Beginning Linux - where would you start?

[uOpt]

GNOME sucks. Systemd puppet.

[No_Use]

If it can be used for audio, fine. But main purpose, basic usage. Web, play movies perhaps mail? Stuff like that.

Any immutable distro can be used for all of this.

Why (only) immutable distros?

[DrGonzo]

Thanks again. This really helps me a lot to avoid falling into any time wasting pitfalls. I think I will take a swing at Mint and see how I can make that work with the Macs. But I am sure I will make it work.

Just curious - why are most negative about Ubuntu?

[lunardigs]

Avoid Fedora.
Avoid Gnome.

Because ??

Because I don't like them ... it's complicated. You wouldn't understand.

[audiojunkie]

Thanks again. This really helps me a lot to avoid falling into any time wasting pitfalls. I think I will take a swing at Mint and see how I can make that work with the Macs. But I am sure I will make it work.

Just curious - why are most negative about Ubuntu?

I’ll answer that one for you. Of all the Linux distros, in all the world, none are more corporate and “for profit” than Ubuntu. Canonical used to have the best distro of all. But over the years, Canonical began to behave more and more like Microsoft—like Microsoft during the Ballmer years.

They attempted to put advertising into the OS. They have added telemetry to the OS. They are currently trying to make the OS agentic—the very reasons many are trying to leave windows. They created the Snap package management system, opened it to the world, and then claimed complete control over the Snap store. This scenario has been played out before, and everyone knew that a Microsoft-like Canonical, having that control, would use it to benefit Canonical, at the cost of everyone else—like charging for usage, for example. Needless to say, Snaps never caught on outside of Ubuntu (and some derivatives), and Flatpaks, which open sourced everything including the AppHub has dominated in adoption. There is much more, but I can’t remember it all. The OS isn’t bad. It’s just—if you are escaping Windows and moving to Ubuntu, you aren’t really escaping.

[DrGonzo]

They attempted to put advertising into the OS. They have added telemetry to the OS. They are currently trying to make the OS agentic—the very reason many are trying to leave windows.

That's sounds absolutely horrific. And the other distros don't do stuff like that, or is that generally a new trend slipping into newer versions?

[audiojunkie]

I’ll go ahead and give you my opinion on which distro to use:

1. Since you are new to Linux, it is very important that you have a good experience while you are learning and getting comfortable with the OS. You need to know for yourself how well Linux runs. You need to know its capabilities.

For music, I’d suggest a preconfigured turnkey distro like AV Linux or Ubuntu Studio, or LibraZik. Yes, in this case, even Ubuntu Studio.

For general usage, Mint is a safe bet.

These should help you get familiar with Linux in the easiest way possible. Later, you can distro hop and explore to determine what you like.

[audiojunkie]

They attempted to put advertising into the OS. They have added telemetry to the OS. They are currently trying to make the OS agentic—the very reason many are trying to leave windows.

That's sounds absolutely horrific. And the other distros don't do stuff like that, or is that generally a new trend slipping into newer versions?

The other distros don’t do that. Canonical is a for profit business. Most other distros aren’t. Even Red Hat, which is a commercial distro doesn’t do that.

[DrGonzo]

For music, I’d suggest a preconfigured turnkey distro like AV Linux or Ubuntu Studio, or LibraZik. Yes, in this case, even Ubuntu Studio.

For general usage, Mint is a safe bet.

Just general usage. I just want to squeeze some life out of my small mountain of old Macs. I think I got the idea from Pewdiepie of all people. Never watch him, yet one day there was a video where he did a Linux installation on an old computer.

One more thing before I let you go. There seem to be a division between "normal" distros and ones aimed for music work. Just curious - what's that all about? Is it like back in the days when you stripped out all the unnecessary background tasks in Windows XP and created a streamlined audio computer?

/Carl

[procrastive]

For me, the last straw for Ubuntu was snap packages. I had already moved off of main ubuntu to xubuntu and then lubuntu after Gnome had become a bit weird and then they tried to push the Unity desktop.

I've been using AVL-MX21 for several years now, but I'm planning to switch to plain MX25 because the elementary desktop now in AVL doesn't do it for me.

I think Mint or MX-linux would be a good place for anyone to start.

[BertKoor]

it's complicated. You wouldn't understand.

Try me.

If you find it difficult to put it under words, then it's based on gut feelings? Maybe it's you who doesn't really understand why.

