You’re about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you’re overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)
The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide. Because there is a lot of info and explanations everywhere, I will often (over-)simplify so as to keep the information accessible and digestible. Please refrain from asking to add your favorite distro/DE in the comments, I feel there is too much choice already ;)
Preamble
Make sure your hardware is compatible
Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don’t use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you’re golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.
Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux
If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).
Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS
Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It’s okay. You’re learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.
When in doubt, search for documentation
Arch Wiki is one of the greatest knowledge bases about Linux. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same. Most distros also maintain their own knowledge base.
Understanding the Linux world
What is Linux?
Linux, in the strictest definition, is the kernel, ie. the core component that, among other things, orchestrates and handles all interactions between hardware and software, of a large family of operating systems that, by metonymy, are called “Linux”. In general understanding, Linux is any one of these operating systems, called distros.
What is a distro?
A distro, short for “Software Distribution”, is a cohesive ensemble of software, providing a full operating system, maintained by a single team. Generally, all of them tend to provide almost the same software and work in a very similar way, but there are major philosophical differences that may influence your choice.
What are the main differences between distros?
As said above, there are a lot of philosophical differences between distros that lead to practical differences. There are a lot of very different ways the same software can be distributed.
- “Point Release” (OpenSUSE Leap) vs. “Rolling Release” (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed): Point release distros are like traditional software. They have numbered releases, and between each one no feature updates take place, only security updates and bug fixes. Rolling Release distros package and distribute software as soon as it’s available upstream (the software developer’s repos), meaning that there are no versions and no specific schedule.
- “Stable” (Debian Stable) vs. “Bleeding edge” (Arch): Stable distros are generally point release, and focus on fixing bugs and security flaws at the expense of new features. Each version goes through a lenghty period of feature freeze, testing and bug fixing before release. Stability here not only means trouble-free operation, but more importantly consistent behavior over time. Things won’t evolve, but things won’t break. At least until the next release. Bleeding edge distros, which often follow the rolling release model (there are outliers like Fedora which are mostly bleeding edge yet have point releases), on the other hand, are permanently evolving. By constantly pushing the latest version of each software package, new features, new bugs, bug fixes, security updates and sometimes breaking changes are released continuously. Note that this is not a binary, there is a very large continuum between the stablest and the most bleeding edge distro.
- “Community” (Fedora) vs. “Commercial” (RHEL): Despite the name, Community distros are not only maintained by volunteers, but can also be developed by some company’s employees and can be sponsored by commercial entities. However, the main difference with Commercial distros is that they’re not a product destined to be sold. Commercial distros like Red Hat’s RHEL, SuSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu Pro are (supposed to be) fully maintained by their company’s employees and target businesses with paid support, maintenance, fixes, deployment, training etc.
- “x package manager” vs. “y package manager”, “x package format” vs. “y package format”: It doesn’t matter. Seriously.
apt,dnforpacman, to name a few, all have the exact same purpose: install and update software on your system and manage dependencies. - “general purpose” (Linux Mint) vs. “niche” (Kali Linux): General purpose distros are just that: distros that can do pretty much anything. Some are truly general purpose (like Debian), and have no bias towards any potential use, be it for a server, a desktop/laptop PC, some IOT or embedded devices, containers etc., some have various flavors depending on intended use (like Fedora Workstation for desktops and Fedora Server for, you guessed it, servers) but are still considered general purpose. They aim for maximum hardware compatibility and broad use cases. At the opposite end, niche distros are created for very specific and unique use cases, like pentesting (Kali), gaming (Nobara), music production (AV Linux) etc. They tend to have a lot of specific tools preinstalled, nonstandard defaults or modified kernels that may or may not work properly outside of their inteded use case.
- “team” (Any major distro) vs. “single maintainer” (Nobara): Pretty self explanatory. Some distros are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people. These distros do not usually last very long.
- “traditional” (Fedora Workstation) vs. “atomic” (Fedora Silverblue): In traditional distros, everything comes from a package. Every single component is individually installable, upgradeable, and deletable. Updating a package means deleting its previous version and replacing it with a new one. A power failure during an update lead to a partial upgrade and can make a system unbootable. Maybe a new package was bad and breaks something. Almost nothing prevents an unsuspecting user from destroying a core component. To mitigate risks and ensure a coherent system at each boot, atomic (also called transactional or immutable) distros, pioneered by Fedora Silverblue and Valve’s SteamOS, were born. Like mobile phone OSes, the base system is a single image, that gets installed, alongside the current running version and without modifying it, and becomes active at the next reboot. As updates are isolated from one another, if the new version doesn’t work the user can easily revert to a previous, functional version. Users are expected to install Flatpaks or use Distrobox, as installing (layering) packages is not as straightforward as with standard distros.
