I think the whole works part is the most important part, Linux can be janky (and by that I mean obsolete information and deprecated or outdated packages are often recommended and there are a thousand different ways to do anything with only one of them actually working (don’t have an aneurysm)) on the best of days, If something just works you can change what you want later.
This is why I switched to Mint. It just works. It’s broken less than vanilla Ubuntu did. So thats what I use.
Yeah. Generally when I’m using a Linux PC to work on something, I don’t want to be fixing the PC itself too. And we make an embedded Linux product at work, so it’s not like I miss out on the fun, lol.
I use Mint everywhere. It works great. Being easier for newcomers to use and having an extra layer of polish does not restrict my use of the command line or scripting.
anything but Ubuntu tbh.
This is crazy. You shouldn’t use Ubuntu for anything desktop related. There’s nothing vanilla about vanilla Ubuntu.
(Custom Gnome extensions, patches on top of Gnome, custom sandbox packages that don’t always work, custom apt that refuses to install the real packages in place of snaps, paywalled security patches, should I keep going?)
Kubuntu LTS (
--minimal-install; nosnapfuckery from the start) has been wonderful.
Um, acktually some of us went from vanilla Debian to Nobara to vanilla Debian.
I use templeOS btw
A man of God surrounded by heathens
What does the Oracle say today?
Subscription price is increasing this autumn.
Surfs up
Debian since 1998. No reason to change.
that should be their mission statement.
Use Debian. No good reason to change.
“You’ve done a lot of work to make this work. Do you really want more work?”™
I’m okay with it.
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Consistent branding over multiple decades!
This is seriously a hot take
I use fedora because I dont feel like waiting 6 years for new features ;P
Same. Tried bazzite, works fine, but immutable was annoying me for things like getting openvpn3 working (or anything involving more direct kernel stuff). Still use bazzite on my kid’s pc and my laptop but switched to fedora for my desktop and it’s been just right.
Ubuntu and Canonical can fuck allllllll the way off. If I had to go back to a dpkg based distro it’d have to be Debian bleeding edge… and honestly I’d probably bite the bullet and try Arch instead just because of Debian’s release lag.
Ive tried Arch before and it wasn’t for me. Having to find all the packages that work for my setup was a bit of a pain. I was 6 months in trying to print something, not realizing I didnt install CUPS and that was my breaking point lol. Its great for those who want it. Real on canonical tho.
Fedora on the right tbh. Even when you chill and get wisdom Canonical and Snap are just a bit too far.
Fedoras where it’s at!
Ewbuntu
Legitimate question as I’m gonna move from Windows 10 within the next couple months. Is there something wrong with Bazzite or Nobara? I had narrowed my decision down to those two since they seem to be an easy transition, they do the things I need, and they’re popular enough that I can probably find fixes to any issues I experience. I pushed off my plan to build a desktop, but I still have an aging laptop that is losing security support in a couple of months.
Also, my wife needs Excel specifically for school. Can Excel work on these distros or are there just good alternatives? She might need to keep a Windows 10 partition just for Excel stuff if she can’t run it in Bazzite or whatever she picks.
Edit:
Thanks everybody for responses! School is not flexible about using Excel specifically, and she has to share her screen during exams to show that she’s just using regular Excel. It’s not a hill we’re willing to die on lol.
We aren’t super interested in doing anything beyond gaming and basic browsing type stuff with our computers, so I’m not sure that Bazzite being immutable really means anything to us. There were some good tips like a /home partition to easily swap distros when needed without losing everything, plus some people pointed out that some of these distros come and go over time so it would be harder to find fixes and continue getting updates if we get too entrenched in something that won’t be around much longer.
Overall, I don’t think we’ll be too picky. We just want a pretty simple process to get something that’s like an unbloated Windows, and we don’t want to rip our hair out looking for a new distro and starting over every six months. Most people are not power users. I can do pretty much all of my computer stuff on my phone and all of my gaming on my PlayStation, so I really won’t notice the difference between most of these recommendations probably.I landed on Mint because it’s a simple no fuss distro that feels familiar to Windows refugees. I game on it just fine and use my computer for a lot of things so wanted something general. I bounced off Ubuntu because it has some decisions that are trying to protect you from actually learning Linux, which is a priority to me.
