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What's the best Linux for novice users these days?

Lucasoato 3y ago
Linux Mint isn't a bad option IMO.
tovej 3y ago
I would suggest one of the big main trunks of the different distro flavors: debian, arch, or openSUSE (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns) Debian is stable, but slow, I think of it as "vanilla linux". Most software everywhere is available as dpkg packages, either through apt or through download, and the packages in the repositories are well maintained. Arch is a rolling updates -based distro with a user repository, so you get even more packages, and you never have to do a separate major distro version update. Arch might require some setting up, but if you can follow a checklist, the installation should be rather easy (although, idk maybe there has been more work done on installation wizards lately) Alternatively, Arch is nice in that most of the derivatives are compatible with the main line, so here you could opt for e.g. Manjaro or Arcolinux, these give you nice preconfigurations for desktop environments etc., which you would have to setup yourself with vanilla arch. openSUSE is an opinionated and fully featured distro with a lot of really nice features. It's stable, the distro is backed up by an enterprise version (SUSE linux), and gets some of its stability and featureset from the money, requirements, and attention of an enterprise customer base
- dijit 3y ago
  > (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns) FWIW people said the same thing about Ubuntu. To be perfectly honest. Mint is a decent enough way to get started. Yes, it's easy to use, yes, that's a good thing. One very unfortunate thing with "easy to use" distros is that when it fails it's much harder to fix than ones with a steeper learning curve for some reason. But most people have this issue with Windows already. All things being equal: I would not suggest someone who wants to "get things done" immediately with a linux OS & coming from Windows: to use Arch or Debian. Most likely I would recommend something like Mint, because it just "gets out of the way" most of the time for the majority of users. This isn't a holy war, this is pragmatism, and giving people choice is not actually helping them adopt a linux that's best for them. Just use Mint until you find it has limitations you can't bear, then you'll have enough buy-in and understanding to jump to something that suits your needs. But making the jump in the first place is the most important part. Not what you jump to. Easy to use is valid.
  - tovej 3y ago
    Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful operating systems. As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux. I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint. I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing. Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint. I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.
- wruza 3y ago
  What makes debian slow?
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I think it's not slow as in speed, because I'm using a Debian 11 and it feels faster that the Ubuntu 20.04 I was using before on the same machine. It's probably slow to be up to date with the latest versions of the installed packages. Not a big deal for people using only browsers (they are regularly updated) and LibreOffice (any version will do) or developers (we use docker and language managers, right?) but there might be some class of users that want to stay closer to the edge.
    - wruza 3y ago
      Is ubuntu not based on debian repos anymore? I remember when it was a debian unstable/latest(?) plus the “Ubuntu” part itself. Debian was a set of versions, from stable to “probably will break”, not a single “old” distro. Anyway it always feels strange when someone claims X is slower/faster than Y, where X and Y are both ~the same kernel and the base system. As if debian maintainers didn’t know some secret “non_vanilla_run_faster: true” settings for the same kernel that was 30 years in development already. Most distros are just slightly different gui programs running on top of basically the same gnu/linux binaries.
      - NortySpock 3y ago
        Ubuntu is still based on Debian testing.
  - tovej 3y ago
    Slow to update packages, sorry for the confusion Nothing wrong with the performance!
angra_mainyu 3y ago
Pop os! hands down one of the best. The tiling extension literally beats awesomewm, sway, i3 or anything else as it is zero-config and enabled by flipping a switch. It also brings useful power modes and makes installing drivers easy.
- wruza 3y ago
  tiling extension It seems to be pretty similar to FancyZones. Users who moved from windows may find it useful, especially compared to usual learning curves of tiling wms. https://github.com/pop-os/shell#shared-features https://github.com/pop-os/shell#shared-features
- dijit 3y ago
  Pop_OS! is actually really good, despite the name. I used it recently and it gave me a really good impression.
- mmkthecoolest 3y ago
  Do note that Pop OS does not support secure boot, which might be difficult to disable on some machines. If that is a deal-breaker I'd recommend either Ubuntu (if you're ok with a MacOS like UI) or Kubuntu (if you want something more like Windows).
acomjean 3y ago
I’ll second pop. It’s basically Ubuntu. I’ve been daily driving it on my work laptop the past year and it’s been great. I thinks they’re using Ubuntu LTS as a base so stable but not cutting edge.

