"They just have to read the documentation"

Does anyone really recommend Ubuntu these days? I think Mint has reigned supreme for years, at least for beginners.
- I recommended Mint to my partner and she wasn't too enthusiastic about it after trying, I have Ubuntu on one of my laptops where she has a guest account and she actually prefers it even after hours of use so her new laptop is getting 24.04. I did do the diligence of explaining that Ubuntu is to Canonical as Firefox is to Mozilla, and why some Linux heads aren't a fan.
- Since bookworm, I find little need to push them past Debian. It's clean and runs all the things.
- I barely see people recommend mint anymore. It like every other Ubuntu family distro keeps having too many issues and poor gaming support compared to the steamOS styled distros.
  Everyone is going to bazzite or cachyOS as the new "noob" distros cause they just work and play steam games and have steam deck isos.
  
  It's funny to see so many different echochambers at play. 🤭 No offense of course.
  Mint is still by far the most popular distro, I even saw Goodwill selling computers with it now. Ubuntu is also widely used, apparently it's really popular in India(?). Meanwhile in hackspaces NixOS and Arch are super popular. Personally I like OpenSuse, therefore hear a lot about that family of distros. We're existing in a super diverse ecosystem.
  It's just annoying when people recommend stuff not because they think it's the best pick for the person who's asking, but because they like it best (I swear on my grave, I god damn saw people recommending NixOS for elders and Arch Linux for productivity environments that must be 100% stable). Therefore I made a meme about it.
  
  How does mint have "poor gaming support"?

I want to install fooFlorp2!
check nixpackages:
"
environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.fooFlorp2 ];
or nix-shell -p fooFlorp2 "
edit configuration.nix, add pkgs.fooFlorp2
install happens, won't work, no mention about the binary
Web search
ohh you don't install it with pkgs, there's a systemd that has to be enabled, and some config wrapped around it.
But the documentation said...
The documentation doesn't lie, but it often doesn't give you the whole answer either.
I love nix, but installing anything interesting ends up with a lot of websearches.
On the upside, my home/work and travel pc's are all just lockstep. anything I install on one just ends up on the others, and that's something cool.
- As a person who just barley figured out how to install Mint in some laptops most of that looks like a foreign language to me.
  
  heh, that's even the easy part, it has a whole language that comes with it too. Getting up and running on NixOS with home-manager and flakes makes Arch install look like Candy Crush.
  But it has lots of super-powers once you learn it. Steep curve though, and it never gets fully better, to this day it's a search or two when I install something I've never used before.

I see a lot og talk here abotu wha tis best. I want to play my games and work on my papers. I have mint right now but is there a better choice fro a beginner?
- If you're already on Mint and it works for you it's a great OS to work with, so no inherent reason to switch. However if you look for something more modern with the same Desktop Environment as Mint (Cinnamon) perhaps Fedora Cinnamon is something for you (doesn't use apt though). The most modern features you'll find on a distro with KDE (Cinnamon for example is behind with support for modern stuff like HDR).
  You'll get tons of recommendations when it comes to modern KDE distros. Personally given you said you're a beginner I'd suggest giving TuxedoOS a shot, as they
  Got the Nvidia drivers preinstalled
  Are based on Ubuntu (Best compatibility)…
  …which is the same base as Linux Mint (so .deb still work)
  Got the App Store all set up optimally (some distros don't)
  There's a hardware supplier if you ever look for sth.
  Some negatives:
  Comes with Tuxedo Software superfluous to you (removable of course)
  Depending on your beliefs it might be a negative that it's made by a company. However Tuxedo is based in Germany (therefore GDPR applies), they've people work full-time on it and a good track record for many years now. Also having the Nvidia driver pre-installed is really good in my experience, only very few distros do that due to license stuff. Otherwise of course there's also Kubuntu or Fedora for something with KDE. You can test all of them on DistroSea in your browser.
  Feel free to ask anything. 🙂

I've had some people here tell me about POP_OS as it's the most friendly to NVIDIA hardware and also is configured for gaming.
What are your thoughts?
- It being good for Nvidia hardware isn't wrong, but it being the best or especially good for gaming isn't exactly true. It mostly boils down to the proprietary Nvidia driver being preinstalled and a lot of media attention why Pop!_OS became so popular for gaming.
  Other distros that are just as good or better for gaming with Nvidia are, for example:
  Bazzite (Immutable)
  Nobara
  TuxedoOS
  The first two are really going the extra mile for patches and gaming support. Bazzite can be a little bit frustrating though given it requires some additional knowledge to work with immutable file systems if you ever need to edit system files. Otherwise you should have a solid experience on any of them.
  