As a professional spreadsheet pusher, I can confidently say that LibreOffice (the Linux version of MS Office) has been able to do everything I needed that word/excel can, and then some.
But really any distro will be able to install the software you need, and it’s easy to switch. Just try it and have fun.
Nothing wrong with them, surely better than Ubuntu, despite the meme.
I went from Nobara to Bazzite and it feels way more polished, although the immutable thing may not be for everyone
Those distros are fine, I haven’t heard anything bad about them. The only distros I wouldn’t recommend are Ububtu and Manjaro (I can explain why if you want).
About Excel, it doesn’t work on Linux unfortunately. But you have some options. You can try LibreOffice and OnlyOffice (you can install them on Windows to try them out before switching) and see if they’re enough for your needs. There’s also a web version of Excel which you can use in your browser but it doesn’t have all the features. If you really need Excel, you can also try using a virtual machine with Windows and run it inside of that but dual booting might be easier for you at that point.
OpenOffice has been effectively abandoned. All of the original devs work on LibreOffice now.
I meant to write OnlyOffice 😭
But thanks for pointing it out, I fixed it
Another option for Excel is running it using Wine. A lot of Windows games run on Wine, which also means that things like Excel run well too.
From what I understand, it’s still an excellent choice. It’s well supported and decent for new users.
Can you look into if the online version of Excel works for your wife? That might simplify your install. Libre Office and OnlyOffice are decent alternatives, but they might not map 1:1 with the instructions she gets from school.
Bazzite is fantastic, but because the system is immutable, you can’t just install packages like you can with other distros. This makes it very stable and very secure, but it also means you need to take extra steps if you want to get creative with your system. If you are already familiar with Docker and containers, then you can do anything you want that way, if there isn’t already a flatpak available. As a last resort, you can also use rpm-ostree to create new layers, but if you go that route you need to understand how to use ostree since eventually you will need to fix those layers manually.
The main reason why I would steer newcomers away from the likes of Bazzite or Nobara is because I don’t think they’re going to last long. CachyOS has sprung up just as I was starting to hear less and less about Nobara. They get trendy as THE distro for newbies to install because it has a gimmick or two aimed at newcomers, which will inevitably get rolled into the mainstream, fixed, rendered obsolete or otherwise dealt with in the mainstream within a couple years anyway, then it’s off to the next one.
Who here remembers PeppermintOS being the hottest thing?
Staying power is an important and under-rated consideration for sure. Particularly as they get popular and the team behind it needs to be more serious about updates and such (if they aren’t already).
Bazzite is an immutable distro, and it expects you to install all your programs through containers. Not all software works with these containers, but like 99.9999% does. I’m a weirdo who wants the deepest of hardware monitoring tools and many of them don’t work with these containers. I haven’t used Nobara yet but it doesn’t appear to be immutable and based on regular Fedora so it shouldn’t have those issues.
excel
It may run through wine, and I’d test that out before fully committing. Worst case if that’s the ONLY thing you need you could do a VM. But would the cloud (web) version of office work for her? If you’re already paying for office 365 then I believe you get it included.
Both are great, as is Fedora, the one that both are based on.
Nobara had some issues updating correctly for me, but I haven’t seen anyone else express that, so I don’t think it’s a common thing.
Bazzite is really gaming focused, so it’s harder to do general purpose computing on it than a desktop OS.
But they are both great OSes, and really you should just try out a bunch of them and pick the one you like the most. They’re free after all.
Nobara had some issues updating correctly for me, but I haven’t seen anyone else express that
This is why I stopped using it. I could never find anyone else with the same issue or any advice on it either. Glad to find out it wasn’t just me after all
I’m not familiar with the above distros, but I’m pretty certain there’s more people on Ubuntu which helps a lot with troubleshooting and finding solutions online. One option is, when installing any Linux OS, is to create a separate partition for “home/”. that way, you can reinstall any other Linux based OS, and keep most of your files installed.
