Best Linux distro.. "best"..

auntjemima

auntjemima

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I haven't used Linux in years. I found it was just painful to drudge through it. However, recently I see a lot of posts saying that Linux is much better these days than they used to be. I wouldn't be much of a computer enthusiast if I wasn't interested in trying new things and potentially better systems.

That said, what is the best distro these days? By best I mean the one that's the easiest to transition to from windows and one that is mostly set up out of the box.

Thanks!
 
Eh, the desktop Linux experience hasn't really changed all that much compared to Windows in many years. Ultimately it's just an OS. If you just want to go play around with Linux without too much hassle, just grab Ubuntu. If there's something in particular you want to get done or monkey with, that's a different story.

If you're looking to transition from Windows full time, then your big bottleneck is going to be apps.
 
Ubuntu & Ubuntu derivatives (Mint and friends) probably fit your definition of 'best' the best.
 
rezerekted said:
There is a Linux forum here, ask there. http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=96

Currently I like Fedora but used to use Mint, Ubuntu would be my 3rd choice.

How is Apps a bottleneck? Apps are just lightweight progs and Linux has plenty of those to choose from.
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But there are many that don't exist there, and the Linux-compatible equivalents simply aren't as good. MS Office and Adobe products are the obvious ones, but there are many others as well.
 
I use Libre Office and Sumatra PDF even on Windows so don't need MS or Adobe.
 
Without quoting multiple posts I'll sum up in points!

1) I am just looking for something to mess around with, likely in a dual boot. I won't be replacing my windows any time soon.

2) I didn't even see the Linux forum.. not that I looked for it, though. This section is called "Operating Systems".. yeah.

3) app support isn't a huge deal YET. Who knows depending on how much I enjoy it.

Thanks guys! Ubuntu it is for now.
 
rezerekted said:
I use Libre Office and Sumatra PDF even on Windows so don't need MS or Adobe.
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That's fine, as long as you accept the limitations of Libre Office (doesn't even include equivalents for many widely-used MS Office programs like OneNote and Outlook) and never work with anyone who does use Office (compatibility is a joke). I'm not sure how Sumatra PDF is a replacement for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere, but I'm glad it works out for you.
 
kumquat said:
That's fine, as long as you accept the limitations of Libre Office (doesn't even include equivalents for many widely-used MS Office programs like OneNote and Outlook) and never work with anyone who does use Office (compatibility is a joke). I'm not sure how Sumatra PDF is a replacement for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere, but I'm glad it works out for you.
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Yeah this. Advanced *nix user here and while some people still stump for the MS and Adobe OSS so called alternatives, you are just kidding yourself and others if you want to believe they are remotely as capable as the real thing. If they work for what you do tho, great.
 
The number of people who actually need Photoshop is <1%. I never understood that argument. It would be like me saying that Windows is just unusable for the public because it doesn't have a good command line shell (a <1% use case).
 
jwcalla said:
The number of people who actually need Photoshop is <1%. I never understood that argument. It would be like me saying that Windows is just unusable for the public because it doesn't have a good command line shell (a <1% use case).
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You grossly underestimate the number of people who use Photoshop, let alone Lightroom, on a daily basis. Lightroom is pretty much the workflow tool of choice for amateur and pro photographers. It's pretty cheap ($150) and used by a LOT of people.

But still, the number of people who would really miss OneNote, Outlook, Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and the ability to send/receive Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files is rather large.
 
Almost all the major distros have Live DVDs that you can boot from directly. No need to install anything or dual boot to get the experience you're requesting.
 
Lubuntu,IMO.
Light,powerful.
I usually run it in tandem with Windows.
Maybe Slitaz if you know how to set it up.I don't.
 
4saken said:
Yeah this. Advanced *nix user here and while some people still stump for the MS and Adobe OSS so called alternatives, you are just kidding yourself and others if you want to believe they are remotely as capable as the real thing. If they work for what you do tho, great.
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Totally agree with you here. Until recently, I was a sysadmin at an accounting firm. If you suggested to the accountants that they use an open source alternative to excel, they would laugh in your face.
 
kumquat said:
I'm not sure how Sumatra PDF is a replacement for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and Premiere, but I'm glad it works out for you.
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Sumatra PDF does it all. ;)

I have a few alternatives for Photoshop, The Gimp is the Linux alternative. On Windows I have The Gimp and PhotoBrush5 ($55.00), also there is Paint.Net.

http://www.mediachance.com/pbrush/

I do have old copies of Photoshop, Pagemaker and Illustrator but can't install any of them anymore because they used 16 bit installers. That is near $3,000 worth of software rendered useless by a shitty installer unless I reinstall XP. I don't support overpriced Adobe products now so it is a non-issue for me. If you need them due to a work requirement then that is different.
 