  See I actually have a dual boot with Nobara right now and it is not playing nice with my RTX 3070

Debian/ubuntu/arch is easy to use even as a beginner, just try NixOS and compare.

Kinda new to Linux, is that the documentation icon ?
- That's Ubuntu, Mint and NixOS.
  
  Thanks, I had recognized the first two but had no notion of the third

@fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com I think they found you
- I'm in everybody's walls.... whispering the words "NixOS...."

No don't use Nix they're evil. Use Lix or Auxolotl or Tvix or Tangram or Brioche or Guix
- Why is Nix evil? This is the first I heard
  
  There was some politically charged drama... I think. There was some drama, anyway. I'm not clear on the details.
  It was probably a Twitter-tier disagreement that was blown way out of proportion by a small group of people. If others have details, please don't enlighten me, I value my ignorance.
  
  NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.
  (There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)

Imo a just works, deb based kde distro with nvidia drivers, flatpaks and no snaps is what we need to bring forth the year of the linux desktop.
- Fedora KDE is not deb based, but dnf is better than apt anyway fight me
  
  I don't disagree but I still wanna fight, where do you wanna meet?
- And one that you can get pre-installed on devices you can purchase. The "just buy and be happy" aspect is important for a lot of people as well, not to mention the valuable customer support. People with dispensable income who wish for this are usually furthest away from hackerspace culture though, so a lot of Linux enthusiasts seemingly overlook it. Or, when it comes to far-left people around, want to overlook it.
  If I remember correctly TuxedoOS checks all those boxes. And I think if you want "same but Gnome" that would be SlimbookOS. 🤔
- I dunno, we live in the age of ChatGPT. Between my generic but sufficient computer skills and ChatGPT's hallucinatory ramblings, I've been smooth sailing on EndeavourOS for a few weeks now.
  
  The EndeavourOS forums are also a really good help source if you wanna ditch the LLM, users there are pretty friendly and it's probably where it sources most of it's relevant info anyway.

- That's where I went. Happy with my choice. Almost 2 years now.

Or arch instead of NixOS 😂
- My gaming PC has been running EndeavourOS for about a year now. First ever time running any spin of arch and it's been a stellar expirience. You can pry this desktop from my cold dead hands, I love it.
  
  If you get bored later on try CachyOS. An update borked my eOS install and somehow screwed up my snapshots. So rather than deal with it, I tried out Cachy (Arch base) and just never went back. It has some quirks, but I haven't had any issues for the past 6 months. And it's fast.
  https://cachyos.org/
  
  I know that there is arch based distros that are more user friendly but I was talking about clean arch and not about arch based distros.
- When my win 10 gaming box EOLs this fall, I'm probably going to jump it straight to arch, since it looks like the most straightforward way to build a Steam OS like system.
  
  good luck.
  
  If you want a steam OS just use cachy they literally have a steam deck img that is just steam OS minus the immutable bits for all realistic purposes.

I've genuinely never seen a single person recommend NixOS to a new user, unless they already had advanced technical knowledge
- Are you new around here?
  
  You could just look at my profile to see that I'm not. I'm also not new to Linux communities in general. Doesn't change that I've never seen someone recommend NixOS to a complete beginner. I have (rarely) seen Arch recommended, but those recommendations will generally be downvoted and have many replies disagreeing. Linux Mint is by far the distro I see most often recommended, followed by Fedora.

NixOS consist of a bunch of options that you define using the nix programming language. Since it's a programming language, everything is well defined and organised into single place.
Technically, someone could build a GUI configuration editor with sane defaults and clearly organised pages of settings, which generates a configuration for you. This could immediately change NixOS from the most tedious to a relatively easy to use distro.
- They already built a GUI editor, but a programmer made it so it is actually harder to use than the text file
  
  Lmao which is it?
- And windows users are well known for their mastery of esoteric programming languages. Such as... um... ah... batch files, which, well, some of them can write. If they're not more than four or five lines.
  But that counts, right?
  
  Linux users can't regedit. Regedit uses some weird programming language only known to a few windows grand masters.
  It basically represents values with 16 possible symbols, ranging from 0 to f. We call it sixteendecimal. Very advanced. But nobody knows what they mean yet.
  This should give you linux users a pause the next time you belittle windows users for their lack of computer knowledge!
  
