side note i like the use of calvin over that other guy
yeah fuck crowder
don’t fuck him tho
not unless you want to be a victim of abuse i guess
Crowder’s one of my favorite musicians… Oh wait, different Crowder.
Music Crowders’s good. Who’s this other Crowder?
The louder one.
Wdym? I legit don’t know (I’m not exactly up-to-date with the current (presumably american) news)
Steven Crowder, the assshole from Louder with Crowder. If you don’t know about him you’re lucky.
That Covfefe got cold a long time ago.
Not a hot take at all. Asking someone to go from a GUI heavy operating system to a command line heavy one and be just as productive is lunacy. Like all major changes it is important to ween off the old thing.
My biggest hurdle with the switch has been permission related issues, and you can’t deal with those cleanly with a UI, and every help thread under the sun throws out a bunch of command line commands giving a solution without explaining why those changes are needed. It may seem like Unix 101 to experienced Linux users, but it is really cryptic to newcomers coming from operating systems that are…cough more lenient with their permissions.
There is also a mentality that UIs are much more idiot proof than command line. UIs are written by people who actually know the OS so we can’t accidentally delete our home folder because of a typo. It is a very legitimate concern.
Yesterday morning i installed Mint xfce on an old laptop.
I wanted to install synaptics drivers for the touchpad because i use the trackball as mouse but need the touchpad for clicking. Something that isnt configureable in the default driver.
When i copied an example config file and added my line, i rebooted the computer.
The GUI broke because in the example config file, there were “…” To indicate writing further options, but xorg couldnt interpret or ignore it, so i had to figure out how to edit textfiles in the command line.
No fun times, and definetely a risk for new users.
This story is literally every experienced Linux users first horror story.
I still remember the first time I broke my xorg config on my shiny new slackware 10 install in early 2005.
It’s so common there’s an XKCD about it.
deleted by creator
Do any of those actually match this one? I looked through the first few pages, and there was nothing related to Linux.
You are correct, which is why I deleted it about a minute after I posted it. Unfortunately deletion of a comment does not propagate to other instances as well as creating one.
Which does not change the fact that this “hot take” IS a repost.
I didn’t mean to plagiarize but if I did I apologize
it is not about plagiarism as in “stealing someone’s ip” but about the fact that being a repost is in itself a proof that is not not really that hot take.
Not really, the vaaaast majority of PC users don’t need the linux commandline.
I agree, BUT that is only because the average windows user never even had to bother with permission. I find permissions on Linux A LOT easier to handle than on Windows. Basically the way Windows does permissions is garbage, so they made it so that people can just do whatever so they won’t complain about permissions. That is… one way of doing things, I guess.
i love K⭐D⭐E
KDE FTW!
Arguably you can’t beat Debian + KDE
Aktually, I prefer Arch + KDE. I say if you like your current desktop, then stay with it. I’ve hit the sweet spot with what I’ve got because I love the AUR, pacman, and paru.
Arch btw
I’ve used Arch before and I still keep an Arch distrobox container but my current usage requires stability.
OpenSUSE + KDE
I feel you. I don’t agree but I feel you.
And I have installed hundreds of opensuse systems, many for new linux users.But that was my choice as the sysadmin (well really one of my predecessors some decades ago). It isn’t as amazing for self-administering newbies.
Another very good option
Just became a first time user (~48 hours ago) of KDE on Sparky distro and I’m pretty impressed.
i read that like it was in the history of the world video
New Linux Users don’t even know the difference.
Ha! Yeah, I remember that phase. I was planning to install LXDE as my first distro, simply because I thought the wallpaper looked cool.
I agree - was switching to Fedora about month and a half ago, and only learned about KDE vs Gnome like a week ago, when I was reinstaling to Nobara to fix some NVIDIA issues.