Linux Mint isn't a bad option IMO.

I would suggest one of the big main trunks of the different distro flavors: debian, arch, or openSUSE (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns) Debian is stable, but slow, I think of it as "vanilla linux". Most software everywhere is available as dpkg packages, either through apt or through download, and the packages in the repositories are well maintained. Arch is a rolling updates -based distro with a user repository, so you get even more packages, and you never have to do a separate major distro version update. Arch might require some setting up, but if you can follow a checklist, the installation should be rather easy (although, idk maybe there has been more work done on installation wizards lately) Alternatively, Arch is nice in that most of the derivatives are compatible with the main line, so here you could opt for e.g. Manjaro or Arcolinux, these give you nice preconfigurations for desktop environments etc., which you would have to setup yourself with vanilla arch. openSUSE is an opinionated and fully featured distro with a lot of really nice features. It's stable, the distro is backed up by an enterprise version (SUSE linux), and gets some of its stability and featureset from the money, requirements, and attention of an enterprise customer base

dijit 3y ago
> (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns) FWIW people said the same thing about Ubuntu. To be perfectly honest. Mint is a decent enough way to get started. Yes, it's easy to use, yes, that's a good thing. One very unfortunate thing with "easy to use" distros is that when it fails it's much harder to fix than ones with a steeper learning curve for some reason. But most people have this issue with Windows already. All things being equal: I would not suggest someone who wants to "get things done" immediately with a linux OS & coming from Windows: to use Arch or Debian. Most likely I would recommend something like Mint, because it just "gets out of the way" most of the time for the majority of users. This isn't a holy war, this is pragmatism, and giving people choice is not actually helping them adopt a linux that's best for them. Just use Mint until you find it has limitations you can't bear, then you'll have enough buy-in and understanding to jump to something that suits your needs. But making the jump in the first place is the most important part. Not what you jump to. Easy to use is valid.
- tovej 3y ago
  Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful operating systems. As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux. I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint. I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing. Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint. I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.
wruza 3y ago
What makes debian slow?
- pmontra 3y ago
  I think it's not slow as in speed, because I'm using a Debian 11 and it feels faster that the Ubuntu 20.04 I was using before on the same machine. It's probably slow to be up to date with the latest versions of the installed packages. Not a big deal for people using only browsers (they are regularly updated) and LibreOffice (any version will do) or developers (we use docker and language managers, right?) but there might be some class of users that want to stay closer to the edge.
  - wruza 3y ago
    Is ubuntu not based on debian repos anymore? I remember when it was a debian unstable/latest(?) plus the “Ubuntu” part itself. Debian was a set of versions, from stable to “probably will break”, not a single “old” distro. Anyway it always feels strange when someone claims X is slower/faster than Y, where X and Y are both ~the same kernel and the base system. As if debian maintainers didn’t know some secret “non_vanilla_run_faster: true” settings for the same kernel that was 30 years in development already. Most distros are just slightly different gui programs running on top of basically the same gnu/linux binaries.
    - NortySpock 3y ago
      Ubuntu is still based on Debian testing.
- tovej 3y ago
  Slow to update packages, sorry for the confusion Nothing wrong with the performance!

angra_mainyu 3y ago

Pop os! hands down one of the best. The tiling extension literally beats awesomewm, sway, i3 or anything else as it is zero-config and enabled by flipping a switch. It also brings useful power modes and makes installing drivers easy.

wruza 3y ago
tiling extension It seems to be pretty similar to FancyZones. Users who moved from windows may find it useful, especially compared to usual learning curves of tiling wms. https://github.com/pop-os/shell#shared-features https://github.com/pop-os/shell#shared-features
dijit 3y ago
Pop_OS! is actually really good, despite the name. I used it recently and it gave me a really good impression.
mmkthecoolest 3y ago
Do note that Pop OS does not support secure boot, which might be difficult to disable on some machines. If that is a deal-breaker I'd recommend either Ubuntu (if you're ok with a MacOS like UI) or Kubuntu (if you want something more like Windows).

acomjean 3y ago

I’ll second pop. It’s basically Ubuntu. I’ve been daily driving it on my work laptop the past year and it’s been great. I thinks they’re using Ubuntu LTS as a base so stable but not cutting edge.