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Ask Slashdot: What's The Easiest Linux Distro For A Newbie?
joseph Kramer -- a long-time user of both Windows and MacOS -- comes to Slashdot with the ultimate question:
I've been lurking here for years and seen many recommendations for a Linux flavor that works. What I'm really looking for is Linux that works without constant under-the-hood tweaking (ala early Windows flavors, 3.1, 95/98). Does such an OS exist? For the record, I am not an IT tech. I just need something to work with the mechanical equipment it controls. Any recommendations?
When it comes to Windows and MacOs, he describes himself as "fed up with their shenanigans." So leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way for a newbie to get started with Linux?
When it comes to Windows and MacOs, he describes himself as "fed up with their shenanigans." So leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way for a newbie to get started with Linux?
Just Debian, no derivatives.
I've had the least trouble with Debian. Mint just doesn't seem to like me, and I don't like Ubuntu.
Building Gentoo from source was fun, Fedora just didn't feel right, FreeBSD wouldn't even work in Virtualbox, and I've yet to experience the pleasure of Slackware.
If this is to control manufacturing/industrial equipment, you really should be employing someone with skills and experience. /advice
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I would choose Kubuntu for its normal Windows 7-like start menu (incorporating type-search for applications, and organized submenus). The distro also has several things to get you rolling, optionally installing flash and mp3 proprietary extensions, a driver installer to get proprietary things like ATI/Nvidia and WiFi up and running. Firefox and LibreOffice are ready to go, and typing "updates" or "software" in the menu will get you more programs to install.
In 17.04 (beta 2 from a few days ago) the awkward "K" branding has been removed from KDE plasma, giving the startup and menu a more unified feeling.
At noob level, probably the most challenging thing is to make and use a bootable USB of the distro, and for that, the ISO plus Rufus or Unetbootin will make the flash drive, and creative pounding of function keys on boot will get your PC to start live off it.
Yes. Thirded, if that's a word.
Solid reasons (apart from 'I use it at home', I'm a computer person, so it's not a useful observation) is that my ex (bit geeky but non-technical career) and a bunch of old (55+) people in various community projects use it. They are often the easiest, because they don't arrive with a ton of half-formed preconceptions, prejudices about open source and uselessness of non-Windows, non-Mac. We install for them, but it's an 'easy' install and we re-use 'older' hardware that would struggle with Windows 23 (or whereever we are now, yes, I am joking before people jump on me).
I'm 66 and my ex is late 50s.
Incidentally, I'm not a complete fanatic and have a Windows laptop at home for Logic Pro, but I'm looking to transfer to Ardour perhaps this year.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
If you don't want to constantly fiddle with things, get a smartphone.
Otherwise the only OS that is "fiddleless" is MacOS X, and even then, only if you don't buy any accessories.
Windows and Linux are full of fiddling around, just in different ways. With Linux it's dependency hell, where one update requires a support library update, which requires a sytem library update which requires a kernel update which requires a build tool update, which requires ... you get the idea. With Windows, you get the constant pushing of C/C++ and .NET runtime updates/parallel installations which in turn makes things so much of a pain in the ass if you use software built against an earlier runtime but libraries against a later runtime. Basically for software that you can get the source code to, it's much less of a pain in the ass to recompile linux/windows applications against what libraries are already on the damn system than to go find working old copies of libraries that don't depend on ridiculous versions of obscure libraries.
In a sense, with Windows to Linux, you go from fiddling with hardware drivers to fiddling with kernel drivers, and system tunables on both.
So there is no such thing as a "linux distro for a newbie", if anything zero Linux distros work out of the box, and those that do, do not support hardware newer than 5 years (or if it does only minimally through a generic driver.) You see this a lot with people bitching about OpenGL, because a game that uses OpenGL will not work on a stock version of Windows or Linux without the video driver installed. On Linux it will be pushed through the software renderer Mesa, while on Windows it will simply look for the openGL miniport driver and go "NOPE" if it's not there.
I don't think Ubuntu and Mint are difficult to use. I use Ubuntu and, for the most part, stuff just works. Linux distributions have come a long way from the days of needing to manually configure your X server, compiling your own kernel for updates (you can do this still, but I haven't needed to do so for a long time), manually configuring your network interface, and so many other things.
Sure, there may be challenges with hardware and file formats that are proprietary, but I haven't ran into too many issues. There are software packages that receive little or no maintenance, but I'm not sure that those problems are worse than on other operating systems. There are plenty of questionable apps in the Apple App Store and Windows Store. There are plenty of programs that are no longer maintained. The app stores for Android and iOS are messes, with lots of poorly written and poorly maintained apps. Windows updates can break your system, and I'm not convinced Windows is any friendlier than Linux when things don't work properly.
I don't think Linux is difficult at all. It used to be far more difficult to configure, but I don't think the reputation is deserved any longer. Unfortunately it's been hard to lose this reputation, inaccurate as I believe it is. I believe both the ease of use of OS X and Windows, and the difficulty of Linux, are exaggerated. Depending on what you want Windows or OS X to do, setup can be nontrivial. A basic install of Linux isn't very difficult now under most circumstances, at least in my experience. I've bought several desktops and laptops within the past year, all of which were easy to configure.
As a Teacher of Windows and Ubuntu to the elderly, Ubuntu Mate 16.04 is by far the best people friendly distro. It is so much like the 6.04-10.04 that we all used to love but with all the new bells and whistles. I get more complaints that Mint its a little harder to find stuff in. I'm close to 70 and don't program. Most of my students are older than I. Thanks to all of the Linux family everywhere for making life so great at our age.
