• stupidcasey@lemmy.world
      34·
      11 days ago

      I think the whole works part is the most important part, Linux can be janky (and by that I mean obsolete information and deprecated or outdated packages are often recommended and there are a thousand different ways to do anything with only one of them actually working (don’t have an aneurysm)) on the best of days, If something just works you can change what you want later.

      • PlaidBaron@lemmy.world
        29·
        11 days ago

        This is why I switched to Mint. It just works. It’s broken less than vanilla Ubuntu did. So thats what I use.

        • Zink@programming.dev
          9·
          11 days ago

          Yeah. Generally when I’m using a Linux PC to work on something, I don’t want to be fixing the PC itself too. And we make an embedded Linux product at work, so it’s not like I miss out on the fun, lol.

          I use Mint everywhere. It works great. Being easier for newcomers to use and having an extra layer of polish does not restrict my use of the command line or scripting.

    • foo@feddit.uk
      4·
      10 days ago

      I won’t use Ubuntu Desktop now, but I used it for 6 years: 16 to 22, and loved it for many reasons. I left it for two reasons:

      1. Snaps
      2. Trying to get bridged networking going for VMs in Boxes ended up wrecking my network settings and I couldn’t get them back to normal. With more expertise I could have probably fixed it, but I realised it’s too easy to do things that I can’t fix.

      So, I went to NixOS for the declarative setup. It’s not always easy especially for niche cases , but at least I always have a working backup. Yes, there are other options, but I like NixOS so I plan to stick with it for now.

      My kids use Bazzite and I like that too.

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    756·
    11 days ago

    This is crazy. You shouldn’t use Ubuntu for anything desktop related. There’s nothing vanilla about vanilla Ubuntu.

    (Custom Gnome extensions, patches on top of Gnome, custom sandbox packages that don’t always work, custom apt that refuses to install the real packages in place of snaps, paywalled security patches, should I keep going?)

    • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      Except I have no trouble replacing snaps. I only replace them when there is a need. I always add gnome extensions to mine. I like a little extra and I get it easily with ubuntu. If you are a individual user you can get the ESM updates for free and I do.

      When one of the other distros demonstrates anything that I cant get with ubuntu I will move on. Until then I’ll keep using it because it keeps working.

      • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        When one of the other distros demonstrates anything that I cant get with ubuntu I will move on. Until then I’ll keep using it because it keeps working.

        You can’t get vanilla Gnome on Ubuntu. There are tons of other distros that will give you vanilla Gnome (they don’t put any of their own patches on top of Gnome).

        But I think you were pretty clear that you don’t want vanilla Gnome, so if Ubuntu’s working for you, more power to you. I just wouldn’t recommend it to anyone new to Linux.

        • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          I don’t like vanilla gnome. Like I said the first thing I do with any debian installation I work on is install extensions.

          • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
            4·
            10 days ago

            Extensions are one thing. Even if a distro comes with some Gnome extensions, you can just disable them. Ubuntu puts custom patches on the Gnome packages they ship. Those can’t be disabled, and they could potentially interfere with extensions that don’t expect them to be there. That’s my problem with Ubuntu’s approach to Gnome.

            I understand that you don’t like vanilla Gnome, but I still wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu to anyone, especially noobs, as a desktop OS, because of the myriad issues with Canonical’s approach to modifying the source of the packages they ship.

            It’s the same reason if anyone reports a bug to any of my software, and they say it happens on Ubuntu, I’ll disregard it unless they can replicate it on an OS that doesn’t patch their packages that way. Canonical is responsible for fixing the bugs their patches cause, and they’ve added tons of extra triage work to devs who have to determine whether Canonical fucked something up or there’s actually an issue with their code.

            • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              10 days ago

              I totally get you don’t like it but once again you are not giving me any reason why what you prefer is somehow better.

              • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
                32·
                10 days ago

                I’ve given you quite a few reasons, you just don’t care.

                Let me put this really simply. Canonical fucks shit up with their patches. Users experience this as buggy software. Users file bug reports to the software. The bugs aren’t valid because the problem is with Canonical’s mess of patches. That is bad for me as the dev, because I have to triage that bug and determine that it’s Ubuntu, not my software. That is bad for you as the user, because software that works perfectly fine on any other system doesn’t work on yours. This is also bad for you because the devs that build the software you use have to waste their time tracking down Ubuntu bugs, instead of spending their time improving the software you use.

