TUI stuff is so underrated. I’d gladly run them exclusively.

I so badly want to do the “old man yells at cloud” meme and be angry that Bazzite is so popular.

I want to do it, I’m resisting hnnnngg

Atomic bad because different and I don’t like things that are different. 🧓

The average day of a “computer wiz” on debian (me):

sudo apt install ./randomshitfromgithub.deb

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list pastes stuff in

“Oh no something isn’t working right!” Pastes some slop from chatgpt into the terminal

9 months later

“This shits fucked beyond repair, time for a clean install!”

Honestly? Not much different than my experience with windows. ;P

I vastly prefer/recommend stable LTS distros. There are really 2 main families of distros for this:

1. Linux Mint / Ubuntu LTS / Debian Stable (Ubuntu is based on Debian, Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS):

Basically endless amount of packages. Most people in the linux world have some familiarity with these so it shouldn’t be hard to get help if you need it.

2. Rocky linux / Almalinux / RHEL (Rocky and Alma aim to be compatible with RHEL software):

For desktop systems people usually opt for fedora, but that distro does not meet my own criteria. Biggest reason you’d use these is for professional VFX software support. For whatever reason a lot of that stuff only has official support for this family of distros. Not sure why!

Get good at 1 of these families of distros. If you aren’t vibing with one its okay to switch to the other. Both have more cutting edge options if you desire them.

Linux Mint is a community favorite and very much is built with a desktop user in mind, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to subject someone to learning any of the others even if they are more server focused. Everything I listed has atleast 5 years of support! If your fiancee isn’t super tech literate, you’ll probably be the one doing a lot of the system maintenance so keeping those major updates sparse is a very good thing. And of course, if you don’t wanna learn 2 different sets of tools, try and keep in the same family of distros.

Also, for desktop environment don’t choose anything crazy obscure. KDE & Gnome are most common, Cinnamon & XFCE are less common but IMO fine. Venture into others at your own peril.

Transfer process depends on what you mean. Transferring your files will probably just take time. I’m hopelessly unorganized so for me backing stuff up takes a few days of combing through a bunch of junk and copying to a flashdrive or cloud storage. Other people might have more efficient ways of dealing with this though.

If you mean software Libreoffice is great local office software, SMplayer is imo a good media player, GIMP, Inkscape, and Krita got art stuff covered. We’re also at the point you can more or less run most windows software on linux with enough fiddling, but that obviously isn’t ideal.

Your biggest hurdle moving to linux full time will be understanding commands when you inevitably do need to change configuration of something with the terminal. If you need help there are usually forums, IRC, matrix, etc.

Happy computing!

Nutomic has said some problematic shit, and is one of the devs of lemmy/admin on lemmy.ml.

This isn’t anti-commie nonsense, dudes transphobic.

I support the antix project for sure, but non-systemd can be a lil tough. Not that other init systems are inherently more difficult, just systemd is far more standardized/widely used and that helps with troubleshooting.

In general, following as many standards and defaults as you can is helpful when learning. Debian, Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, SUSE, and anything most things derivative of them. All get a person used to a certain set of commands and software, all have sane defaults, and all are stable.

Yep. Tenacity all the way!

No.

Anyone suggesting a rolling release distro to you is setting you up for failure, especially on a 2014 laptop that will absolutely not benefit from it.

Use Linux Mint. It’s still Linux, you can still break it customize it as much as you want.

edit: Y’all are absolutely insane to downvote this when we are talking about a NEW linux user using a 11 year old laptop.

There’s hardware as recent as like mid-late 2000s that’s 32bit. That’s still within the realm of stuff that consumers might be using, let alone corporate/industrial applications.

Even if Firefox leaves us behind, the kernel likely won’t stop supporting it for years to come. We just removed 486 support. Surely 32bit support will be around a while.

I hate how people are cheering this on. 32bit has its place and linux has always been a sanctuary for legacy hardware.