I did hear terms like KDE or Gnome thrown around, but never really realized that it’s actually and important choice. And once you add X11 vs Wayland to the mix, it’s suddenly so confusing I just subconsciously choose to ignore that choice and went with whatever the OS installed for me. I though that DE chouse is similar to X11 vs Wayland choice, i.e something tha is more about back-end than front-end, and didn’t realize that’s literally how your OS UI looks and controls, instead of how it works in the background (which I now know is what X11 vs Wayland is actually about)
Turned out I really don’t like Gnome (Which was default for Fedora), but love KDE, which was thankfully a default for Nobara.
So, if you’re ever recommending Linux to someone, be it in a comment or somwhere else, or someone is asking for a recommended distro, please include a short paragraph about the importance of choosing the correct DE, and explanation of what it is and that you can change it!
Just installed Mint to try it out because it looks similar to Windows. Don’t judge me.
Oh I’ve judged you! And I find you guilty of making an acceptable decision that suites your preferences.
I’ll get the pool noodles!
The sentence, however, is still death.
To be carried out in 3283745405.
Installed it on a thin client instead of win10 iot for the same reason, basic functionality all there, being used as a media streaming browser machine, no regrets.
Had previous experience with fedora and others many years prior, definitely can tell how far it all progressed since
I installed Mint for the sake of trying it and I quite liked Cinnamon, but after that I did some distro and desktop hopping, I will not go back until it has proper Wayland support.
It has proper Wayland support.
Cinnamon? If you’ve seen the news that it’s getting Wayland support, it doesn’t mean it has now or anywhere in the near future.
A smart distro allows you to change DEs without changing the distro, though.
Is it just me or is every new distro just a base with a different DE? I started to notice this a few years back but not sure if it was my imagination or something developers starting doing because it was easier to ship the DE as “the OS” than it was to instruct users on how to switch to their DE.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Distros used to be about experimenting with different packaging systems and system managers, but now seems like the packaging systems are mostly the three: Arch, Debian, Red Hat. And the system manager is almost always systemd.
So the only thing to do (beyond better quality control, which takes a lot of constant work) is to make the DE somehow unique.
They could be using different package managers or different repos
I think the default setting matters, if there is any. Looking at Gentoo.
Fun aside, I think Fedora might be a good choice, because Gnome is easy and polished!
Are there (sizeable) distros that does not allow you to install multiple DE’s and change between them?
That’s not usually the problem. Usually you can generally do this on any distro, even ones that have a higher level of integration with their DE.
The problem is more likely to be issues caused by overlapping configurations and base libraries that can cause weird issues if they aren’t swapped out or kept default. If they aren’t default and are managed by the package manager, usually the package manager will mark it as modified and often won’t touch it unless you purge the configurations. Some will ask and some will straight up nuke em.
To me the problem is actually removing the old one. You can easily uninstall gnome, but it will leave behind config files and various data. It’s less clean.
Also, there’s an overlap in the libraries required by DEs, so you should use the “replace” option in you package manager (if it has one) to let o t figure out the best way to uninstall one and install the other.
I’m sure they all allow it, but some make it awkward enough that a reinstall might be a better option.
someone who switches away from the distro’s default desktop environment is not a new user.
Yes, but a lot of them have multiple DEs (Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu…) and sometimes the DE is specific to the distros (Mint).
Linux Mint uses Cinnamon as the DE, which you can use with Fedora (and probably others).
You can actually choose to download an Linux Mint iso with either Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, so you’re not exclusively locked into Cinnamon.
TIL
You get to choose whatever in my distro’s installer
only distro ive tried that had that was debian (and arch if you count a tty as an installer), which one do you use?
NixOS
isnt nix installed in a similar way to arch?
Endeavour OS offers these on install
But the post is more about recommending a DE to start with/them picking one they like since it’s visual. And then you recommend a distro where that is default
Well sure. My approach for looking for a distro was usually “which ones have KDE and pacman” and after that I start comparing.
And for me, AUR.
Which distribs have pacman but not AUR?
I just wanted to mention that if a distro (somehow) had AUR but not pacman, I wouldn’t care.
I think that SteamOS is a great place to start people off with Linux.
edit: I mean if you plug a steam deck into mouse and keyboard and use it as a linux box.
it has the support of another company hiding as “games” and can WINE pretty easy with Steam controlling the WINE.
