, try these other things to make switching to linux later easier. As fanatical as the linux community is, there’s no shame in needing a longer more gradual transition.
Echoing everyone else, Mint. Bazzite (which is Fedora based) if you’re planning to run more recent games on it. Mint isn’t bad at running games by any means, Bazzite is just more fine tuned towards it. With Cinnamon/KDE they basically feel like Windows minus the bloat.
Don’t settle immediately. If you can spare the time, distro hop for a few weeks / months. On the shorter run of things, give each OS you try a good week before moving on to the next. All distros do essentially the same thing, they just flavor it diffetently. Do you like typing apt, or dnf, pacman or yum? Do you prefer being deep in CLI or prefer using an application store? How do you like your userspace to look? Shiny? Bubbly? Classic? Retro? GNOME, Plasma, Xfce, Mate, Cosmic?
There’s enough options out there to make your head spin. Without touching arch, you should at least visit the following -
Little Champs
- Mint
- Zorin
- Endeavour
- Pop OS
Big Champs
- Fedora KDE (or any of its “spins” https://fedoraproject.org/spins/)
- Ubuntu (and its corresponding “flavors” https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors)
- Debian
- Arch (just one of the four main pillars)
Gaming focus
- Bazzite (fedora)
- Nobara (fedora)
- Cachy (arch)
Give each or those that pique your interest a fair shake. A week at the minimum. Some you may not need a week, some you’ll find yourself in a natural swing of things. You’ll know when you know.
I’m on Win10 LtSC IOT… The only reason I moved from Win7 to that operating system was so I could keep steam alive. My steam account is 18-19 years old. Any one have step by step instructions on how to get the nicest, easiest to use Linux distro for a guy who uses 5 different windows keyboard shortcuts entry 5 minutes?
I’ve been with Windows since 95, I’ve been working in IT support since XP… I just want to get away from Microsoft, keep all my games, keep a file explorer and be able to quick change my brain to learn new (just as easy ) keyboard shortcuts like Crtl-C, Ctrl-F, Win-R, Win-E…
With most Linux OS’s you have a choice of what desktop environment to use. The desktop environment controls most of what I would call the OS experience. Most linux distros will have KDE or Gnome installed as the default desktop environment, though there are often some more minimal or power-user focused desktop environments offered. I’ve heard Cinnamon is another good choice.
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-F, F3, F11 generally behave the same on most Linux desktop environment and software as they do on Windows.
Alt-Tab, Alt-F4 are commonly supported
For the run menu, Alt-F2 opens a similar menu in KDE and Gnome. I can only go into the specifics with KDE, but I can also run commands with the regular Windows key start menu. Though when I personally run commands, I generally open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) so I can get tab completion. On KDE, Win+E opens a file explorer. Almost all the keyboard shortcuts are customizable on KDE, but I prefer to swim with the current whenever possible.
For some distros, you can write a “Live” version to a flash drive to try it out before installing, but opening applications will be slower than running on an SSD.
these days computers are fairly cheap. just have two, one for games and such, the other for browsing and wotnot
Having multiple OSes is such a boon for doing… everything hahaha. Last night Windows was playing games and my MacBook was taking a long while to copy a huge folder over from server to server in my house, so I initiated the transfer from a Debian machine that was just playing media for our cats and let that run for a few hours. I had to walk over to it, though—my machine didn’t wanna RDP into it. What kinda world do we live in where I have to GO TO IT?! Wild.
Kubuntu has been pretty nice to me. It has the beginner friendliness of Ubuntu and the modern desktop of KDE
Highly recommend Fedora over Ubuntu.
Ubuntu Server and Desktop has some dumb defaults that look measly next to Windows, but still annoying next to Fedora.
Fedora also generally has more solid documentation without a bunch of LTS slag threads with outdated answers.
Any distro > Ubuntu > Qubes (not for beginners haha)
Bazzite on my gaming machine, Bluefin on my other machines. Both are Fedora Atomic based (meaning read-only kernel). Secure, stable, amazing. Apps are installed via Flatpak, and cli tools using Homebrew.
I’ve been a full time Linux user for 25ish years now. I’m currently happy here, but have tried most of them
I’ve been on Bazzite for like 2 years now, and I’ve never (purposely) used Brew. What kinds of things do you use it for?
Not a whole ton truthfully. If you run ‘brew list’, you’ll see a lot of things already installed via Homebrew. The main one I install explicitly is ‘yt-dlp’, and I’ve played with llama.cpp and similar too
Hmmm, I use yt-dlp but forget exactly how I installed it. Definitely not flatpak, definitely not distrobox, and I’m pretty sure I never layered it.
App image maybe?
Edit: I think I literally just downloaded the Linux binary?
I used to download their binary from github and put in /usr/local/bin
Hoembrew will update that now whenever I update my system so I don’t think about it anymore.Hmmm, I guess I’ve just been running an outdated version of it for a while then.
I had a great experience with Fedora on my thinkpad, it’s almost as if they’re made for each other. It’s basically the testing version for Redhat. If you want something more stable and still enterprisey, Rocky Linux or Almalinux are both basically RHEL rebranded.
I’ve abandoned Ubuntu, even though it was what I started on and used for over a decade. Canonical is kind of like the Microsoft of linux right now, a bit hostile toward the rest of the community, but still an acceptable choice. I would recommend Linux Mint instead, though.
Keep in mind that the look and feel you’ll experience is all the desktop environment, so if you don’t like it, trying using a different one instead of looking at a new distro. I highly recommend using a few live USBs of what you want you try before installing to get a feel for what you like.
