Ubuntu is actually falling down the ad hole lately. It’s not great, even if you leave out the technical issues that the distribution leans into these day (snaps, amongst other things)
LMDE? The comfort of Mint with the stability of Debian. I picked it for my wife, who doesn't want to mess with configs and tinkering around. I play tech support for her system when something goes wrong though.
i currently use mint and only want to switch because cinnamon has this weird thing when you have a game running, window resizing is laggy. i often have btd6 running when I'm working so it bugs me. kde doesn't suffer from that.
Seconding LMDE, been on it for a year on my study laptop. Literally never ever had a problem so far, and being an "out of box" distro there's minimal work needed to daily drive.
i have tried fedora and nobara a few times but they randomly make my hdd unmountable and it's difficult to get it back. even after installing a different distro.
Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won't recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.
And no, I'm not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won't work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.
You cant ask a youtube channel what distro best suit your specific usecase.
Also realistically no one wants to sit trough a video to check out a strangers recommendation for linux.
I do get that people are worried about the incompetence of AI but this topic and procedure is so bog standard i have more faith in chatgpt doing it then a human.
If you dont believe me, try it.
Ask chatgpt/claude/gemini “How to make a bootable linux media from windows” you will have to spend a long time trying before you find it fails on something this boilerplate.
You don't need to ask, as there are tons of well made videos giving great breakdowns of the most popular distros and the pros/cons of each while also showing demonstrations of a user session within them. To me, that's far more informative than a broad, generalized typed paragraph. However, I will concede that I'm more a visual, hands-on learner, so this is subjective.
And I agree, creating a boot disk is very simple and straightforward. The likelihood of GPT/Gemini getting it wrong is low. Especially Gemini/Copilot, as they basically just regurgitate the top tech site articles in this context and will cite the links it used (e.g. stack exchange, Tom's hardware, etc). But like I said above, it can still happen, so why not just look up the source material for something so simple? I doubt any time is really saved by using AI in this instance. Not to mention, if you're more of a visual person, it's nice to see someone else give a demonstration.
To each their own, though. Neither method is necessarily the wrong/better one.
It's crazy how different people are. The idea of sitting through a video to do something like this is so painful to me. Like I find it useful for physical things where seeing the motion can be helpful, but I still generally find doing things that way awful. Please, please, please just give me written instructions for things. Especially if I'm going to need to refer back to it a few times (e.g. there are multiple steps that take a bit of time).
It depends on the context for me. Repairing/replacing something on like my lawnmower or car? Video all the way. A simple CLI command/process? A quick write-up is often preferred for me.
Gaming in Linux on a windows VM isn’t viable for most systems. Most games run really well through proton with little to no effort. Some even run better on Linux than on windows. You just can’t play a lot of the most popular competitive online games because it flags their anti cheat.
Most of the time, yeah. Check ProtonDB for the particulars regarding any particular game. Games with intrusive DRM or anticheat probably won't work though.
Many distros nowadays have decent support forngaming accessories and a mix of Lutris and Steam/Proton have given me a near seemless experience on Linux. Smooth enough for my partner to hop ship to Bazzite for their ROG Ally.
Sometimes there are small quirks, like controllers on Bazzite just work™ but on Vanilla OS 2 my xbox controller wouldn't be recognized by Steam or games wirelessly (wired worked) but my DS5 controller worked flawlessly (including the trackpad that I never got to work on Windows).
Most of the Steam library will work well and ProtonDB is a great resource for compatibility. Furthermore there are Decky plugins for setups like Bazzite and Chimera that embed the ProtonDB rating into the Steam game page.