I use OpenSUSE, because it has YaST, which is basically the Control Panel in Windows. Without it, I'd have to use the terminal. It also installs on just about anything.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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The best advice I can give is to just use Linux. Back in early 2006 when I started switching over to Linux I would dual boot, and any time I ran into something that was hard to do on Linux I would just boot into Windows to save time. Eventually I decided to stick with it and not reboot when that would happen. Linux back then was not as user friendly as it is now, so for the most part this should be the exception and not the rule. Obviously some software is going to be Windows specific, but the best thing you can do to learn is just stick with Linux and use it.
As for distros, whatever is the most used which is probably Ubuntu right now, will be best as people will have plenty of answers and questions that will cover what you are going through compared to a niche distro. When you get more experience with Linux, you will get a better sense for what you want out of a distro like rolling releases like Arch, functional package management like with NixOS or whatever else may be important to you. So just stick with Ubuntu or whatever is more popular right now and reevaluate after you get to the point your comfortable with command line tools.
The linux motto to any problem is "it's possible, but here are the pitfalls". You can do almost everything on linux (unlike windows), but the tradeoff is it can sometimes require more time to learn and troubleshoot issues. In my opinion, linux is great for those of us who dislike to use the mouse and take our hands off the homerow. Get used to using the terminal to launch apps, instead of clicking stuff on the desktop. Learn keyboard shortcuts. My recommendation is to use a window manager like i3 with an i3 status bar at the bottom. This will give you a minimal desktop, where you can move windows/tiles around all with keyboard shortcuts. Open apps with something similar to dmenu, where you just have to press a keyboard shortcut and type the first few letters of the app you want to open, and press enter. Learn vim-like keyboard navigation to edit text and reposition the cursor through the text all without the keyboard. Linux integration with this style of experience is vastly superior to Windows and Mac.
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I have terrible distro ideas. I rock kubuntu or Fedora for basic server stuff. So I'd recommend dual booting Ubuntu or Kubuntu just cuz it's easy and you already have experince with it.
Mostly what I wanted to convey was a sense of excitement for you! No matter what option you end up doing there's so much to learn here. I remember when I was a very young lad learning how windows 95/98 worked. The jank.
FOSS Linux has that kinda jank. The unpolished functionality of OS' long forgotten. Idk. Makes me feel like a kid again.
I'm excited for you. Lmk what you end up doing, if you remember. Buying a laptop or dual booting or whatnot.
As a 40 something who's used Linux exclusively a few times before but always came back to windows for one reason or another, I now use a MacBook as my primary. I hate the ads served in windows and the poor handling of focus.
MacOS to me has been like a more polished Linux with broader support for applications.
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My advice is to restart with Arch (I use Arch btw). Not Manjaro, I'm talking Arch.
I think using/installing Arch as well as its barebones nature FORCES you to understand how Linux works differently than Windows with concepts like root, bootloader, terminal emulation, and disk partitioning, just to give you some examples. At the same time, Arch has excellent documentation, a great package manager in pacman, and rolling release model that greatly simplifies maintainance during daily use so you can tune it to exactly how you want it.
I believe doing it the hard way at first will make it easier for you in the long run if you really want to understand Linux, and Arch is just the right amount of difficult to make you learn Linux, whereas Gentoo would be too hard and you don't learn enough from using Ubuntu/Debian/Mint.
But yeah, if you just want to use something that works well out of the box, then Ubuntu is great, there's nothing wrong with using the more user friendly distros.
I'm a long time Linux user but I'm really lazy. I recently installed Arch to try it out again as last time I did it was maybe 2012. Personally, manually setting up the hard drive partitions on initial install is just annoying enough to be too much work (I have a lot of drives) but luckily there's an installer that does that part for you. Everything else you have to do is sensible and easy and actually ends up being less work in the long run. The wiki is also extremely informative, helpful and correct.
Arch probably can be a beginner distro just because if you have a problem it's so much easier to find out how to fix it on the internet thanks to the wiki and the forums. Something as mundane as installing nvidia drivers in Debian can be a massive ordeal and the minimum required skill level to fix it yourself if it doesn't work on the first attempt is very high.
Yea took me a while to understand that I need some drivers to install if I wanted to turn on hardware acceleration to watch videos on my computer.
I didn't stick with Linux as a daily driver until I tried Manjaro. Learned enough to be comfortable installing Arch and ran that for a while, but after installing it a few times I was looking something a little bit simpler to setup. I now prefer EndeavourOS which is basically Arch with a nice installer and a few QoL apps.
I tried that after already having about 2 years experience with Ubuntu desktop and an Ubuntu server (but still mostly a Windows user). I'm also a software developer.
And I failed to install Arch on a laptop the last time I tried it out. Ubuntu ran flawlessly, trying to go step by step through the Arch installation I hit a random error (at a step that was very straight forward and easy in the documentation) and got stuck. Messed around with it and at some point gave up.
I mean that's years ago, it probably works a lot better nowadays and especially on more modern hardware, but even so for someone new to Linux I'd never tell them to go with a do-it-yourself install. Slap Ubuntu on that bad boy, let them install a few packages, do a handful of terminal commands and they'll get much farther. Instead of giving up three hours in because a random command (that they still don't understand) is broken.
If you look at the original post, his goal is to learn and understand Linux and he is on his third attempt after already trying Ubuntu remix, which is why I made this suggestion.
Again, if he just wanted to use Linux on his computer, then there is nothing wrong with using a more user friendly distro at all. But for his particular needs he described, then Arch is a better distro for learning how Linux actually works.
But as OP said, they already failed several times. That's like telling someone who nearly drowned in the shallow end of a pool to go jump into the ocean.
See here:
So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial?
For me it feels like they do want to learn, but aren't comfortable yet as a day to day user. They want to use Linux, but struggle with commands and how to use it. Having a stable and easy to use system you can use each day without trouble would probably be a better start than telling them to fiddle with Arch. Give them an easy distro and when they want to learn more they can use the crappy old laptop and try to install Arch on there (while leaving their daily driver alone).
I think I learned the most when using Ubuntu for school, 90% of it was easy and straight forward. 10% of it was hell, like back in the day getting HDMI or audio to work. But because the 90% were there I just dug in and spent a dozen hours to troubleshoot the rest.
Being able to easily switch back to Windows hindered my attempt to learn Linux. When I wasn't in the mood to learn a new concept, or failed to get something working after a few tries, then I'd just boot right back into Windows. I was able to push on when I deleted Windows in a rage and now the alternative to getting over the Linux hill was going back down and doing the "no, no, no, no, fuck off" dance that is the Windows install process.
Websites recommending Ubuntu to noobs didn't help me much. The panel being stuck of the left size of the monitor after my friend boasted about customization on Linux really grinds my gears. Linux Mint was much better coming from Windows, and I'm still on it years later.
@tabular
@Andonyx
Agreed on all points, I didn't end up finally switching to linux until I got so fed up with the auto update caused issue I was having that I just got rid of windows entirely
And while I at first switched to Ubuntu, I wouldn't be happy until a few months later when I landed on fedora with KDE
Only one thing: never give up. You'll get things fixed by copy and paste until one day youll have a broken system and think wait I actually know how to fix this because I've been through it five times before.
I was never happier than when I found Timeshift. https://itsfoss.com/backup-restore-linux-timeshift/
Who needs time shift when you can just slowly break your system while trying to fix a bug and then just either reinstall the os or switch to a different distro bc might as well