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auntjemima said:
Without quoting multiple posts I'll sum up in points!

1) I am just looking for something to mess around with, likely in a dual boot. I won't be replacing my windows any time soon.

2) I didn't even see the Linux forum.. not that I looked for it, though. This section is called "Operating Systems".. yeah.

3) app support isn't a huge deal YET. Who knows depending on how much I enjoy it.

Thanks guys! Ubuntu it is for now.
Click to expand...

Ubuntu is great, fast and easier to get used to.
 
I've used Ubuntu and Linux mint 17.2, overall I'd have to recommend Mint over Ubuntu as I prefer Cinnamon over Unity - I've also found Linux Mint to be more stable than Ubuntu.

The other goods thing about Mint is that it is a derivative of Ubuntu, so what ever works on Ubuntu will also work on mint - Including Advise in the Ubuntu forums.

I've also used many of the 'hardcore' distro's, which are great from a learning perspective, but I tend to use Mint on my daily driver as it just works.

Enjoy your transition, I only ever turn my Windows PC on to play Battlefield these days, everything else is done on my Linux Mint based PC.
 
Use the popular one. More forum posts with solutions to typical problems, more polished.

I like Debian personally. Ubuntu is okay. Fedora and Mint are also pretty good.

Yes, some of your devices will not work or will work partially. Stick to repositories, don't start off by installing random 'tarballs'.

They are all very similar, really. Just choose a desktop environment. I recommend KDE.

Performance-wise there's not much to tweak, just make sure video (GPU) acceleration is working (the command used to be 'glxinfo | grep -i direct' which would spit out: 'Direct rendering: enabled' or something of that nature. Without video acceleration it won't be perfectly snappy.
 
flu!d said:
I've used Ubuntu and Linux mint 17.2, overall I'd have to recommend Mint over Ubuntu as I prefer Cinnamon over Unity - I've also found Linux Mint to be more stable than Ubuntu.

The other goods thing about Mint is that it is a derivative of Ubuntu, so what ever works on Ubuntu will also work on mint - Including Advise in the Ubuntu forums.

I've also used many of the 'hardcore' distro's, which are great from a learning perspective, but I tend to use Mint on my daily driver as it just works.

Enjoy your transition, I only ever turn my Windows PC on to play Battlefield these days, everything else is done on my Linux Mint based PC.
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I feel the same way about Mint/Cinnamon. I tried Ubuntu a couple of years ago and while it was okay, I just couldn't warm up to it. I installed Mint (15 at the time I believe) on an older gaming laptop that I wasn't using and I've had Mint on it since (now at 17.2). I find the interface very familiar, being quite similar to Windows XP. The built in apps work fine for me, as I pretty much only use it for surfing the web, making online payments and things along those lines. I have used Libre Office for several things and for home use, it seems to work just fine. I was like the OP where I just wanted to "test" Linux and after using Mint for a while, couldn't see going back to Windows on this machine.
 
blinx said:
Totally agree with you here. Until recently, I was a sysadmin at an accounting firm. If you suggested to the accountants that they use an open source alternative to excel, they would laugh in your face.
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Doing accounting with Excel. Sounds like a great strategy.
 
yeongil said:
Another vote for Linux Mint as the "best" distro. I have Qiana (I know, not the most recent version) installed on my secondary desktop (a Haswell-based Intel NUC). Install was super easy (though I should mention that I've dabbled with Linux off and on for at least 15 years), and I really like Cinnamon. Everything just works. :cool:
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I was a complete Linux newb when I installed Mint for the first time and it was quick and painless.. Sure, there are options that can get you into pretty big trouble if you don't know what you're doing, but if you stick close to the defaults, the installation went smoother than your typical Windows install. I've used several distros in the last couple of years, but always return to Mint for the ease of use.
 