So Arch with KDE
i would recommend it to gamers but they still dont support it officially outside the steam deck…
I don’t think they will officially support it outside of the deck IMO, having used one in the flesh they have hardware optimization down to a tee - which to me really rounds off the deck experience.
The rapid sleep/wake and some options in the quick access menu would likely need some ironing out on other hardware configs, not sure how nvidia card support would work too…
They promised it “soon” so im still holding my breath. I hope.it happens but lets see.
Great take. But you know the real sneaky one that trips you up? File system.
I wouldn’t call myself a beginner, but every time I install a Linux system seriously I see those filesystem choices and have to dig through volumes of turbo-nerd debates on super fine intricacies between them, usually debating their merits in super high-risk critical contexts.
I still don’t come away with knowing which one will be best for me long-term in a practical sense.
As well as tons of “It ruined my whole system” or “Wrote my SSD to death” FUD that is usually outdated but nevertheless persists.
Honestly nowadays I just happily throw BTRFS on there because it’s included on the install and allows snapshots and rollbacks. EZPZ.
For everything else, EXT4, and for OS-shared storage, NTFS.
But it took AGES to arrive to this conclusion. Beginners will have their heads spun at this choice, guaranteed. It’s frustrating.
I did NTFS because both windows and Linux can read it. Do I know literally any other fact about formatting systems? Nope. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to, I’m normie-adjacent. I just want my system to work so I can use the internet, play games, and do word processing.
I once tried to install my Steam Library in Linux to an NTFS partition so I wouldn’t have to install things twice on a dual boot system. Protip: don’t do that.
chkdsk -f (or r or whatever the third option is), reboot twice, but do it multiple times because steam on linux asks you to reinstall the games in the exact same spot and you accidentally do it because you’re not paying close attention due to the mild panic windows threw at you?
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows
There is a guide here that says you can do it, but my experience was that I installed the games in Windows on my D drive, mounted the drive in Linux (Mint, I think), and when I tried to play them The system locked up. Rebooting into windows, Steam said the game files were corrupt and I had to reinstall them. I’ve always just kept two separate game libraries on any dual boot systems ever since.
Interesting. I was able to use the files perfectly fine from linux, but windows threw a tantrum when I tried to boot and removed everything linux had touched.
Oo! That’s definitely a gotcha. Good tip!
I once heard that the trick to this is you need to let Steam “update” every game before you switch OSs. If it doesn’t get to finish this, it will bork. That’s also highly impractical I feel though.
So yeah on my dual boot Linux is for making things and doesn’t see my main Steam library. Win10 is just for games. :p
EDIT: Win11 or 12 won’t be a problem because I’m confining them to a VM for only the most stubborn situations, and doing everything including gaming with Linux. :D
Honestly, I’d say the defaults most distros use will be fine for most users… If they don’t know why they should use one filesystem over another, then it’s almost certainly not going to matter for them
I’ve settled on btrfs a year ago and I’m happy with it. I like the compression and async trim.
I’m still figuring it out. I know ExFAT works across all desktop OS’s, NTFS works with Linux and Windows, and ext4 only works with Linux.
But it took a half hour of googling to figure out you can’t install Linux on NTFS. I planned to do that to ease cross platform compatibility. Oops. I’m also attempting a RAID 1 array using NTFS. It seems to work, but I’m not sure how to automatically mount it on boot. I feel like I might have picked the wrong filesystem.
Hey there friend! Sorry to hear about your woes. From my understanding in practice, ExFAT is usually better as more of a universally readable storage system for external drives. Think, using the same portable drive between your PS5, friend’s mac, and whatever else. Great for large files and backups! Maybe not as much for running your OS from.
My approach and recommendation would be that you don’t want OS’s seeing each others’ important business anyway. Permissions and stuff can get wonky for instance.
So your core Linux install can be something like EXT4 or BTRFS. I like BTRFS personally because you can set up recovery snapshots without taking tons of space. It does require a little extra understanding and tooling though, but it’s worth looking into. (There’s GUI based BTRFS tools now though. Yay!)