- “OG” (Debian) vs. “derivative” (Ubuntu): Original distros are directly downstream of their components’ source code repositories, and do most of the heavy lifting. Because of the tremendous amount of work it represents, only a few distros like Debian, Arch, Slackware or Fedora have the history, massive community and sometimes corporate financial backing to do this. Other distros reuse most packages from those original distros and add, replace or modify some of them for differenciation. For example, Debian is the parent of almost all deb-based distros like Ubuntu, which itself is the parent of distros like Mint or Pop!_OS.
What are the main components of a distro, ie. a Linux-based operating system?
All distros provide, install and maintain, among other things, the following components:
- Boot and core system components (these are generally out-of-scope for beginners, unless you need to fix something, but you should at least know they exist):
- A boot manager (GRUB, systemd_init, etc.): Boots the computer after the motherboard POSTs, lets you choose what to start
- An init system (systemd, etc.): Starts everything needed to run the computer, including the kernel
- A kernel (Linux): Has control over everything, main interface for software to discuss with hardware
- Command-line environment, to interact with he computer in text mode:
- A shell (bash, zsh, fish etc.): The main interface for command-line stuff
- Command-line tools (GNU, etc.): Standard suite of command-line tools + default tools chosen by the distro maintainers
- User-installable command-line tools and shells
- Graphical stack for desktop/laptop computers:
- Display servers (X11, Wayland compositors): Handle drawing stuff on screens
- A Desktop environment (Plasma, Gnome, XFCE etc.): The main graphical interface you’ll interact with everyday.
- User-facing applications (browsers, text processors, drawing software etc.): Some are generally installed by default and/or are part of a desktop environment’s suite of software, most are user-installable.
- A package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, yast etc.): Installs, deletes, updates and manages dependencies of all software installed on the machine.
Which are the main Desktop Environments and which one should I choose?
As a new user, this is basically the only thing you should concern yourself about: choosing a first Desktop environment. After all, it will be your main interface for the weeks/years to come. It’s almost as important as choosing your first distro. These are a few common choices that cater to different tastes:
- Gnome: Full featured yet very minimalist, Gnome is a great DE that eschews the traditional Desktop metaphor. Like MacOS, out of the box, it provides its strongly opinionated developers’ vision of a user experience. Fortunately, unlike MacOS, there are thousands of extensions to tweak and extend the looks and behaviour of the DE. Dash-to-dock or Dash-to-panel are great if you want a more MacOS-like or Windows-like experience, Blur My Shell is great if you love blurry transparent things, Appindicator is a must, and everything else is up to you. Gnome’s development cycle is highly regular and all core components and apps follow the same release schedule, which explains why a lot of distros choose it as their default DE.
- KDE Plasma: Full featured and maximalist, Plasma does not cater to a single design philosophy, is very flexible and can be tweaked almost ad infinitum. This may be an advantage for people who like to spend hours making the perfect environment, or a disadvantage as the possibilities can be overwhelming, and the added complexity may compromise stability, bugginess or completeness. There is not yet a single development cycle for core components and apps, which makes it a bit more difficult for distro maintainers and explains why there are so few distros with Plasma as the flagship DE. The KDE team is however evolving towards a more regular update cycle.
- Cinnamon: Forked from Gnome 3 by the Linux Mint team who disliked the extreme change of user experience it introduced, Cinammon provides a very traditional, “windows-like”, desktop-metaphor experience in a more modern software stack than the older DEs it takes inspiration from. Cinnamon still keeps a lot in common with Gnome by being simple and easy to use, yet heavily modifiable with themes, applets and extensions.
- Lightweight DEs for old or underpowered machines: The likes of XFCE, LXDE, LXQt are great if you want to ressurect an old machine, but lack the bells and whistles of the aforementioned DEs. If your machine is super old, extremely underpowered and has less than a few Gb of RAM, don’t expect miracles though. A single browser tab can easily dwarf the RAM usage and processing power of your entire system.
As for which one you should choose, this is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences. FYI, you are not married to your distro’s default desktop environment. It’s just what comes preinstalled. You can install alternative DEs on any distro, no need to reinstall and/or distro-hop.
How do I install stuff on Linux?
Forget what you’re used to do on Windows of MacOS: searching for your software in a seach engine, finding a big “Download” button on a random website and running an installer with administator privileges. Your package manager not only keeps you system up to date, but also lets you install any software that’s available in your distro’s repositories. You don’t even need to know the command line, Gnome’s Software or Plasma’s Discover are nice graphical “App Stores” that let you find and install new software.
