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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’m pretty happy with Linux actually. I’ve used a few distros and DMs over the years and honestly we’re at a point in time where it’s pretty nice. A more user friendly and robust connectivity management would be nice, and a few of the file browsers could benefit from a UX revamp. DMs could also enforce stricter design choices by default to gently guide developers towards a consistent UI/UX. But overall it’s quite solid.

    The same can’t be said about most of the OSS that goes with it. Most of the apps available for Linux are garbage. I mean, they do some things well obvioulsy, but are overall terrible to use. With their crap UX and a UI stuck in the last century the only reason people use them is they have no other choice and are desperate…


  • You are overthinking this.

    The distro you chose is important when you start to do serious things : running a web server, deploying applications for a company, etc.

    At your level this is irrelevant. You want to play with Linux, get a taste of it? Install VirtualBox on your PC, create a new VM and install Linux Mint Cinnamon. Is it the best to begin with? Maybe yes, maybe no, who cares, it’s one of the noob friendly distros and it is based on Ubuntu Linux (it’s virtually the same minus some proprietary crap) which has TONS of documentation online, and forums filled with answers to almost any question you can think of. You run into a problem? Paste the error message in Google and a post on the Ubuntu forums will be on the top of the search results.

    In one evening, you will have learned how to run and configure Virtualbox (very easy) and install an “easy” Linux distro. And you will have your playground ready.

    Now just look around, try the environment. Open a console and start trying some commands. Find yourself a little project that will force you to look under the hood : setting up a basic LAMP webserver for example. That will teach you how to use package repositories to install new software, where the different components of these software end up in the system folders, how to run command lines, etc. Give it a few evenings.

    Then pick up two-three other distributions with different Windows Managers and reinstall your VM (or make a new one) with them. To see the differences. Manjaro with KDE. Fedora XFCE. Endeavour i3 (an amazing Arch based distro but with a very steep learning curve. For later).

    Just fool around in a VM. Don’t take that seriously. Explore Linux. Give up. Come back to it. Nobody cares, just have fun and try. You won’t know if you like it unless you play with it.

    Then if you fall in love replace Windows with your favorite distro and run Windows in a QEMU virtual machine… :P