If this is your 1st forlay into Linux and you just wanna ride, do yourself a favor and install Mint. It works, and it’s a great way to get into it easily and painlessly and operates (mostly) how you would expect it to coming from another OS.
Tbf, Unbuntu works, but they’re ran by a company which has made some questionable choices. You can still go with it if you don’t care too much, it has the advantages of being user friendly and well documented.
If you’d rather not, but you want something not too far and equally easy, you can go with Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu but disables snaps. They also offer differently choices of desktop environments, the default being Cinnamon (which looks a bit more like windows), and another being Mate, which is closer to Gnome.
They also have a “Debian Edition”, which aims to stop being dependant on Ubuntu and may or may not replace the default edition someday, but so far it’s not the one they recommend for new users.
Ignore the noise and go with Ubuntu LTS. When you get comfortable with that, you could try Debian.
You could play it backwards too. Try Debian, if you can’t get it to do what you want, wipe and do Ubuntu LTS. But I do not recommend this path if you have no idea what you’re doing. People underestimate how difficult it is to do simple things when you don’t know how to, no matter how trivial.
The meme above refers to Canonical’s own Snap packaging format (think of it like UWP/Microsoft Store apps vs. “regular” Win32 apps), and the way they’re pushing for its adoption. Snap is installed by default on Ubuntu and official Ubuntu flavors. You can uninstall it manually, but Canonical has modified the APT package manager so that when an application is available as a Snap package, it automatically installs the Snap back-end and the application as a Snap package without notifying the user (instead of installing the .deb-packaged applications, which is what happens on all other distributions that use APT). Canonical recently also ordered that official Ubuntu flavors (which are maintained by independent groups) can’t include Flatpak, a universal packaging format that directly competes with Snap, in their default installations.
Also how do you know snap will stay removed? I wouldn’t be surprised if it magically came back. Might as well use something that’s a little more respectful of your rights. Pop OS or Fedora seem like good choices if you just want gnome wayland. If you want KDE go for Fedora KDE
I moved to Fedora kde. Smaller, newer packages(kde 6), and wayland updated.
There is no reason to fight Ubuntu, just pick something that is not against your priorties. I came from Windows 10 and there was a lot of fighting for respecting user choice.
Wait… I’m just about to switch over to Linux on a laptop and was going to use Ubuntu. This looks kind of cursed though?
Download the live disc images of Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Arch blah blah etc etc etc.
Distrowatch.com is a great resource.
Take them for a test drive before you commit.
If this is your 1st forlay into Linux and you just wanna ride, do yourself a favor and install Mint. It works, and it’s a great way to get into it easily and painlessly and operates (mostly) how you would expect it to coming from another OS.
Welcome
Tbf, Unbuntu works, but they’re ran by a company which has made some questionable choices. You can still go with it if you don’t care too much, it has the advantages of being user friendly and well documented.
If you’d rather not, but you want something not too far and equally easy, you can go with Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu but disables snaps. They also offer differently choices of desktop environments, the default being Cinnamon (which looks a bit more like windows), and another being Mate, which is closer to Gnome.
They also have a “Debian Edition”, which aims to stop being dependant on Ubuntu and may or may not replace the default edition someday, but so far it’s not the one they recommend for new users.
Ignore the noise and go with Ubuntu LTS. When you get comfortable with that, you could try Debian.
You could play it backwards too. Try Debian, if you can’t get it to do what you want, wipe and do Ubuntu LTS. But I do not recommend this path if you have no idea what you’re doing. People underestimate how difficult it is to do simple things when you don’t know how to, no matter how trivial.
It’s not as bad as it looks, especially if you aren’t hardcore, but for long-term linux users it’s not great.
Debian has become what Ubuntu wanted to be: An easy, clean distribution that basically just works, which is a major reversal.
Also consider fedora.
But don’t be worried about Ubuntu, it’s still completely usable.
Switching to Ubuntu is way, way better than staying on Windows.
That being said, Ubuntu is maintained by the Canonical company, and they have made some really sus decisions in the past. Things like putting Amazon ads in the application launcher and then trying to gaslight people when the inevitable backlash arrived.
The meme above refers to Canonical’s own Snap packaging format (think of it like UWP/Microsoft Store apps vs. “regular” Win32 apps), and the way they’re pushing for its adoption. Snap is installed by default on Ubuntu and official Ubuntu flavors. You can uninstall it manually, but Canonical has modified the APT package manager so that when an application is available as a Snap package, it automatically installs the Snap back-end and the application as a Snap package without notifying the user (instead of installing the
.deb
-packaged applications, which is what happens on all other distributions that use APT). Canonical recently also ordered that official Ubuntu flavors (which are maintained by independent groups) can’t include Flatpak, a universal packaging format that directly competes with Snap, in their default installations.Install cachyos
You could try out Linux Mint¹, they’re Ubuntu based and disable Snap by default².
Linux mint has no GNOME or KDE variant, so while they fix many Ubuntu issues, they are still on XOrg.
So? There’s nothing preventing someone from installing either, and they’re adding Wayland support to Cinnamon.
True one can install it on Mint. But at that level, just
While this is not that hard to do if you’re used to linux, I would not reccommend this to someone who is switching from windows.
Yeah probably. Installing Mint and GNOME or Plasma on there will be waay easier.
Use flatpak
Also how do you know snap will stay removed? I wouldn’t be surprised if it magically came back. Might as well use something that’s a little more respectful of your rights. Pop OS or Fedora seem like good choices if you just want gnome wayland. If you want KDE go for Fedora KDE
I moved to Fedora kde. Smaller, newer packages(kde 6), and wayland updated.
There is no reason to fight Ubuntu, just pick something that is not against your priorties. I came from Windows 10 and there was a lot of fighting for respecting user choice.
I would never use dnf Fedora again, it is an unstable mess.
I am on Kinoite since a year or more? Works great. Fedoras Packages are awesome, stable and often better than Uwuntu or OpenSUS
But dnf upgrades simply were extremely unreliable.
It doesnt matter how your distro looks, thats the desktop.
It matters how it backups, upgrades, recovers.
Use timeshift on your brtf partions. Also dnf5 is soon coming and going to be default.
So far no problem at all for me. It is also pretty fast to reinstall if needed.