Flatpak are a great and more recent recent alternative to distro packages that’s gaining a lot of traction, and is increasingly integrated by default to the aforementioned App Stores. It’s basically a “universal” package manager system thet sits next to your system, that lets software developers directly distribute their own apps instead of offloading the packaging and distribution to distro maintainers.
Choosing a first distro
As discussed before, there is a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a decently large community of maintainers and contributors and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case. Choose a distro that implements well the DE of your choice.
What are great distros for beginners?
The following are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way. Always read the installation documentation thoroughly before attempting anything, and follow any post-install requirements (for example, installing restricted-licence drivers on Fedora).
- Fedora Workstation: Clean, sensible, modern and very up to date and should work out of the box for most hardware. Despite being sponsored by Red Hat (who are getting a lot of justified hate for moving RHEL away from open-source), this is a great community distro for both beginners and very advanced users (including the Linus Torvalds). Fedora is the flagship distro for the Gnome Desktop Environment, but also has a fantastic Plasma version. Keywords: Point Release, close to Bleeding Edge, Community, dnf/rpm, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
- Linux Mint: Mint is an Ubuntu (or Debian for the LMDE variant) derivative for beginners and advanced users alike, that keeps Ubuntu’s hardware support and ease of use while reverting its shenanigans and is Cinammon’s flagship distro. Its main goal is to be a “just works” distro. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, Community, apt/deb, smallish maintainer team but lots of contributors, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu or Debian).
- Pop!_OS: Backed by hardware Linux vendor System76, this is another Ubuntu derivative that removes Snaps in favor or Flatpaks. Its heavily modified Gnome DE looks and feels nice. In a few months/years, it will be the flagship distro for the -promising but still in development- Cosmic DE. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, commercially-backed Community, apt/deb, employee’s maintainer team, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu).
- If you want something (advertised as) zero-maintenance, why not go the Atomic way? They are still very new and there isn’t a lot of support yet because they do things very differently than regular distros, but if they wort OOTB on your system, they should work reliably forever. Sensible choices are uBlue’s Aurora (Plasma), Bluefin (Gnome) or Bazzite (gaming-ready), which are basically identical to Fedora’s atomic variants but include (among other things) restricted-licence codecs and QOL improvements by default, or OpenSUSE’s Aeon (Gnome). Keywords: Point Release, Bleeding Edge, Community, rpm-ostree, large maintainer team, Atomic, sub-project (Fedora/OpenSUSE).
Which power-user distros should I avoid as a beginner, unless I reaaaally need to understand everything instead of being productive day one?
These are amongst the very best but should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed.
- Debian Stable: as one of the oldest, still maintained distros and the granddaddy of probably half of the distros out there, Debian is built like a tank. A very stringent policy of focusing on bug and security fixes over new features makes Debian extremely stable and predictable, but it can also feel quite outdated. Still a rock-solid experience, with a lot to tinker with despite very sensible defaults. It is an incredible learning tool and is as “Standard Linux” as can be. Debian almost made the cut to “beginner” distros because of its incredible reliability and massive amount of documentation available, but it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection. Keywords: Point Release, Stable as fuck, Community, apt/deb, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
- Arch: The opposite of Debian in philosophy, packages often come to Arch almost as soon as the source code is released. Expect a lot of manual installation and configuration, daily updates, and regularly fixing stuff. An incredible learning tool too, that will make you intimate with the inner workings of Linux. The “Arch btw” meme of having to perform every single install step by hand has taken a hit since Arch has had a basic but functional installer for a few years now, which is honestly a good thing. I work in sofware. A software engineer who does every single tedious task manually instead of automating it is a shit software engineer. A software engineer who prides themself from doing every single tedious task manually should seriously reconsider their career choices. Arch’s other main appeal is the Arch User Repository or AUR, a massive collection of user-created, automated install scripts for pretty much anything. Keywords: Rolling Release, Bleeding-edge, Community, pacman/pkg, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
Which distro should I avoid, period?