                Maybe you don’t consider this a problem, because you’re used to how buggy Ubuntu is, or maybe you don’t use any software that Ubuntu has fucked up, but that is a problem that people experience, and if you don’t see that, that’s a you problem.

                Also, I specifically didn’t mention “what I prefer”, because it doesn’t matter. Canonical is the only big Linux company that does this to an extent that devs waste their time on it. Any other big name distro is better than Ubuntu.

                • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  21·
                  10 days ago

                  Your right I don’t care. Fanatics care about things no one else does. I don’t have many bugs with ubuntu and any that I do are usually trivial. You keep saying its bad but its not my experience. My experience started with Slackware. I still have a Slackware box that I still compile my own kernel on from time to time to keep in the know on kernel changes. I’m not by any metric an amateur. I’m sure some of these bugs seem unique and are a major problem for you.

                  I’ve tried mint and wasted my time with arch. I’m installed them all. I’ve even created my own. None of them have ever brought anything game changing to the table. I’ve seen bugs with every distro. Somehow to you these bugs are worse. I can clearly see they are similar to other distros and the bugs they have.

                  In reference to what you prefer. Its clear you don’t prefer ubuntu and you have continually mentioned it. So don’t pretend you don’t have a preference. Disguising it as some general disdain on how canonical operates doesn’t negate its clearly your preference. You will not change my mind and I don’t want to change yours. You seem like you just can’t take I don’t care about how you see it any other way than personally.

                  Other linux companies? Of which I really only know of three in total all do things that people don’t like

                  Red Hat(IBM) killed centos and I moved all my servers over to straight debian the week after their announcement. I didn’t like it but I didn’t foam at the mouth about it. They also clamped down on their sources so fedora is going to become increasingly obscure. Kind of like SCO became. They wont die that death but I look at Red Hat as a dead end.

                  SUSE has never been a distro I’ve used. No reason really. I always had other options. Their decisions were business ones and therefore unpopular to some.

                  Canonical is doing it their way and they are doing a good job. You can’t deny that but Its clear you don’t like it. I would really like you to stop generalizing and give me a specific bug they have out of the box that isn’t tied to some specific hardware. I don’t pay for ESM but I use it since I only have two Ubuntu machines that I use personally.

                  In the unlikely event anyone else bothers to read this. I will speak to you what I’ve said elsewhere in this thread. Find something you like and stick with it and don’t let someone elses problem become yours.

    • NeilBrü@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      Kubuntu LTS (--minimal-install; no snap fuckery from the start) has been wonderful.

        • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
          11·
          9 days ago

          The only thing that stops me from recommending Fedora and OpenSUSE more often is that there are still so many niche packages that are only offered as .deb (like Unreal Engine). Being forced to use unofficial community Flatpaks makes me uncomfortable and new converts aren’t going to want to hear how they can compile something themselves, assuming that’s an option.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            9 days ago

            You should not install random package files. That is a bad idea in general and creates instability and introduces security problems.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    7314·
    11 days ago

    Kubuntu for modern systems, Xubuntu for older systems, Lubuntu for older, low-end systems with limited RAM, Ubuntu server for headless servers.

    Stay mad, Ubuntu haters.

      • hue2hri19@lemmy.sdf.org
        4·
        10 days ago

        Installed 24.04 this week. On the second day my graphical interface was completely borked. Bare in mind I only installed the usual things I need like neovim, appimage support, compilers, etc.

        I’ve used the same installation of Arch, Fedora and Suse on different machines for years in a row without an issue

    • felbane@lemmy.world
      7·
      11 days ago

      Same. Tried bazzite, works fine, but immutable was annoying me for things like getting openvpn3 working (or anything involving more direct kernel stuff). Still use bazzite on my kid’s pc and my laptop but switched to fedora for my desktop and it’s been just right.

      Ubuntu and Canonical can fuck allllllll the way off. If I had to go back to a dpkg based distro it’d have to be Debian bleeding edge… and honestly I’d probably bite the bullet and try Arch instead just because of Debian’s release lag.

      • Turret3857@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        Ive tried Arch before and it wasn’t for me. Having to find all the packages that work for my setup was a bit of a pain. I was 6 months in trying to print something, not realizing I didnt install CUPS and that was my breaking point lol. Its great for those who want it. Real on canonical tho.