What's The Easiest Linux Distro For A Newbie?
Just Debian, no derivatives.
I've had the least trouble with Debian. Mint just doesn't seem to like me, and I don't like Ubuntu.
Building Gentoo from source was fun, Fedora just didn't feel right, FreeBSD wouldn't even work in Virtualbox, and I've yet to experience the pleasure of Slackware.
If this is to control manufacturing/industrial equipment, you really should be employing someone with skills and experience. /advice
The first thing the person asking has to to realise is that this is a very loaded question about religion. You might as well ask which Christian/Muslim/Jewish sect has the 'one true' interpretation of it's respective religion's scripture. Having said that the parent is partly right, Debian or one of it's many derivatives is pretty easy on newbies, or at least as easy as Linux can be but then so is Fedora. Suse is also a good choice but less popular because it is meant to be a bit more Microsoft compatible and having anything to do with Microsoft is to Linux geeks what sunlight, holy water and garlic are to a vampire. When I worked with Suse I liked it because it has YaST setup and config utility which is a bit reminiscent of AIX's smitty (SMIT) command and lets you do lots of system configuration changes in one place and if you have to interact with Microsoft systems then Suse might be a good choice for you . For those looking at the enterprise sector you might want to consider CentOS which is functionally and (mostly) binary compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offerings. I'm sure there are other Linux distos that are worth mentioning but these are the ones that I have worked with the most and think are good for newbies because of their features and/or community support. If you strip away all the sectarian bullshit that surrounds Linux distros the best advice you are left with is go for a big and widely used distribution like Debian/Ubuntu or Red Hat Fedora simply because there are lots of users and therefore lots of forums, blogs, help pages howto guides, etc... Of all the things that are mostt valuable thing to any Newbie the most important one is extensive community support. Suse and the host of Debian and Red hat based distributions all have extensive and helpful communities, especially the last two. You can always move on to something less widely used or hostile to newbies later.
I changed my video card to one that had HDMI audio. If I want to use my fancy sound card, I need to prevent the system
from defaulting to the HDMI interface. What's worse, even though the old sound card modules load on boot, the system
(Mint 18.1) fails to make the old interface available in any of its configuration options. Blacklist the HDMI module? Now
I don't get any sound configuration interface at all. I fumbled around on the forums for days. Nobody had a solution that
that worked, much less one that a noob could grok. Fuck Mint. Fuck Systemd, Fuck Debian. Not necessarily in that order.
I second elementaryOS. It is very neat and clean UI and sensible defaults (most of the time). It is based on Ubuntu, so your have excellent package support. I have seen it working over 90% of the time with just default installation.
Some Linux veterans may feel a bit crippled since it has very limited customization options, but for newbies, and those who don't intend to fiddle with the system, but just use it, it is the best I have seen in a long time.
The same OS that makes you go into settings to run programs not downloaded through its proprietary services?
Crap like MacOS is the reason why Linux is so popular among tech savvy people. We're tired of it.
You can get a Chromebook and run packaged, maintanance free Android apps and games. If you want to develop, you can install Ubuntu/some other Linux disto as chroot (Crouton) without impacting stability/maintainance-free operation of the main OS.
But that's where the bulk of usage is. In the last 2 decades, the only people who went Linux were those who knew and loved the various shells, programming environments, UIs and so on. Those who wanted something to simply work went the Windows or Mac route.
It's a different story today. While there's still no reason to go from Mac to ChromeOS if you've already sunk money into a Mac, people were unhappy first w/ Windows 8, and now Windows 10. But their choices - if they want to look at a Mac, they'll normally find it out of their budget - if they're not the Photoshop buffs but are just interested in email and websites. If they look at Linux, they'd have to be wary about what might not get recognized during the installation.
ChromeOS gives them much of their use case, and once it has the ability to run Android apps, they'd have a leg up over even Linux. Only thing - the Chromebooks currently in the market are vastly underpowered. It would be nice if ChromeOS DVDs were available, so that if one wanted to install it on an i7 w/ 8GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, one could, and not be restricted to those entry level toys. Another thing - not everyone wants to store everything on 'the cloud', so it would be nice if the OS allowed you to store your photos, music and the like locally, particularly if you're not using an 8GB SSD.
I'm assuming that you're not trolling, so here are a few things:
- Linux is command line only if you want it to be: otherwise, you have the widest choices of desktop environments to choose from. Some hold that bonanza of choices against it, claiming that users are left confused. If you want something like Windows, but lightweight, Razor-qt or LX/QT would be a good place to start
- If you are on a Linux command line, putting an '&' after your command and pressing enter will run that command in the background, and enable you to continue running other commands. Particularly if the first is something you know will take a while. There are other commands like bg or fg followed by the process ID that enable you to change the priorities of running commands. Incidentally, Microsoft too supports such things, using START and then the command name.
- Linux does have a lot of commercial software available for it, albeit at the server or workstation level. Things like Verilog or VHDL. The usual desktop software like LibreOffice is $0 only b'cos they are a lot worse than MS Office, particularly for Excel, PowerPoint and Access
Only thing you said that's right - the support. In Windows, when anything is broken, you call the PC vendor or take the PC back to the place you bought it, and they may help you. With Linux, since you got it for $0, there is no support involved unless you explicitly buy a short or long term support contract.