- Ubuntu: despite having a huge mind-share as the beginner distro, Ubuntu suffers from it’s parent company’s policy to make Ubuntu kinda-Linux-but-not-really and a second-rate citizen compared to their Ubuntu Pro commercial product. Some of the worst takes in recent years have been pushing Snaps super agressively in order to get some “vendor-lock-in”, proprietary walled-garden ecosystem with exclusive commercial apps, forcibly installing snaps even when explicitely asking for a .deb package through
apt, baking ads and nags into major software or only delivering critical security patches to Pro customers. Fortunately, there are some great derivatives like Mint or Pop!_OS cited above that work equally well but revert some of the most controversial decisions made by Canonical. - Manjaro: Manjaro might seem appealing as a “user-friendlier” Arch derivative and some of its tools are fantastic to remove some configuration burden, but ongoing mismanagement issues and the fact that it needs Arch-style regular maintenance as updates often break stuff prevent it from being a truly beginner distro. Manjaro also has a highly irregular update schedule that’s weeks behind Arch, making using the AUR extremely dangerous, as it always expects a fully up-to-date Arch system.
- Any single-maintainer or tiny team distros like Nobara or CachyOS. They might be fantastic distros made by exceptional people (I have mad respect for Nobara’s maintainer Glorious Eggroll and his work on Proton-GE), they are most often derivatives so the heavy lifting is already done by their parent distro’s maitainers, but there is too much risk involved. Sometimes life happens, sometimes people move on to other projects, and dozens of small distros get abandonned every year, leaving their users dead in the water. Trusting larger teams is a much safer bet in the long term.
- Anything that refuse to use standards for ideological reasons like Alpine Linux, Devuan or Artix. Don’t get me wrong, not using any GNU tools or systemd is a cool technological feat and developing alternatives to the current consensus is how things evolve. However, these standard tools have a long history, hundreds if not thousands of maintainers and are used by millions, meaning there’s a huge chance your specific issue is already solved. Refusing to use them should be reserved to very advanced users who perfectly understand what they’re gaining and losing. As a beginner to intermediate level, it will at best make most of the documentation out there irrelevant, at worst make your life a miserable hell if you need to troubleshoot anything.
Philosophical questions, or “I’ve seen people arguing over the Internet and now I’m scared”
You’ve done your research, you’re almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community or on the other website that starts with a “R”, but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?
Shoud I learn the command line?
Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE’s settings. But sometimes, it’s much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it’s the only way to fix something. It’s not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.
I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from its era?
Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server. If it’s possible, one of the best ways to breathe new life into an old machine is to add some RAM, as even lightweight modern sofware will struggle with less than a few Gb.
Should I be concerned about systemd?
No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical and ideological rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner.
Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?
Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people’s complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GTX/RTX users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80’s and 90’s and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. X11 was born in a time when mainframes did most of the heavy lifting and windows were forwarded over a local network to dumb clients. X11 predates the Internet and has basically no security model. Wayland solves that by being a much simpler display protocol with a much smaller feature set adapted to modern computing and security. The only downside is that some very specific functionalities based on decades of X11 hacking and absolute lack of security can be lost.
I want to play some games, should I look for a gaming distro?
No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.
Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps vs. native packages?
Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent stable version and/or the one packaged by the developer themselves (which should often be the Flatpak anyway). Snaps however are kinda bad. They are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. Also, Canonical is very aggressive in pushing snaps to their users, even forcing them even when they want to install an apt package. If you don’t care, have fun.
I need/want program “x”, but it is only available on distro “y” and not on mine. I’ve been told to ditch my beloved distro and install the other one, should I?
No. Generally, most software is intallable from your distro’s package manager and/or Flatpak. But sometimes, your distro doesn’t package this program you need, or an inconsiderate developer only distributes a random .deb on their Github release page. Enter Distrobox. It is a very simple, easy to use command line tool that automates the creation of other Linux distros containers using Docker or Podman (basically, tiny, semi-independant Linuxes that live inside your regular Linux), and lets you “export” programs installed inside these containers to you main system so you can run them as easily and with almost the same performance as native programs. Some atomic distros like uBlue’s variants even include it by default. That .deb we’ve talked about before? Spin a Debian container and dpkg install the shit out of it. Absolutely need the AUR? Spin an Arch container and go to town.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who helped improve this guide: @GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml, @tkn@startrek.website, @throwaway2@lemmy.today, @cerement@slrpnk.net, @kzhe@lemm.ee, @freijon@feddit.ch, @aarroyoc@lemuria.es, @SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org, @Plopp@lemmy.world, @bsergay@discuss.online …and many others who chimed in in the comments <3
Link to version 1: https://lemm.ee/post/15895051
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I agree that Alpine Linux shouldn’t be recommended to newbies but I don’t like the explanation. Distros like Alpine Linux are good for the whole Linux ecosystem, as they avoid monoculture and bring diversity to the software, which in turn they foster competition. Like a biological ecosystem, betting everything into one particular specie is a recipe for disaster. Some examples: Glibc has found many bugs because musl did things differently, and it turned out that glibc was not following the standard (also musl had bugs on its own), GCC was stuck until Clang came out and developers started to prefer Clang,…
First of all, thank you for this! This effort is very much appreciated and will definitely make it easier to parse through Linux; especially for beginners.
