Year of Linux on the Desktop
Year of Linux on the Desktop
2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He's running Windows 7 right now, so I'll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
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There's a bit of controversy regarding Ubuntu that I don't need to get into but Fedora and Pop!_OS are also really good for Proton support. Ubuntu will work fine but I just prefer not to use it. Maybe you could let him try out the live environment for a couple distros to see what he might like in terms of UI.
And Mint as well
Yay Mint! But seriously, it's an excellent choice for anyone switching from Windows. And I've been running Steam on it without any issues whatsoever.
Mint is a really good distro for people coming from windows 7 UI wise.
They also ripped out Snaps, which is half the performance problems with Ubuntu
I've had some random issues with Mint and Lutris that I haven't had on Fedora. Otherwise it's a great distro
Ubuntu has experimented with so much shit going in then being pulled out it's a surprise she don't have an anal relapse
I second popos and mint. I love fedora but if he is a gamer you want something that will just work (navida built in or a very easy one click mechanism to get it). If he has to research PPAs and installing rpmfussion it will get all too hard very quickly. Also do some expectation setting before hand, research what games he plays work on linux, better he finds out now rather than after 2 hours of pain or getting band for "hacking" because of proton triggered an anti-cheat thing.
Edit: I run fedora on all my machines except my gaming rig which is popos. Fedora works too but popos is hassle a free experience.
Fedora more or less just works. I followed, like, 5 simple steps on the top Google result for "installing nvidia drivers fedora" and that was all it took. No further configuration or fiddling required.
I've done it. I agree it can be done very easily. But is relying on all new users entering the right question into google and google returning a correct answer for their distro that is not 7 years out of date the best strategy in the long run?
Any distro that does not offer a option during install or on first boot to just install this stuff with a promt is not new user friendly.
Ublue-nvidia. Just works
Would Ublue be of any use to someone who uses AMD? I'm seeing it recommended a lot lately.
Yes I use it on Amd / Intel too
The project in general is huge. Checkout secureblue or hyprgreen, these all use ublue as base.
Really, ublue made Fedora more like Ubuntu with all the variants. Just a looot more modern.
I'll have to give it a shot then, maybe on a VM or something. I thought it was mainly for specific configurations at first.
No its a toolbox (not the program) based on Fedora, with minor changes and improvements.
This is a great way to package stuff, as it means changes are done fully automated and scalable.
Ublue has maaany images, for more Desktops than Fedora officially supports (so they wont be as stable but they are there), including different kmods and rules for Asus, Framework, Surface, with or without NVIDIA drivers.
There are other projects using ublues tooling, like Secureblue, which is now in a well working state.
So its not only good for Nvidia but the shitty mess that is kernel modules and proprietary drivers, while being on a recent distro, can be tamed best in ostree and immutable snapshots.
If an update fails, you wont get it. And even if, you will have a rollback image that you can select on boot.
All of those are still ancient systems. Arch or opensuse tumbleweed are the only systems that are reasonable for a desktop because they're rolling releases
Fedora is still pretty frequently and recently up to date with respect to packages and kernel, not sure you'd be losing much over arch.
But the debate to me is also not that important, I've been running fedora and have at some few occasions gotten some instabilities due to updates (mostly Nvidia with Wayland) so I can totally understand someone wanting stability and reliability over bleeding edge).
Someone who reviewed Nobara a while back said it best: Arch is bleeding edge while Fedora is cutting edge. Both embrace new things in the Linux world like systemd, Btrfs and PipeWire, but Fedora tries to keep things stable.
I might hop back onto it if my Arch install cakes it.
This is totally wrong. Having the latest software is overrated for gaming. I think most users would rather have a reliable system.
Agreed. If you're sticking to a few games and you're mostly a hobby gamer then yeah, but I can totally see more hardcore types, pro streamers etc looking at getting rolling release systems simply for the experience especially if they've got the money lying around
But that's not really true. You get temporary stability, and then have to do a massive update which is guaranteed to break shit. Do you have a staging server for your desktop? If not, you're not actually getting any benefit from waiting to update.
I'd rather do some maintenance every two years than once a month. I just don't have time or willpower to deal with it because I already have a technical job with computers at work.
Also, last time I did a full upgrade on debian it didn't break anything. Some distros just do a much better job of testing. Rolling releases have always broken something for me after a while.
The thing that rolling release distros are good for is sanitising upstream when it comes to version compatibility. Gentoo was infamous for that, sooo many things back then were bug-compatible with each other because all other distros would lock versions down and only care about their one particular combination.
Yeah dude I totally need those new flags the latest
lessimplements.I don't know about vanilla Arch, but on Manjaro each update breaks at least one thing. I never had issues with Mint. I wonder if I'd still get more stability from Mint if I installed Plasma on it. Anyway, I already got used to AUR and not having to deal with version upgrades. But I still wouldn't recommend Arch-based distros when stability is needed.
This hasn't really been true with arch for years. As long as you update reasonably frequently. I haven't had a breaking issue in ages.
What were the issues you had that broke things?
Usually LibreOffice has issues. That could be because I use libreoffice-still as opposed to fresh. Then there's often file and dependency conflicts requiring manual intervention. The latter is usually documented here, I think, if it's expected. Oh, and protonvpn is absolutely broken every single time.
A little unrelated, but how come we're successfully federating with yiffit.net? We currently have broken outgoing federation. I checked sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.dbzer0.com and none of those show content from us anymore.