Excel doesn’t work on Linux, but LibreOffice and Google sheets do.
Setting up qemu is easy, vm that opens the apps as windows so it seems native while running off a vm works well with cpu based stuff
I’ve had a much better experience with OnlyOffice compared to LibreOffice in terms of MS compatibility, and it’s a Flatpak so it should have no issues running under Bazzite.
I usually get downvoted for this since it’s not open source, but WPS Office is free and basically an exact ms office clone. I use it regularly moving files between my work laptop with windows
I went with Nobara because it’s pretty much Fedora + gaming related fixes. Meaning every Fedora guide out there works and Fedora on its own is pretty user friendly.
Excel, as in Microsoft Excel might be a problem. If she needs something Excel-like, the default LibreOffice stuff is very capable, but it’s not 100% compatible, really depends on what she needs. The online Office 365 thing might also be enough.
As for the Windows partition, a simple virtual machine might be enough and you don’t have to reboot the PC every time you need to open an Excel file.
I’ve had Bazzite break its own update utility such that it needed manual intervention at least 3 times now. I see no point in a “just works” distro that doesn’t actually just work.
Was this caused by layering?
One of the breakages was caused by an expired signature or something from Universal Blue, which hit all users. I’m surprised that one doesn’t get talked about more. One of them was caused by Bazzite changing how Steam itself is handled and not transitioning my system over properly. Can’t remember what the third one was caused by.
Thanks for clarifying!
One of the breakages was caused by an expired signature or something from Universal Blue, which hit all users. I’m surprised that one doesn’t get talked about more.
Yeah, this was a big one. Though, I have to give them credit for how they handled the situation. I believe a lot of other projects got a lot to learn from them in that aspect.
One of them was caused by Bazzite changing how Steam itself is handled and not transitioning my system over properly.
Was this the transition from the (so-called) bazzite-arch distrobox to layering Steam into the image?
It likely was. Can’t remember the details unfortunately.
Alright, but you seem to be a (relatively) early adapter then. Do you still use it? Or have you pivoted since?
Hell no, I switched back to Arch so my system would stop breaking!
I thought I saw something that the bazzite project might end once Fedora moves away from the 32 bit packages:
Don’t have a link to underline this but it was just a proposal and was not endorsed officially. This is not going to happen.
Ubuntu. The only distro I was able to kernel panic. Multiple times. It just doesn’t like power users.
Mint because the name is fun
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I consider myself to be ‘techie’ for lack of a better word. I have custom janky solutions for everything. I have in the past written down a blue screen and troubleshooted it to give the IT team notes… Hell, I used to be the guy IT would call if they received a ticket from my office (anyone in my office) because I could give them more details and such… So, I like computers and shit, right?
And holy fuck I don’t get the Linux world. I used Mint back in '13ish and it was fine but in a different place back then. I use Pop_OS! on my laptop and I like it just fine. I use Ubuntu on my secondary computer and I like it just fine. I don’t get what I’m supposed to prefer about all these different distros/environments. I can’t wrap my head around it. Do y’all change OSes that often? Am I missing out on something? Am I wrong or are y’all the kids who are wrong?
I feel like a lot of it is from new-ish users excited to talk about it and in the process of forming often prematurely strong opinions on this versus that within Linux. After 15 years of daily driving Linux desktop environments i settled on the one that gave me the least fuss and havent given it a second thought since. I suspect there are many with a similar story, but it’s a boring conversation start if people are looking to debate it.
i settled on the one that gave me the least fuss
Debian?
Lol, yep.
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Any rolling release will do, doesnt actually matter the flavor.
Steam has been investing into Arch (btw) which is nice but really all you want is quick updates. Graphics drivers on other distros may not be updated quickly enough for you to enjoy the newest releases.