Having said that, some personal nitpicks of mine:
- I absolutely love Fedora. But if it’s named first on your list of beginner distros (presumably due to alphabetical ordering), then it better be easy as hell and work as expected OOTB. Unfortunately, that ain’t the case. Hence, at least mentioning the Howto page of RPM Fusion would have been sensible to combat issues users might experience otherwise.
- I’m fine with the inclusion of openSUSE Aeon, but openSUSE Kalpa is literally in Alpha. Therefore, it’s too early to be recommended.
- I’m personally not very bothered with Fedora Workstation on the list of distros geared towards beginners, while Debian is found on the list of power-user distros that beginners should avoid instead.
(I’m a die hard Fedora fanboy anyways.)However, I am curious to your reasoning/justification. - Alpine Linux was originally envisioned as an embedded-first distribution. Therefore, most of its design choices revolve around that; small, secure, simple et cetera. The way that you describe/depict Alpine Linux, is more in line with how I would for (what I’d refer to as) demonstrative distros like Artix and Devuan.
I pondered a lot including a bit about rpmfusion in Fedora’s paragraph, but I elected not to because there is already too much stuff here :D
As a 20-years Debian user who switched to Fedora a couple years ago on my main laptop, I would say confidently that Debian is the distro I’m the most comfortable with. I love Debian. But, there are a couple things that prevent me from recommending it as a very first distro:
- The base system is very barebones and you’re required to manually install vital things like proprietary drivers (I think it’s a bit more painless now with the nonfree installer but I haven’t installed a fresh Debian in a few years). For me, having a fully functional Debian laptop is not hard work but requires a bit of knowledge beforehand.
- A lot of people want the latest and shiniest, and with Debian might be tempted to switch to Testing or Sid which is a very bad idea for a daily driver.
Good call about Kalpa, I’m removing it
Thank you for the clarifications!
Regarding what you mentioned on Debian; ultimately, you’re a lot more experienced than I am with it. But, IIUC, Debian 12 should have done a great job at easing (new) users into its ecosystem. Not sure if it’s sufficient though.
You’re welcome!
Yeah I think the recent nonfree images should take care of the most pressing driver issues (last time I installed Debian, I had to separately download and put on a second USB stick the drivers for my WiFi card just to be able to proceed with the installer). I don’t know if you still need to manually install proprietary blobs for the CPU or the GPU post-install tho. If not, that would mean modern Debian is indeed very close to OOTB functionality.
Debian Sid is a great daily driver, just not for beginners.
Some distros are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people. These distros do not usually last very long.
Except the oldest distro that still exists is maintained by one person.
Slackware?
Yes.
Reading this feels like reading those famous math textbooks, which are for people who are already well-versed in the field yet kept being shoved into undergraduate courses.
This is REAL Linux, done by REAL Linuxians.
“Hello I would like
sudo pacman -Syyuapples please”They have played us for absolute fools.
I liked your guide, but the vocabulary feels a bit too technical for people who have never used Linux before and aren’t tech savvy.
Sorry, I’m not a native English speaker and I work in IT :D
I however believe that it’s more useful in the long run to use correct terminology (with a small explanation if necessary) rather than “dumbing it down”, as it makes finding pertinent information quicker/easier.
I agree, we all have search engines and if someone doesn’t understand a word or phrase they can learn it on their own. Brilliant write up!
Thanks !
There are two reasons switching to, or even trying out Linux is difficult and often ends in failure: too many choices or too much information. This (great) write up is an example of the latter. Those among us, the would be tutors of Linux, actually read the whole thing before hopping down to the comments, or offer our opinion. Be honest.
We are all passionate about FOSS. Not just because it’s neato, but because we recognize that it improves the quality of life of anyone who uses it, and (hopefully) society at large.
Rather than providing many choices with a sink or swim mentality, or write a novel Herman Melville would envy, my suggestion is to become mentors rather tutors. What’s the difference?
Haha I dunno I thought it was a pretty good primer for people seeking it out, and people in this community are super helpful and mentor-like in my experience.