EXT4 is nice and reliable and basic. Not much to say, really! Both can do RAID 1.
Next, a /home mounted separately, this COULD be NTFS if you really wanted that sharing. (BTW there’s some Windows drivers that can read EXT4 I think?)
BUT I feel more organized using a different way:
What I do personally is keep an NTFS partition I call something like “DATA” or “MAIN_STORAGE” and I mount this into my /home on Linux. It’s usually a separate, chunky 4TB HDD or something.
On Windows this is my D:\ drive, and it’s also where I store my project files, media, and whatever else I want easily accessible. Both OSs see those system-agnostic files, but are safely unaware of each other’s core system files.
In Linux, you can mount any folder anywhere, really! You can mount it on startup by amending your FSTAB on an existing install or setting the option during installs sometimes.
So the file path looks something like /home/MonkeMischief/DATA/Music
It’s treated just like any other folder but it’s in fact an entirely separate drive. :)
I hope this was somewhat helpful and not just confusing. In practice, it’ll start to make more sense I hope! The important thing is to make sure your stuff is backed up.
… Perhaps to a big chonky brick formatted as ExFAT if you so choose. ;)
I am experimenting with Linux on two devices: My daily driver laptop and a desktop.
The laptop is set on a dual boot from 2 SSDs. The first SSD contains Windows and has one 2TB NTFS partition. The other SSD has a 250GB partition for ext4 where Ubuntu lives and a 750GB partition for ExFAT.
The desktop has a 500GB SSD with ext4 for the OS, and has two 4 year old 2TB HDDs for data. This is why I’m trying to run them in RAID 1. For cross compatibility (and what they were already formatted as), they are in NTFS.
What do you think of that? Am I using adequate filesystems?
Yes, I listened to a podcast about that recently. Linux was far with XFS or something, but then Apple came, improved their HFS and actually made tools for it and it got better.
BTRFS is just as established as etx4, just not as damn old. It also just works, and it has advanced features that are crucial for backups. But I have no idea how to use btrbk and there is no GUI so nobody uses that.
But as a filesystem that just works like ext4, plus the automatically configured snapshots in both regular and atomic Fedora systems and OpenSuse, BTRFS is awesome.
Only outdated Distros that fear change stick with ext4, at least thats my opinion.
Lending my voice to this as well for most, my thought is EXT4, without LVM, deferring to the preferred FS for the distro. It is a mature, stable, and reliable choice and logical volumes complicate things too much for beginners.
If dual-booting, yeah, definitely an NTFS partition for shared storage (just be aware that Windows can be weird with file permissions and ownership).
Ext4 is the safe bet for a beginner. The real question is with or without LVM. Generally I would say with but that abstraction layer between the filesystem and disk can really be confusing if you’ve never dealt with it before. A total beginner should probably go ext4 without LVM and then play around in a VM with the various options to become informed enough to do something less vanilla.
and then play around in a VM with the various options to become informed enough to do something less vanilla.
This part is skippable, right? Any reason a user should ever care about this?
(note: never heard of LVM before this thread)
It makes adding space easier down the road, either by linking disks or if you clone your root drive to a larger drive, which tends to not be something most “end users” (I try not to use that description but you said it heh) would do. Yes, using LVM is optional.
Not a hot take, I keep saying the same thing in different threads. I was not able to switch to Linux for years before I understood that I have problems with Gnome not with Linux itself, tried KDE and given I was migrating from Windows it clicked immediately.
After you gain some experience, DE becomes mostly irrelevant, but it is crucial for starting off in an unfamiliar environment.
I switched back to Linux about a year ago after taking about a 10 year break, and I installed gnome without even considering another option (because it’s good enough right?)
It’s completely different than what I remember and I hate it. I want to switch to something else but that is now a “someday” project.