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
    301·
    11 days ago

    Fedora on the right tbh. Even when you chill and get wisdom Canonical and Snap are just a bit too far.

  • MrVilliam@sh.itjust.works
    19·
    11 days ago

    Legitimate question as I’m gonna move from Windows 10 within the next couple months. Is there something wrong with Bazzite or Nobara? I had narrowed my decision down to those two since they seem to be an easy transition, they do the things I need, and they’re popular enough that I can probably find fixes to any issues I experience. I pushed off my plan to build a desktop, but I still have an aging laptop that is losing security support in a couple of months.

    Also, my wife needs Excel specifically for school. Can Excel work on these distros or are there just good alternatives? She might need to keep a Windows 10 partition just for Excel stuff if she can’t run it in Bazzite or whatever she picks.

    Edit:
    Thanks everybody for responses! School is not flexible about using Excel specifically, and she has to share her screen during exams to show that she’s just using regular Excel. It’s not a hill we’re willing to die on lol.
    We aren’t super interested in doing anything beyond gaming and basic browsing type stuff with our computers, so I’m not sure that Bazzite being immutable really means anything to us. There were some good tips like a /home partition to easily swap distros when needed without losing everything, plus some people pointed out that some of these distros come and go over time so it would be harder to find fixes and continue getting updates if we get too entrenched in something that won’t be around much longer.
    Overall, I don’t think we’ll be too picky. We just want a pretty simple process to get something that’s like an unbloated Windows, and we don’t want to rip our hair out looking for a new distro and starting over every six months. Most people are not power users. I can do pretty much all of my computer stuff on my phone and all of my gaming on my PlayStation, so I really won’t notice the difference between most of these recommendations probably.

    • SincerityIsCool@lemmy.caEnglish
      21·
      11 days ago

      I landed on Mint because it’s a simple no fuss distro that feels familiar to Windows refugees. I game on it just fine and use my computer for a lot of things so wanted something general. I bounced off Ubuntu because it has some decisions that are trying to protect you from actually learning Linux, which is a priority to me.

      As a professional spreadsheet pusher, I can confidently say that LibreOffice (the Linux version of MS Office) has been able to do everything I needed that word/excel can, and then some.

      But really any distro will be able to install the software you need, and it’s easy to switch. Just try it and have fun.

    • Damage@feddit.it
      17·
      11 days ago

      Nothing wrong with them, surely better than Ubuntu, despite the meme.

      I went from Nobara to Bazzite and it feels way more polished, although the immutable thing may not be for everyone

    • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      11·
      11 days ago

      Those distros are fine, I haven’t heard anything bad about them. The only distros I wouldn’t recommend are Ububtu and Manjaro (I can explain why if you want).

      About Excel, it doesn’t work on Linux unfortunately. But you have some options. You can try LibreOffice and OnlyOffice (you can install them on Windows to try them out before switching) and see if they’re enough for your needs. There’s also a web version of Excel which you can use in your browser but it doesn’t have all the features. If you really need Excel, you can also try using a virtual machine with Windows and run it inside of that but dual booting might be easier for you at that point.

      • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        OpenOffice has been effectively abandoned. All of the original devs work on LibreOffice now.

      • Penguin_1024@lemmy.sdf.org
        34·
        11 days ago

        Another option for Excel is running it using Wine. A lot of Windows games run on Wine, which also means that things like Excel run well too.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          9·
          11 days ago

          From what I understand MS Office is notorious for not working well at all in Wine. The only ones thst I have seen evidence of running consistently in Wine are older ones like Office 2000-2007. 20-some year old products are probably simply not current enough to be useful.

          I think the better bet would be dual booting or better yet virtualization.

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      8·
      11 days ago

      From what I understand, it’s still an excellent choice. It’s well supported and decent for new users.

      Can you look into if the online version of Excel works for your wife? That might simplify your install. Libre Office and OnlyOffice are decent alternatives, but they might not map 1:1 with the instructions she gets from school.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      6·
      11 days ago

      The main reason why I would steer newcomers away from the likes of Bazzite or Nobara is because I don’t think they’re going to last long. CachyOS has sprung up just as I was starting to hear less and less about Nobara. They get trendy as THE distro for newbies to install because it has a gimmick or two aimed at newcomers, which will inevitably get rolled into the mainstream, fixed, rendered obsolete or otherwise dealt with in the mainstream within a couple years anyway, then it’s off to the next one.