I wouldn’t even call myself a beginner anymore, but I read the whole thing. :)
Oh yea folks on lemmy are super helpful. And some of them are mentors. To me there are two qualities of a good mentor: time and patience. They will take a student and work with them for however long it takes. They know the student won’t get it immediately, so they wait. They recast the question. They will provide personalized examples. They spend enough time with a single student for that student to mature as much as they can while the two are together. Think Mr. Miyagi from the karate kid.
Just as with the other two, there are drawbacks. Mentorship takes time. I’m from the standpoint that if we spend that time, and I mentor 2 people, and you mentor two people, and they mentor two people, we reach critical mass and we start reaching the normies who want, but don’t have another way. I’m not as wise as Mr. Miyagi and I’m quite snarky with my opinions 🙃
This is an exceptional write up, thanks!
I started with Mint and it was very simple to set up. I don’t really like the DE though (personal preference, I’ve used OSX for over 10 years). From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else - is this fairly straightforward to do?
I’m looking to use the machine as a photo processing platform (from film and digital) and finding alternatives to Adobe products like Lightroom and Photoshop… with a view to ultimately having a NAS and cloud backup once I get to it.
Mint has three prebuilt options, Cinnamon is just the default. Beyond that you can also install other desktops.
From your description it sounds like I can change Cinnamon to something else
You definitely can.
is this fairly straightforward to do?
It ain’t bad. However, I would opt for a distro that defaults to the preferred DE. In this case, similarly to Linux Mint, the distro would have to be beginner-friendly, popular, polished and stable[2]. So, IMO, that would be:
- GNOME[3]; Pop!_OS or Zorin OS
- KDE Plasma; Tuxedo OS
- Xfce; MX Linux
Note that there are many other DEs. However, the above mentioned DEs (together with Cinnamon) are the most polished and popular. And while there are many other distros through which you might ‘consume’ said DEs, the distros mentioned above are the ones I (personally) like to recommend.
- At least relatively speaking.
- Stable is used here in the context of meant to be used without updating for 'extended’ time; except for security updates.
- While both default to GNOME, they differ pretty significantly in how they’re setup and the associated envisioned workflow.
Anything that refuse to use standards for ideological reasons
See: “Best Practice”
Distro best added to the “Power-user distros to avoid” list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).
I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn’t the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn’t appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that’s been broken by automation that didn’t quite work as expected. Anyway, I’d suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.
Never understood why Arch got the reputation it has tbh, I’ve been using Arch-based distros since forever (and since being more or less a beginner in understanding how Linux and Unix-like systems work in general) and never found it hard since it was so well-documented and all the knowledge I needed was spoonfed to me by the wiki. Gentoo should have that reputation. Gentoo uses so many confusing concepts that no other distro seems to use lol
I don’t know man. As someone who’s been using PCs for decades with occasionally dabbling with stuff on Linux shells, I’ve tried to install Arch on my laptop a couple months ago and I kept running into one problem after another while trying to follow the Arch wiki installation guide. Maybe if the guide had a single set of instructions that would work majority of the times, instead of branching into options, and only cursory mention of critical stuff that should not be left out mentioned in footnotes, it’d be easier to install. After the second attempt that took a full evening I just gave up.
I’m sorry to hear—that’s surprising to me tbh, the Arch and Arch-based distros ive installed have all worked out of the box for me, with the only issues being related to hardware not working well with Linux ie not distro-specific (I used to have Ubuntu on the same machine for instance which had the same issues with the nvidia gpu and 1st gen ryzen cpu). But if you’ve had trouble thats fair enough, use whatever works well for you
Thank you. Fantastic write-up. Saved for future use. :-)
I generally agree with these assessments. One point I would like to add some nuance to, though. This might not be the most popular take, but saying that Ubuntu should be avoided at all cost is a bit extreme. IMO.
If I may, here some counter-arguments to the criticisms of Ubuntu:
It is easy to use and accessible. It has a user-friendly interface and is installed with ease, making it an excellent choice for beginners. The large user base and extensive documentation also provide a wealth of resources for troubleshooting and learning.
Snap packages are convenient as they bundle all dependencies. Flatpaks do something similar, of course. But just because Canonical controls Snap and it is closed source doesn’t automatically make it evil.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn’t always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux. Ubuntu has a large and active community that can be incredibly helpful to new users. The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don’t currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently. Their work also makes the work of distros like Mint, Elementary and Pop! OS easier.
Ultimately, the choice of Linux distribution depends on individual needs and preferences - even for beginners. Although I am not a Ubuntu fan, I wanted to provide a counterpoint with this post. Ubuntu certainly has its flaws, but are we really doing the world of Linux a favour by promoting complete avoidance and thus damaging Ubuntu?