[Tiles]

Thanks again. This really helps me a lot to avoid falling into any time wasting pitfalls. I think I will take a swing at Mint and see how I can make that work with the Macs. But I am sure I will make it work.

Just curious - why are most negative about Ubuntu?

I named already a few points. It has a compatibility problem with itself, even a point upgrade can make software dysfunctional. On a fresh install i got a crash as the first action. The inbetween versions are everything but stable anyways, and even the LTS versions are troubled. I don’t find the default GNOME setup particularly user friendly, i am as told more a fan of desktops like Cinnamon. Decisions like Amazon integration. Or Telemetry. There are Lots of naggers that sums up over time.

Snap is one of the biggest problem, it is proprietary and not really open. They push Snap wherever they can, And as a consequence I ran into problems with Flatpak and AppImage packages that didn’t work for me at all. I even had trouble getting GIMP to run properly. The Snap version 3 refused to work correctly with NTFS partitions, while GIMP 2 did (Flatpak did not work). So I’m effectively stuck with older functionality like 8-bit per channel.

For me as a developer it's also such crazy decisions like that you are not allowed to log in as root if you want. Autologin has some side effects too. Like that then you need to use your password to open your browser and software. I can't even ... have these guys not understand what auto login is meant for? Well, you can work around it, but that's a bigger operation then. On other Linux distros you simply do.

Another thing is that Ubuntu tries to stay close to bleeding edge. Not even a bad thing one may think, but that makes the user to a Beta tester, and is for me a negative thing since for example an Appimage built on Ubuntu will not work on Debian then because of the too high GlibC version.

Ubuntu once was the beginner distribution, no question. But other distributions have simply grown better meanwhile. And they don't force you to the "one and only Ubuntu way to use Linux". That's why i said i see Ubuntu at the negative list.

I would try Mint to get a feeling for Linux at all. That's a good first Linux distribution and a good decision. You can't really go wrong here.

One more thing before I let you go. There seem to be a division between "normal" distros and ones aimed for music work. Just curious - what's that all about? Is it like back in the days when you stripped out all the unnecessary background tasks in Windows XP and created a streamlined audio computer?

It has more to do with drivers. Normal distributions are not optimized for Audio. You need to put in some effort to reach a stable low latency setup with ALSA and Jack or Pipewire. That's why there are special "audio" distributions that promises this low latency out of the box. You actually can turn even Mint into a low latency solution by installing a low latency kernel and Pipewire, and taking care about the realtime rights. CHatGPT will give you advice if you want to.

For music i would nevertheless prefer Windows or Mac. Not only because of the latency issue, but also and even more because of the missing softtware and periphery. And your Mac hardware isn't the newest anymore neither.

[ThomasHelzle]

After being underwhelmed by "normal" Linux for decades each time I tried, I finally found a home with CachyOS.
There are good tutorials on youtube to get one through the basics and it's frigging fast.

My main advice would be: see if you have some Discord server or some friends that can help you out at the start. It's really motivating to be able to chat about experiences and get some hints, until one has a general feel for the system.
Many recommend using a chatbot for help - I had mixed results since I didn't have the words. YMMV of course.

The (US-) corporations make it very easy ATM to want away and I feel quite relived to have moved my daily business away from Windows 11. The machine that became sluggish with that behemoth now flies with CachyOS. Installing Firefox takes seconds - it feels like cheating.
My four main DAWs work natively. Latest Wine 11.7 and the new alpha of Yabridge finally seem to get there as well. There are scripts for Affinity through Wine, there is Resolve native and many open source alternatives.

Can highly recommend taking a dip in some fresh water
Best of luck!

Cheers,

Tom

[uOpt]

Just curious - why are most negative about Ubuntu?

They deploy lots if stuff that is to their benefit, not the user's. Snaps are an example. That stunt with the Rust coreutils - they pushed that on the user at a time when these utils did not pass GNU coreutils tests. That's insane and had the predictable result. Didn't they also use the Rust sudo?

[imrae]

If it can be used for audio, fine. But main purpose, basic usage. Web, play movies perhaps mail? Stuff like that.

Any immutable distro can be used for all of this.

Why (only) immutable distros?

I think the idea here was not that *only* immutable/atomic distros can do this, but that if this is what you are doing you won't run into the downsides of those distros, and will get the full benefit (i.e. fast and reliable automatic updates).