  Batch files¹, powershell, visual basic if you use Office, Lisp if you used AutoCAD back when macros were written in Lisp... 🤷‍♂️
  ¹- And, frankly, I doubt setting up NixOS is particularly more complex than setting up an autoexec.bat boot menu back when some programs (well, games are programs) wanted extended memory and some others wanted expanded memory (couldn't have both modes at the same time, of course), and you had to make sure the drivers loaded in the most optimal order (which could vary depending on the aforementioned memory expanders, and which drivers the specific game actually needed) to fit as many as possible of them and DOS in high memory leaving as much as possible of the 640KB of system RAM free for the program... and I'm not even getting into the whole IRQ thing for soundcards and whatnot... and we had to do it all without Internet, learning by trial and error, or word of mouth, or from magazines...

I mean isn't it accepted that NixOS is a terrible pick for a beginner, especially a non-technical one? I feel like even the Nix community doesn't recommend the distro to complete beginners.
- I use Nixos BTW.
  And I can't recommend it to anyone. Not even veterans.
  I can only say if you like souls like games nixos might be your thing....
  
  Lol I've been considering trying it and that might push me per the edge. The self hate is strong xD
  
  Doubt, highly doubt it.
  I use nixos btw
  Complete with home manager, flakes, build server and automated deployments, the whole lot on machines from compute stick, gaming rig, hell even a surface. I have never had more free time than compared to arch. updates & config drift are no longer anything I worry about. Save so much time on rebuilds & customisations.
  Nixos users never recommend it for new users. I always recommend mint or Ubuntu depending on the person and what they are used to. Seasoned Linux users i don't even recommend it unless they have basic programming skills.
  After that, bring it on, stick through the learning curve, you dont need the documentation. I only needed it at the start for a short period until it clicked and I figured it out. the repo and search has more than enough. In the repo you will find community builds and configs for a wide variety of hardware.
- I really wish everyone thought like that, but I still see people recommending Nix, Arch, Void… and some go the ideological route and start recommending systemd-less only like Artix or ranting against anything that uses Flatpak. Those discussions can get messy, and they always alienate the person who asked. Unfortunately those with ideological reasons are always the loudest and present in basically every "Beginner's Help" group.
  
  I wouldn't recommend vanilla Arch only because of the installation process. CachyOS that simplifies it is an extremely good pick for a person who already knows what a computer is, but wants to try a proper OS.
  Arch mostly got it's reputation in the early days. Today some things are a lot easier to do on Arch than on other distros, especially because AUR exists. Also, it built one of the best wikis over all that time.
- I wish. People recommend Arch to beginners all the time. And then wonder why there's so many "Linux is too hard" comments everywhere
  
  Arch isn't necessarily hard. It just is unstable plus it encourages dated ways of doing things.

Documentation? For Nix? Yeah right.
- The code of the packages is the documentation. So the newcomers better start learning Nix language and reading the paper about how Nix works under the hood before they get started! /s
  But seriously, I used NixOs for about 2 years almost 10 years ago and while it was/is fascinating when you have everything setup, getting there and maintaining everything across so many packages that each have their own way of configuring them took hundreds of hours. I'm back on Arch using a custom tool I wrote to fully manage my configs, packages, dotfiles etc.
  The way I remember it is that there is no consistency across Nix packages and it all feels like a giant puzzle for people who enjoy spending time configuring more than actually using the computer. And I say that as someone who actually enjoyed getting into that when I had unlimited time.
  
  I dunno man. I spent way less time configuring my machines on NixOS because it just works. But in fairness, that is after I have spent a lot of time learning it (compared to classic systems that is, not a lot compared to NixOS maintainers who write way better module than I do). Now that there is a foundation, I just run the updates. It's almost scarily stable. And the ability to group related settings together is such a bliss because you no longer wonder about "what did I do to enable X", just open the file, it's all in one place. Stuff that could be three completely different things (e.g. a service specific config file, a PAM entry and the service activation itself in effectively 5 lines. Want to do something for multiple services? Just map over their list. Etc
  I happily used Arch for 15 years and after trying NixOS on a decommissioned machine for one day I switched over everything as fast as possible. And I did try out Ansible on Arch, so it's not like I didn't try management via a tool. But using a system like NixOS just solves sooo many potential issues.
  It obviously comes with downsides, for example there is no quick configuration change. Changing something small requires another evaluation. Still worth it
  
  Okay, but when I figure it out on my desktop I just copy paste the exact snippet to my laptop and it just works.
  Do you think I can remember the steps I took to fix my issue with Ubuntu? I don't remember what file I modified and where I put some config file.
- Did you know that the suffix for nix documentation files is, coincidentally, .nix?