I remember when it had a cute footprint where the “start button” used to be. It’s so different. I should have went with xfce or something. Maybe I should try cinnamon.
the DE is very important unless you have A LOT of free time and REALLY WANT to see something different from what youre used to.
my first distro (other than ubuntu in school computers, but we dont talk about those) was fedora server minimal install, where i installed dwm and had fun using it. i had just switched from windows and was happy to have so many options, even though i had (almost) no linux experience before. after trying most of the big DEs and distros, i ended up on arch with xfce, which i have been using for more than a year now.
most people really should go slower and try things step by step, as what i did would be really weird for anyone that tried it …probably
For windows users that go to Linux I always recommend KDE as it looks like windows and it’s easy for them to understand and use it!
Start recommending Cinnamon then, it’s the best DE when switching from Windows.
Whats better in cinnamon in your opinion?
It’s really similar to Windows in how you use it. Switching between Windows 11 and Cinnamon is as seamless as it can be.
There’s almost no configuration or anything necessary, you just install it and it’s great.
Same applies for Manjaro with KDE and on top of that it has support for wallpaper engine which I really wanted.
As a power user of windows I’ve lost faith in Ubuntu, though. Their DNS implementation alone is a disaster. So I’ve switched to Debian and KDE, but then I saw there is a Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) so that’s probably what I would recommend if anyone asked me. I personally haven’t used it yet tho as I’m enjoying KDE.
Cinnamon is not the Ubuntu DE, it’s Linux Mint’s.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu
I recommend KDE as when I switch from windows I tried multiple DE and that one felt the most like windows it also had support for wallpaper engine which I really wanted!
i concur
I use xfce btw
And for new users choosing a distro with big user base (thus having a better support system) should be a top priority. Instead newbies are often advised to use an obscure distro that in theory might be a good fit, but isn’t. Probably those who do the recommendations are Linux testers (using VZ) rather than Linux users and mostly evaluate a distro based on install process and out of the box usage.
Configuring a big distro to your needs is much better than choosing a nishe distro.
I’m a noob using the default Ubuntu DE for a few months now and I’ve gotten used to it, at this point I’m afraid to ask what are the other DEs and whether I should swap over
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_environment
You can use the list there to look up images or videos of the DEs
If you think you’d prefer one then you can try it but you aren’t likely to find an advantage over what you’re used to (there are some like old hardware wanting lighter weight) it’s mostly preference.
If you changed your Window Manager to i3 then you would probably hate it just for being so different
Test them out on a virtual machine
I particularly like Cinnamon, it’s very simple and nothing fancy (while still looking great and modern).
The other popular choices include:
- Gnome
- KDE (customizable to hell)
- XFCE (very easy on resources, good for old hardware, or if you like simplistic DE)
- LXDE (similar to XFCE in the resources department, but looks more modern, IMO)
There are others, but I can’t speak for them as I’ve never tried them. I can’t really describe modern Gnome as well, because the last version I used was 3 and it doesn’t look at all as the same DE, so someone else will have to provide that info.
I‘ve recently used lxqt in a project. Very cool and the successor of lxde afaik at least for lubuntu.
modern gnome is simpler to learn and more polished than basically all other DEs. i think its better for someone that wants something new and for people who just started using a computer, because of just how easy it is to use. its not good if youre switching from windows or mac and want something similar.
Don’t. It’s a trap. Most of them have compatibility issues with software. Stock Ubuntu is the benchmark for every piece of software these days. Deviating is fun until it isn’t.
Unless you want to go a non Debian based distro, always pick Ubuntu.
Compatible issues on desktop environment level? This is the first time I ever hear about that.
Tried switching to KDE Plasma and then OpenCV broke because of outdated QT version or some shit. Same with another distro. And I couldn’t install two versions at the same time.
It’s all fun until you get dependency conflicts.
Bro. I think you would benefit from sticking to Chrome OS.
Yeah I agree.
Stock Ubuntu is the benchmark […]
…for nothing this days. The only people using Ubuntu now are dinosaurs and system managers running cheap servers or locked into Canonical’s ecosystem, and the latter are using headless servers, remotely managed, not the DE. Variety is the spice of life. All mainstream DEs are perfectly serviceable, 100% compatible with everything and completely stable and reliable. FFS, Ubuntu’s snaps don’t even work well on their own DE. Stop fearmongering for Canonical, let people live life.