      Who here remembers PeppermintOS being the hottest thing?

      • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        Staying power is an important and under-rated consideration for sure. Particularly as they get popular and the team behind it needs to be more serious about updates and such (if they aren’t already).

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 days ago

      Bazzite is fantastic, but because the system is immutable, you can’t just install packages like you can with other distros. This makes it very stable and very secure, but it also means you need to take extra steps if you want to get creative with your system. If you are already familiar with Docker and containers, then you can do anything you want that way, if there isn’t already a flatpak available. As a last resort, you can also use rpm-ostree to create new layers, but if you go that route you need to understand how to use ostree since eventually you will need to fix those layers manually.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      11 days ago

      Bazzite is an immutable distro, and it expects you to install all your programs through containers. Not all software works with these containers, but like 99.9999% does. I’m a weirdo who wants the deepest of hardware monitoring tools and many of them don’t work with these containers. I haven’t used Nobara yet but it doesn’t appear to be immutable and based on regular Fedora so it shouldn’t have those issues.

      excel

      It may run through wine, and I’d test that out before fully committing. Worst case if that’s the ONLY thing you need you could do a VM. But would the cloud (web) version of office work for her? If you’re already paying for office 365 then I believe you get it included.

    • cacti@ani.social
      3·
      11 days ago

      I’ve had a much better experience with OnlyOffice compared to LibreOffice in terms of MS compatibility, and it’s a Flatpak so it should have no issues running under Bazzite.

    • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      Both are great, as is Fedora, the one that both are based on.

      Nobara had some issues updating correctly for me, but I haven’t seen anyone else express that, so I don’t think it’s a common thing.

      Bazzite is really gaming focused, so it’s harder to do general purpose computing on it than a desktop OS.

      But they are both great OSes, and really you should just try out a bunch of them and pick the one you like the most. They’re free after all.

      • whelk@retrolemmy.com
        2·
        10 days ago

        Nobara had some issues updating correctly for me, but I haven’t seen anyone else express that

        This is why I stopped using it. I could never find anyone else with the same issue or any advice on it either. Glad to find out it wasn’t just me after all

    • 474D@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 days ago

      I usually get downvoted for this since it’s not open source, but WPS Office is free and basically an exact ms office clone. I use it regularly moving files between my work laptop with windows

    • dil@lemmy.zip
      2·
      11 days ago

      Setting up qemu is easy, vm that opens the apps as windows so it seems native while running off a vm works well with cpu based stuff

    • Habahnow@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      11 days ago

      I’m not familiar with the above distros, but I’m pretty certain there’s more people on Ubuntu which helps a lot with troubleshooting and finding solutions online. One option is, when installing any Linux OS, is to create a separate partition for “home/”. that way, you can reinstall any other Linux based OS, and keep most of your files installed.

      Excel doesn’t work on Linux, but LibreOffice and Google sheets do.

    • twinnie@feddit.uk
      1·
      11 days ago

      Honestly, most people keep a Windows partition anyway. I have one for Fusion 360 which intermittently stops working in Bottles.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
      1·
      11 days ago

      I went with Nobara because it’s pretty much Fedora + gaming related fixes. Meaning every Fedora guide out there works and Fedora on its own is pretty user friendly.

      Excel, as in Microsoft Excel might be a problem. If she needs something Excel-like, the default LibreOffice stuff is very capable, but it’s not 100% compatible, really depends on what she needs. The online Office 365 thing might also be enough.

      As for the Windows partition, a simple virtual machine might be enough and you don’t have to reboot the PC every time you need to open an Excel file.

    • Unboxious@ani.social
      12·
      11 days ago

      I’ve had Bazzite break its own update utility such that it needed manual intervention at least 3 times now. I see no point in a “just works” distro that doesn’t actually just work.

        • Unboxious@ani.social
          2·
          8 days ago

          One of the breakages was caused by an expired signature or something from Universal Blue, which hit all users. I’m surprised that one doesn’t get talked about more. One of them was caused by Bazzite changing how Steam itself is handled and not transitioning my system over properly. Can’t remember what the third one was caused by.

      • ook@discuss.tchncs.de
        12·
        11 days ago

        Don’t have a link to underline this but it was just a proposal and was not endorsed officially. This is not going to happen.

  • zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    11 days ago

    Ubuntu. The only distro I was able to kernel panic. Multiple times. It just doesn’t like power users.