Throw Mint Cinnamon or the latest version on the computer, solved. Ubuntu can.. be speshy sometimes on my older spare laptop, but it is not really their fault, more my computer is a bit cooked. Some puppy linux distros are cool, but also a tiny bit complicated for beginners.
- That was the reason I decided to install Mint Cinnamon.
  It's been impossible to install for a week now. And I'm not even 100% IT illiterate. After ~3 days of struggling, I decided to do the walk of shame and post on the Mint forum, admitting my failure. It's been unsolved for about a week now. >100 fails and errors, crashes, freezes.
  I can't even imagine where I would (not) be had I chosen Kali or Arch.
  
  Tbh you might have failing RAM or something. Have you run Memtest?

“Arch” they just need to read the newsletter before updating.
- "Gentoo" because fuck you personally.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch
  Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a type of a Linux installation and the name of a book written by Gerard Beekmans, and as of May 2021, mainly maintained by Bruce Dubbs. The book gives readers instructions on how to build a Linux system from source. The book is available freely from the Linux From Scratch site.
  LWN.net reviewed LFS in 2004:[19]
  Linux From Scratch is a wonderful project. It should become a compulsory reading material for all Linux training courses, and something that every Linux enthusiast should complete at least once. This would also create another interesting side effect: people who tend to be quick in expressing dissatisfaction on the distributions' mailing lists and forums would probably show a lot more respect for the developers. Installing a ready-made distribution is a trivial task. Building up a set of 4 CDs containing a stable, secure and reliable operating system, plus thousands of applications, is most definitely not.
- Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list. When updates require out-of-the-ordinary user intervention (more than what can be handled simply by following the instructions given by pacman), an appropriate news post will be made.
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance
- alias yay="yay -Pw; yay"
  
  Today I learned, thanks.

@Natanox Seems like NixOS replaced Arch as both a local extremist cult and the most effective newbie repellent.
- What's funny to me here is that, as a long time Arch user, I have been considering switching to NixOS. One of the most terrifying thoughts to me is that after using the same Arch install for 2 years I will spend ages trying to recreate it if I ever have to. Oh, that and Nix letting you test packages seems like a cool feature.
  
  I was in the same boat two years ago.
  What I did is that I've setup a VM with NixOS in it to play with, learn the language and tweak the configuration file.
  The great thing about NixOS is that once I was feeling confident enough to switch I installed NixOS on bare metal, loaded the configuration file I prepared in the VM and I instantly had everything installed and running. (Except for the NVidia drivers, fuck nvidia)
  Since then I've stayed in nixos and I'm not looking back.
  
  I've been on arch around a year now and also considered the jump to NixOS. I was actually dual booting it with arch for awhile and I found pretty quickly that the shit documentation was a huge turn off for me. I ended up nuking the nix partition and reclaiming it for arch.
  
  The nice thing is that NixOS will keep your setup and all your tweaks if you ever need to reinstall. It's designed to solve that exact problem.
  One way of switching over would be to carry over your homedir and just starting with migrating packages and config as a first step.
  
  I am about to switch away from arch that I installed 5 years ago. It's a daunting thought isn't it?

I really love this image for this, that expression combo is perfection.
- definetly! do you know what anime that is?
  
  Chatlotte (2015)

I am daily driving nixos. It is for those users who have already used atleast couple of beginner distros. Get familiar with packages terminal and other. It is just arch but stable even at the unstable branch. It has saved from breakdowns during important work. But nixos needs time to mature it's flakes and home manager.

I have this exact situation with my wife's work laptop, which can't upgrade to windows 11. The requirements are pretty simple, something that runs Chrome and Dropbox as well as Microsoft Office 2007.
I'm going with Mint Cinnamon for her (I use arch & kde btw) - was pleasantly surprised to see Dropbox now has Linux support actually, haven't looked at it for years!
Almost everything she uses her computer for runs in Chrome.
- Don't use Office 2007 as it has major security vulnerabilities
  
  If you don't open external files there is no problem? We paid for it and it does the mail merge so that's what we use. Been looking for Linux alternative with the same functionality and no luck so far, LibreOffice is almost but not quite good enough. Nobody else does mail merge from spreadsheet?
  Also I'm guessing it will be more secure on wine
- Now? i am pretty sure I have had dropbox on my linux machine like 10 years back, definitely back when AntergOS was still a thing and even before I remember having it
  
  I looked it up there was an issue with btrfs just after they started Linux version which was why I stopped using it. That was a long time ago you are right, seems to be resolved now.
- There is also LTSC, which is much lighter than regular Windows 11, and does not have the ridiculous requirements.

