Want to switch to Linux, but not sure what distribution to choose?

Want to switch to Linux, but not sure what distribution to choose?

halp

What do you want it to do?

Do you want it to just work out of the box, or are you willing to put some work into fine tuning it to your own tastes?

install gentoo

Latter, but I'd probably fuck up if it's really hard to make it work.

OP for first time go with Mint. Just werks and it's better than Ubuntu

Mint.

Get xubuntu

i can only suggest Debian
but that's not a distro for beginners

Freebsd is not Linux.
Also install freebsd

> "what distribution to choose?"

Manjaro Deepin, Manjaro Xfce, Zorin, or Solus.

memes aside, manjaro xfce

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Debian

Mint for sure. Debian-Cinnamon if you're a masochist.

Linux is shit.

What are you currently using? This is usually the determining factor.

Ubuntu is great but it looks more like MacOS than Windows, at least it does when you move the dock to bottom. So if you're a winfag, avoid the default DE (Unity).

Mint or Zorin would be good enough for a winfag as they have a windows-like UI. They're based on ubuntu so all debian/ubuntu software works there.

Alternatively, you can use Manjaro (based on Arch, but has a normie installation process). It's an overall good system with literally every desktop environment available. I prefer XFCE on it. Another good Arch-based distro is Apricity, but it's rolling release so potentionally unstable. Looks nice, though.

Another great distro is openSUSE, though it's download size is 4.7GB. It feels very easy to use and it's a good starting distro.

You can also look at Solus, Deepin and PCLinuxOS. But I wouldn't recommend them as starting distros.

Any significant differences between Xubuntu and Mint XFCE?

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If you want a secure desktop you will want to stay away from xserver (xorg) and use Wayland. You will also want SELinux or Apparmor. Fedora comes with both of these things out of the box but you will have to set up multimedia codecs/software manually.

If you want something easy and don't care too much about the security of your system, Debian XFCE is quite fantastic with a huge repository.

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For Linux babbies, yeah, Mint makes sense.

openSUSE

korora all other options are wrong

the one with the most appealing logo

Solus is actually really nice

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Mint is going to be a very easy transition into linux and also has a ton of support and documentation available online.

If you want to jump into a distro a little more advanced, then try something like antergos.
Antergos is basically just arch, but it sets up the whole os for you. If you use this you'll get used to running and maintaining arch without having to know how to install it (which is the only difficult part).
For DE's I would recommend xfce (lightweight and looks decent) or gnome (very babby friendly, and resembles os x).

depends on what you want to get into and what is your level of experience and patience.

Ubuntu MATE and Fedora have finally stuck for me, but before that I had several failed attempts with fedora. And it wasnt the tech that failed, it was me with my lack of knowledge /lack of reasons to use linux/lack of patience

Solus if you want a lightweight, polished, Just Werks™ distro.

xubuntu is Sup Forums approved

You talk like a fag and your shits all retarded

no this is going to seem like a joke but arch is amazing use the arch anywhere installer and make sure you get pacaur when it ask you if you want anything extra installed and personally i think you should get KDE plasma as the desktop enviorment everything else is a breeze

They are all the same.

Does KDE still break easily? Ran KDE a while back and man, that was the most annoying DE I've ever had to use.

GNOME3 is also nice with all the various extensions. Never ran GNOME2 before as that was before my time as a Linux fag.

There isn't. Mint have a different configuration menu ( I don't know if that's still the case with Mint XFCE though ) and other minor stuff only.

KDE used to be my favorite DE but ever since Plasma came out it just refuses to run on my PC.

And yes, GNOME3 is actually quite nice after you customize it to your liking.

Mint > *

It's the only distro that works well without having the need to spend days setting it up. It also has the best GUI.

not OP but which distro is the best to get for general gaming plus Steam.

Plasma works fine. There was a rough transition to Plasma 5 for a long, long time (so bad that I even stopped using it and I've been using KDE since 2) but it's 100% fine now.

> Mint
> Go to www.distrowatch.com
> Mint #1

iwonderhowitfuckinggotthere.jpg ?

By the metrics mint is twice as popular as freakin canonical ubuntu. This fact is massively underplayed on Sup Forums by the gentoos and kevins. Clem and his team have done an outstanding job.

Both me and my grandma use mint cinnamon x64 FFS

Care to give me a tl;dr about the features of the latest KDE? Only thing I know about it is that it's pretty and has a package list a mile long...

See, I like my GNOME3 because I can customize it with all sorts of extensions and I don't need to dive into the ass end of a configuration file to do so and GNOME3 is rather light on my old system compared to KDE...

Well, the big thing is you don't need an assload of fucking extensions that break every time you update Gnome to a new revision to extensively customize it (not to mention that you don't need extensions to do SIMPLE FUCKING THINGS THAT SHOULD BE A PART OF EVERY FUCKING DESKTOP, LIKE A SANE FUCKING APPLICATIONS MENU). Opening Plasma's system settings is like opening a fucking new world of possibilities.

The only thing I don't like about Mint is a) lack of updates for certain packages until the next distro update and b) it still has quite a few packages that cannot into multiarch. Gotta love trying to install some 32-bit library only to have the package manager list 100 packages to be removed if you try to install that library.