Anyway, just my opinion. I know some of you will disagree with me, perhaps passionately and strongly. Some will agree. That is fine. My hope is that the Linux world remains as diverse as possible, with plenty of options for everyone, and enough resources for fast, high quality development.
I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it’s neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I’d even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.
The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn’t always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux.
I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.
What’s bad about Ubuntu is that the “free” version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).
The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don’t currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently.
Fortunately that knowledge can be used downstream and often upstream too. After all, most Ubuntu issues are Debian Sid issues.
My opinion doesn’t mean much since it’s been forever since I tried any other distro but I’m surprised Debian isn’t on the beginners list.
it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection
I’m not really sure what this means? It might be more accurate to say it’s not the best distro if you’d like to tinker with your desktop experience.
Notably, nothing on the beginners list ought to be run as a headless server, but debian is perfect for that job. The reason I’ve become so enamoured with debian over the years is that I can use it on my desktop and on servers and it’s the same system - everything is exactly where I’m used to it being.
Thanks to this guide I’ve stopped banging my head against the wall trying to install Arch on a laptop and just ended up putting Mint on it. Nearly everything works out of the box, and Cinnamon seems to be close enough to what a Windows user would expect, and then some, seeing how customizable it is.
I’ll bang my head against the wall again once I’ve familiarized myself with it.
Thanks again OP!
Thank you for sharing your experiences!
May I ask you what made you pursue an Arch installation in the first place?
The memes…
😂. Thanks for the clarification!
I feel like Manjaro is so much worse than Ubuntu. I don’t like Ubuntu but you seem to be at the level of hate. Ubuntu has a nice layout and everything works out of the box. The problem is snap but that can be explained.
“Hate” is a strong word. I don’t hate Ubuntu. It’s just irrelevant.
It’s not alone anymore in the realm of “easy to install and use”, and ongoing enshittification nagging you to upgrade to Pro™️ makes it an objectively worse product than its direct competitors.
Exactly. Both Manjaro and Ubuntu have had a certain history of “silly misguided shenanigans” that sorta damage trust. You just never know when the next stunt might be pulled.
I personally didn’t have too many problems with Manjaro on my gaming laptop, but have since moved to EndeavourOS, which I’m enjoying very much. :D
Same here :) switch from a 2 day Manjaro testing into EndeavourOS without the hassel of native Arch install.
Manjaro looks like a really good distro from the outside, but heard a few strange things about that specific distro I didn’t like at all. Also they messed with the boot up logo, add their personal bookmarks in new firefox install…
Had a really strange feeling about that non-authorized intrusive installation. I’m no expert so I won’t rant over Manjaro, but my moto says to always follow your guts !
The problem is other distros exist that do everything Ubuntu does right without all the things Ubuntu does wrong
I don’t agree at all that Wine is for advanced users. If you install Wine you can use most Windows software out of the box like it’s Windows with modern Wine. I kept a Windows partition for quite a long time but nowadays I think Wine works well enough to not even need a Windows partition—Proton works well for gaming, and Wine works well for one Windows-only proprietary software I need to read some old files I have saved with a proprietary file format. (That’s also the only non-game I use Wine for—for the vast majority of Windows-only software, there’s a foss Linux alternative that works just fine, and it’s worth looking around for those alternatives when you make the switch.)
I also disagree that not using standards (such as systemd) is reserved for “very advanced users”. It depends on what exactly the standard you are moving away from is, but so long as you understand what it is you’re replacing, what you’re replacing it with, and how to use the replacement, you will be fine. Documentation is one big reason to avoid deviating from standards, but you may decide documentation is not as important as whatever your reason for wanting to use a different init system, or a different C library, or whatever. Tbh, personally, I use runit right now and find it a lot easier to use than systemd. It’s very simple—services are just executables and symlinks. I’d have to check documentation and look at examples to make a systemd service, but to make a runit service I just have to create a directory with an executable in it, and to enable it I just make a symlink. The benefit of systemd is how widely used it is so you’re more likely to find someone with the same problem as you, not because it’s inherently easier to use.
If you
understand what it is you’re replacing, what you’re replacing it with, and how to use the replacement
then you, almost by definition, are an advanced user.
A beginner should avoid these things, once you are far enough along to understand why you might want to replace one of these things, and form your own opinion on it, then go right ahead. But you’re no longer a beginner at that point.
then you, almost by definition, are an advanced user.
I don’t agree, but how people define “advanced”/“beginner” is mostly arbitrary I guess. I wouldn’t say that qualifies as advanced, maybe intermediate at best, but I think it’s entirely possible to understand eg the basic differences between init systems without ever touching Linux before in your life.