Thanks again guys! I installed Mint 17.2 and it is surprisingly easy to use. I had used DOS fairly extensively when I was younger so the terminal window came easily to me.

My only real issue was constant crashing during install which I traced to the program I was using to make my usb bootable with the Mint ISO. Ended up using Winsetupfromusb. I found the Mint suggested options (there are two) caused my crashes.

Either way, its smooth sailing it seems. I really wanted to dual boot this with windows 7 but in my past experiences trying to dual boot Linux with a windows OS already installed always causes windows to go wonky so I just did a clean install by itself.
 
openSUSE (kde flavor) is pretty easy. I tried FreeBSD this week, and it's a text adventure nightmare, like Gentoo, or Slackware from 20 years ago.

Use VirtualBox to get a feel for a new distro first.
 
I just removed my windows drive from my laptop and put in a spare so the install can be removed and installed quickly. I suppose I could have installed it on a USB stick just as easily however the speed from usb compared to sata would make it too slow to enjoy any experience I might have.
 
auntjemima said:
I just removed my windows drive from my laptop and put in a spare so the install can be removed and installed quickly. I suppose I could have installed it on a USB stick just as easily however the speed from usb compared to sata would make it too slow to enjoy any experience I might have.
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That's actually the same thing I did. This old Gateway gaming laptop I'm using had two drive bays, with two 500GB drives from WD in use with Windows 7. Removed both of those and installed a Sandisk SSD drive I got on sale and installed Mint on it (two years ago). I've been using it this way since and it works great. Still have the old Windows drives sitting there in case I ever need to use the laptop to play older games on the go, but I haven't yet.
 
wtburnette said:
That's a great idea, but a liveUSB can be just as easy or easier, without the need to install anything except the boot disk creation software.
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Or combine the two -- boot liveusb from within virtualbox or kvm :)
 
jwcalla said:
The number of people who actually need Photoshop is <1%.
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Yeah, I never understood that fetish. While Linux could use a better range of image editing software*, no one who lives in Photoshop/Lightroom/etc is going to use Linux anyways.

* while the capability of GIMP is good for common (although not most professional) editing usage, its usability is complete crap
 
Sounds like you went with Mint which is a good choice. My dad uses it on one of his machines and has been very happy(it was a core 2 system with a vista sticker on it). I use debian when I do linux stuff so it was easy for me to deal with.


I haven't tried this yet but I keep hearing more about it if you want to try something else as well.

https://elementary.io/
 
xorbe said:
I had to look that one up, as the website is so minimal. It's based on Ubuntu and has been around for 4 years. Will have to try it out in vbox sometime.
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Yea I've seen listing saying it has become pretty popular for not being one of the biggest players. FYI it isn't as easy to tweak as some systems and apparently is pretty easy to break if you don't know what you are doing.
 
Linux Mint is great even for consumption and you don't need to install it to HD.

Find an unused 8GB USB stick

Download Universal USB Installer utility

Download Linux Mint Cinnamon 64-bit ISO

Use Universal USB Installer to write ISO image to USB stick and select persistent storage (max out ~4GB).

Boot USB stick, install Chrome and enjoy.
 
I used Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint. have to say I love Kubuntu the most for my desktop. Laptop, I went Mint to Arch with XFCE
 
kumquat said:
You grossly underestimate the number of people who use Photoshop, let alone Lightroom, on a daily basis. Lightroom is pretty much the workflow tool of choice for amateur and pro photographers. It's pretty cheap ($150) and used by a LOT of people.

But still, the number of people who would really miss OneNote, Outlook, Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and the ability to send/receive Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files is rather large.
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The number of people who THINK they need all that is large. The ones who actually do is a much smaller number :)

Most people do just fine with alternatives once they get into doing it. I would absolutely hate to think that my work depended on windows.
 
pxc said:
Yeah, I never understood that fetish. While Linux could use a better range of image editing software*, no one who lives in Photoshop/Lightroom/etc is going to use Linux anyways.

* while the capability of GIMP is good for common (although not most professional) editing usage, its usability is complete crap
Click to expand...

I agree Gimp is horrible to use. But you can get stuff done with it if necessary.
 
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