>The only thing I don't like about Mint is a) lack of updates for certain packages until the next distro update and b) it still has quite a few packages that cannot into multiarch. Gotta love trying to install some 32-bit library only to have the package manager list 100 packages to be removed if you try to install that library.
Go to Update Settings, pick all settings.
You can also easily update versions with mint by selecting upgrades to new releases.
As for certain packages, install ubuntu PPAs for them. It's very easy.

>PPAs

That's the major problem for me right there. I hate having to search for PPAs.

I use Arch (no, I am not going to meme about how Arch is better) and 99% of my packages come from the official repos. I like having everything in one place instead of scattered PPAs that may or may not get abandoned.

I do make use of AUR but that's for some minor non-system shit such as additional gstreamer plug-ins for Wine.

It depends on the distro. I'm guessing in some distros it's still broken as hell. In KDE Neon it's mostly alright, but I had issues with it from time to time.

The distro I've found is best for KDE is openSUSE, and holy goddamn - it actually deserves to be called stable.

I don't get this logic, you can fine tune any of the distros to your own taste, Linux is totally modular.

The answer is, if you just want it to work, some Ubuntu derivative. If you absolutely must have a particular package manager or init system, which only the most autistic do, then you can look into things further.

Done.

Debian its the best in my opinion

Shilling for openSUSE here. It just werks for me. If you want great KDE experience, try it.

I prefer PPAs because they're binaries. Arch has AUR and everything must be compiled. To make matters worse, shit from Git repos is downloaded with all the history. So to install a simple 1.4 MB script, sometimes it will cost you 10minutes and >400MB github repo download.

I'm not kidding. Something as simple as youtube-dl will need a 400MB download to update. That's fucking insane.

And don't even get me started on mpv-git.. that update is 700MB in size.

>git repos

I can agree on most of your points but the git repos thing can be worked around.

What I do with Wine, for example, is I take the PKGBUILD from the multilib package in the official repos and I have a folder where I git pull everything for a given package and then point the PKBUILD script to that folder, which keeps the update size small, and then make my own package. Compile time takes forever since I use he multilib version so it compiles two versions of Wine.

Still, all that shit I wrote doesn't make it user-friendly where you just download the thing and you're done.

Yeah, that's way too much work. I still use Arch but man.. it's fucking tedious to update all the AUR repos I use.

And one of the most annoying things: AUR managers don't even check Github repos to see if a repo has been updated. It has to be done manually by the maintainer on AUR.

BTW, what does your custom setup look like? Do you have a special folder for git repos? Where do you keep PKGBUILD files? How do you check if it has been updated? What's your toolchain like? Do you have any scripts?

Dunno why this picture is still being circulated, most probably due to the way search engines work giving a huge bonus to a 10 year old article. Just for fun I want to go over your pic on all of the clearly wrong choices that people who make this pics just throw in there to make it a grid of "choices" because hey linux is this thing I just googled and I guess I will go write "and article" about it because I am "and tech journalist"

Suse - old and nobody cares, was relevant in 2001 because it was sold in stores in a box
Mandriva - Dead as fuck?
Knoppix - for live CD only
MEPIS - Dead as fuck?
redhat - you're not a business
Solaris - not linux, also dead, also nobody cares
gentoo - 'tism 1
pclinuxos - nobody cares
novell - dead since the mid 90s?
*bsd - hipster / 'tism 2, not linux
xandros - dead
Lunar - nobody cares
aurox - nobody cares
slackware - shitty-on-purpose, 'tism 3
Vector - nobody cares
slax - nobody cares

normies/op/shits see this pic and say "Oh cool look at all the choices I have" then an equal distribution will pick each one in this list and literally ignore the iso dated 2006-xx-xx because it is first in the list, download it, and rage and say linux sucks. These pictures trying to make linux appear bigger than it is by listing all these distros nobody cares about only hurts the linux community because new users judge the whole thing based on some basement shit from 12 years ago.

This would be like if you made a list of new cars for sale but you said the only Honda for sale was the 1992 CRX hatch because some boyracer guy you remember said it was cool 20 years ago and then you can't figure out why everyone reading this list thinks Honda is shit. We need to start removing old, shitty iso links, I don't know WHERE the fuck these people find these archaic bronze age distros.

KISS right

>"KISS"
>muh KISS
>I said it has KISS. Therefore, it does, I guess.
>Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss etc. etc.
>Blah blah blah I have to do all this shit.
>I call "doing all this shit" KISS therefore it is KISS
>I don't know what KISS stands for, another loser in IRC would just say that every time I would complain, and I was too scared to ask, so I will just say this now as well.

Arch

Linux From Scratch

GNOME tesembles Unity better than OS X though.
Xfce is more like OS X

>custom setup

It doesn't look like much of anything as I am no power user.

>folder

No, I just have separate folders for various packages. For example, for Wine I just have a folder named "wine-git" where I have cloned the git version of Wine and I just update that with the "git pull" command.

For the million gstreamer plugins that Wine wants I just have folders named after the plugin in question and I keep the PKGBUILD script in there.

>toolchain

Errrm not sure. All I have is a given PKGBUILD that I run with "makepkg --skipinteg --skipchecksum --skippgpcheck" and let it do its thing.

>scripts

I can't script to save my life so no.

All in all, my setup is basically built on trial and error, not very efficient or automated but at least I get what I want. Also, I don't use the git versions of many packages save for Wine since the latest stable versions of everything work for me just fine.

Fedora is the best. Any spin you want but for the love of god don't go with Arch unless you wanna be balls deep in the beast.

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