• swordsmanluke@programming.dev
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    8 months ago

    If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.

    What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

    The major families at the moment are

    • Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

    • Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.

    • Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

    There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

    The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.

    • capital@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

      And Zorin. I don’t hear much about it but it’s what I switched to from Win 10 and I’ve been liking it.

      That + Steam Proton has me playing my old Windows-only games.

      • swordsmanluke@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        Yup. Zorin’s another great Debian-based distro. I’ve been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I’m a fan.