It’s a tool first and foremost. If you’re professionally using a power drill all day everyday, you’ll want a very good one that’s powerful, reliable and comfortable to use. If you professionally type all day everyday, you’re absolutely entitled to use a keyboard that perfectly fits your preferences in terms of feel, comfort, feedback and layout.

Same. Old DB2 base from the 80’s that was migrated to Oracle in the 90’s then to Postgres in the 2010’s.

And the people there know all the column names by heart 😅

Go AMD. The open-source drivers already provide the best performance compared to the closed-source ones, and are included in the kernel and Mesa, which means the cards will work out of the box. For the best performance and latest drivers and optimizations you should switch to a distro with more up to date packages than Debian if you plan on buying a current gen card tho. For example, Fedora is a very good mix between working OOTB, ease of use and bleeding-edge packages.

nVidia is… difficult. The open-source drivers are getting better but are still way behind closed-source drivers, and each closed-source drivers version only works with a single kernel version. It might work OK as long as the drivers and kernel are kept in sync (I think Pop! or Nobara have nVidia specific versions for this reason), but otherwise each kernel upgrade is a risk. Plus nVidia drivers are basically shit with Wayland and cause a ton of issues.

Intel has a good track record with iGPUs so discrete cards should be as trivial to use as AMD ones, if more at the entry-level performance-wise.

Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.

I concur with the person above. I have a 4yo QcK Edge mat that still looks and feels almost new. If you thoroughly soak and clean them when they start to get grimy they’ll keep their properties for a very long time.

It’s like scrolling on your phone, where the content on your screen follows exactly your fingers movements. On Wayland you can do the same with a trackpad, like for example when scrolling, switching workspaces or invoking the activities overview. It feels much nicer, more immediate and more natural than on X.org, where gestures are just triggering a shortcut after a set distance.

X is not going to die, X is already dead.

(great write-up btw ;) )

Box Jades are lighter than Navies, provide insane amounts of tactility (and noise) and feel awesome.

May I ask why you, as a beginner, specifically chose one of those distros instead of more “mainstream” ones?

Puppy Linux’s main use-case is to be a live ISO, that doesn’t need to be installed to run. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to install it, but I think if you want to use an Ubuntu derivative, there are better options for a beginner like Pop or Mint that would let you install a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and so on.

Alpine Linux is specifically designed to avoid all the core system tools that are pretty much universal on most other distros like glibc, systemd or GNU tools and libraries, which will make your life hell as a beginner if you need to troubleshoot anything as most “universal” documentation like the Arch wiki would be at best partially relevant, at worst useless.

Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.

I have updated Debian across 4 major releases without issues. I have daily updates on Fedora without issues. I had to do maintenance probably monthly on Manjaro.

Arch doesn’t do things for you, therefore Manjaro doesn’t do things for you. This means you are the one who needs to do the maintenance and upgrade config files and such. It is interesting, it is formative, but it is not for beginners who might get the impression that Linux needs constant maintenance and breaks often.

Thanks for this great writeup about what makes Ubuntu its own thing rather than standard.

Thanks, if you know who to lobby for it, please do ;)

I’ve updated my post with “I heard conflicting stuff over the Internet and now I’m scared” and an introduction. Those are legitimate questions for people who, like me, do a lot of research before committing to something. Some of the discussions here and in other communities might scare people off, as they might feel they’ve done the “wrong” choice or are afraid to do the “wrong” choice.

I’ve ran my gaming pc on Manjaro for about 2 years. There were too many issues to list here, but the one huge problem for me for new users is updates.

You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly. This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro. I mean, those posts are great, but all other majors distros update without intervention.

Also, I always updated from the tty as there’s a weird “never update inside Gnome” policy.

I’ve edited and merged the Snap paragraph with Flatpaks. After all, they serve the same purpose.

There are daily threads started by new users who say stuff like “I read that systemd is bad, should I switch to [insert systemd-less distro here]” or “My RTX 4080 runs Sim City 2000 at 12 FPS, is Linux trash?”, so there seems to be a need to at least help alleviate the fears of people who read conflicting stuff (or downright flamewars) on the internet and might be overwhelmed by those conflicts.

So… Fedora + Distrobox ?

Nah I use Super and Super-A all the time when docked. Otherwise I mostly use trackpad gestures.

You’re right. I’m changing this paragraph.