I swear, I've only recommended it to one newbie, and they were an engineer! I had a reason!
Hilarious that this is the new norm, though. NixOS is so not typical at all. Arch is more normal at this point.

I use Alpine, tbh I dont see why I should learn an entire programming language just for a distro
- Alpine just feels like everything on my system is there for a reason (and somehow makes arch feel "bloated") so I 100% understand wanting a full config file for everything on your system. But DAMN THE DOCS SUCK. Also NixOS locks you into systemd...
  
  I keep seeing this sentiment, what's wrong with systemd?
  
  I have an old Laptop with a second gen i3 and 4gb of ram. Alpine runs very smoothly with Sway.
  
  NixOS locks you into systemd…
  Okay! Nix is out until it fixes that. What a fucking mess systemd is.
- Why do you use Alpine?
  
  Very old computer
- Because whenever I use apt or a similar standard package manager there is always some issue. For example, I start up an Ubuntu VPS and try to run nginx just to find out that Ubuntu 24 only has 1.24
  And to get a newer version you need to do a bunch of steps:
  https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/installing-nginx/installing-nginx-open-source/#stable_vs_mainline
  How are these sources.list incantations any different from editing a configuration.nix file?

I have an old MacBook for 2012, can barely open terminal, installed Pop!_OS, and I love it!
Am I a terrible person?
- Nah, you're killing it.
- Not at all. Pop OS was my Windows to Linux distro of choice, of which I stayed on for almost 3 years. It's a great way to get familiar with Linux.
  I only got out because I wanted to be closer to the edge, not because it was bad.
- Pop!_OS has been my go to for years now. Always been so reliable and easy to use. This was the distro which kept me from going back to Windows
  
  same here. always had issues getting nvidia drivers working on other distros, but pop os got me going out of the box.
- I have MacBook pro from 2011 and it runs Plasma fine. It has 16GB of memory, though.
  
  I've got an old Dell XPS system from 2010 with a Core i7 970 in it that runs Mint perfectly well.
- Yes, you are a terrible person. /s

Oh I actually need a recommendation... I have a tiny 7 inch LCD monitor. If I hook it up to my iPad the colors are fine but when I run it from the mini Linux computer I have the colors are all washed out and have weird dithering.
I know it's a driver issue and I haven't been able to find one that works. I also tried different distros. I tried mint, ubuntu and I think one other one that I can't remember. All had the same issue.
Do any of you have ideas? How can I fix it
- I know that on KDE Theres Something called color profiles for adjusting the color range but I'm not exactly sure how to use it.
- I would try Fedora KDE and then adjust the color profile on it.
  
  If you're a gamer, Nobara is based on Fedora KDE with all the gaming stuff pre-loaded and ready to go.

At least they aren't trying to get Steam to work on Kali.
- That’s surprisingly easy.

I use arch btw

Nix OS is so much pain
Use Ansible or something else
- I use NixOS on all my machines, much less pain and suffering than I've had on other distros.

errupts
\sigh

Big nix fan here, I love being able to define my system from a couple configuration files and not scrounging around the file system for the right dot file
- And also it let's you do crazy things that would be impossible in other imperative distros tho.
  I am thinking about root-on-tmpfs, conditional configuration and doing all sorts of crazy things with packages while remaining manageable.
  It is simply another whole tier.
- Definitely solves more problems than it creates! /s

Give them n00bs tinycore

sips coffee from Alpine land

Nice astroturfing attempt
- Nice report for "astroturfing". Please go ahead and point out which rule was violated so I can make a decision.
  
  Leave it, tos 8 covers my point and yes its a case of my butthurt but its a recent pattern across communities in lemmy atm that seems to have started a nasty attempt thats trying to grow a grassroots campaign, this may not be one. Just reporting for your sake and others to raise awareness based on some social controversy in the distro. We should be lifting distros (and people) up not burning them for fake reasons