Very good write up overall. I’ll start by admitting that I didn’t read all of it. But from the parts that I did read, I have some small comments. I think that Debian Stable is a great beginner distro, since it’s essentially unbreakable. With something like KDE Plasma as a DE, it’s perfect for noobs. EndeavourOS is another great one. Maybe not for beginners, but for semi-advanced usecases.
Also, I’m not sure about suggesting the Atomic family of dostros to newcomers. It might be my relative unfamiliarity with them, but I don’t think immutable distro are a good place to start. They’re definitely great to try when you’re familiar with Linux, but they’re still kind of fringe. It’s hard to get support using those.
I think immutable distros could be great for newbies, but I’m just thinking they’re still so new that if you go online to look for Linux advice or help, most things you’ll find are very much not for immutables and I doubt a true newbie understands what’s what.
That’s also a reason I’d recommend something like Debian (although I’ve actually never even used it myself) because there’s so much compatible info out there. I would recommend OpenSUSE, even Tumbleweed, but there’s just not as much help or there to find as there is for Debian. But even with that said, OpenSUSEs snapshots and the way they’re configured out of the box is an absolute godsend and game changer for newcomers.
I think immutable distros could be great for newbies, but I’m just thinking they’re still so new that if you go online to look for Linux advice or help, most things you’ll find are very much not for immutables and I doubt a true newbie understands what’s what.
I definitely agree. But, I think it’s sufficient to communicate to new uBlue users that they should check uBlue’s own documentation first. And, if they didn’t find the answer there, that they should ask on discourse or on Discord.
I only addressed this for new uBlue users as I don’t think other immutable distros are sufficiently newbie-friendly yet.
I’m doing an experiment right now. I’m giving my previous laptop to my dad to replace his very old, very close to death MacBook Air. I’ve installed Bluefin, rebased to the Stable branch and keeping everything else stock.
We’ll see how it goes :D
Hehe, consider to keep us updated 😜.
Will report :D
The only thing that scares me a bit is that not only he’s a newbie, he also actively refuses to understand how computers work ^^;
Perhaps that makes him the perfect candidate 😂.
Totally agree with that. I’m just wondering how many people read things like welcome screens etc where such info usually is presented.
They should have all necessary software installed and configured for people to easily get to things like those you mentioned. And have a clear help section in the OS, preferably with sections for different large topics and what not, that links to forum sections or similar. Steer them right before they even hit the web sort of.
Wonderfully laid out. Couldn’t agree more.
I’m also curious to find out how effective welcome screens are.
I suppose the most effective would be if the user is told how to act whenever they’re about to commit a ‘mistake’; after which they’re friendly reminded what they should do instead 😅. But I believe that’s a gargantuan effort to effectively gameify the distro 😂. Cool idea though; hopefully some iteration is already in the works.
OpenSUSEs snapshots and the way they’re configured out of the box is an absolute godsend and gangbanger for newcomers.
I have a general idea of how to set this sort of thing up in almost any distro now, but this is absolutely one of the ideas that swept me off my feet with OpenSUSE. I like a lot of distros but keep coming back to that wild little tumbleweed chameleon/geeko. :D
It’s huge. I’ve been using ~10 distros sporadically over the past 25 years, and I never ever felt like I could depend on my systems running Linux. Because one simple mistake by either me or an update could render the computer unusable because I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to fix it. And that was always something that finally happened that made me revert to Windows full time. Tumbleweed is the first distro ever where I feel like I’m standing on solid ground instead of on a house of cards that I can’t put back together, because of the snapshots. It gives me confidence and I feel like I finally can use Linux while slowly learning it at my own pace. Absolutely love it.
Also, I see that I have a typo to fix in my previous comment lol.
Good call about Atomic distros, I’m adding some precisions.
but I don’t think immutable distro are a good place to start.
FWIW, the first distro I used and subsequently daily-drove[1] was Fedora Silverblue over two years ago. The try-hard in me immediately started off (or at least tried) applying the hardening outlined in Madaidan’s article. After banging my head for a week, I started actually using the system and it has been a very smooth ride ever since. The uBlue images are straight up better when it comes to the OOTB-experience without even mentioning the associated ‘managed’[2] aspect that comes with it. Therefore, I believe that they’re perfectly suitable. They’re not for everyone, but no distro is anyways.
- I forgot to mention how simultaneously I quit Windows cold turkey as well.
- The uBlue images are able to ‘prevent’ breakages that would otherwise affect everyone.
