I took a bunch of stuff from work that was gonna get recycled including a decent laptop and a flash drive. I work in network admin and IT if that narrows it down. Never used Linux before though.
Edit: Thanks everyone! I'm down for some problem solving so I think I'm gonna go the Arch/Manjaro direction so I can learn my way around Linux generally.
Debian.
It’s incredibly stable, has a broad userbase, everything works and it’s using the most standard libraries and tools across all the distros.
You’re coming from a networking and administration background so it’s not like anything is gonna be too weird for you to figure out.
There’s even a good chance you use a Debian machine for something already.
The new kde is very nice but just do yourself a favor and start with xfce4.
Oh lol I didn’t see any of the old dragon days stuff, it ran fine I just like xfce more.
Seconded, Fedora has become probably the most 'Ubuntu' distro of '23. Having to figure out why a random snap package can't see a given file is certainly not user approachable, and forcing them to be used for every single package by default is not ideal.
It’s worth noting that because you’re coming from a background of understanding and operating computers you don’t need to be as worried about the most detailed support wiki or forums.
The skill set of breaking a problem down will let you transcend howtos for your distro.
Once you obtain 'the knack,' there is nothing which can stop you. If there's a will, there's a way.
mint is good if you're coming from windows, everything will be roughly where you expect it to be
Manjaro. The package manager is great, and Arch Wiki is one of the 7 wonders. Some gainsayer always replying saying "Manjaro is great, but it's pretty advanced for a beginner" and this person is an NPC, because I legit run into more problems with Mint and Xubuntu than Arch. Installing an AUR is really easy, unlike whatever the process is for getting something that isn't on Apt-get.
Arch / Manjaro are good distros if you want to get into fucking around (and incidentally, finding out). All Red Hat-derived distros (i.e. Fedora) as well as Debian-derived distros (i.e. Mint, Ubuntu) separate development packages from runtime packages. Gentoo, Arch (and Manjaro, as an Arch dirivitive) combine them. For people who don't care about tinkering, this only results in additional bloat on the hard drive. But for people who do care about tinkering, this means that everything comes with batteries included. Of course, you can still do all this stuff on Fedora/Debian, but when you already have things like Portage / AUR set up on your system, you get a fully functional build toolchain out of the box. Makes grabbing things from Github and trying them out a lot easier.
I've never used Manjaro personally though. Just Arch. My understanding is that Manjaro is significantly easier to set up.
Manjaro isn't just Arch, it's significantly changed and has become pretty approachable, while Ubuntu has become quite a bit less so in recent years.
Ubuntu always sucked, but that's just my opinion. Literally just, what if we took Debian and made it shittier?
unity was great. in some ways gnome3 still hasn't caught up to some of the nice parts of unity
I tried it, it runs really well actually, except for the constant crashes. Real bummer. A taste of ambrosia.
If you want a daily driver, Debian. Maybe a variant distro that comes prepackaged and themed nicely out of the box. But stick with one that uses Debian's upstream repos and isn't like maintaining its own kernel release schedule.
If you want to fuck around and learn about linux then Arch. Or again you can use variant distro for an nice installer. But stick with the core repos as above. That means no Manjaro.
If you're going to use the laptop as a main driver, I say Debian since the laptop is most likely a few years old. Debian plays nicely with older equipment relative to other major distros. Otherwise, if you already have a dedicated PC and want to tinker with the laptop, Arch wouldn't be a bad idea.
Gentoo
Fedora is a pretty good starting point IMO. It has a pretty quick release cadence at roughly 9 months. This means the software is both fairly up-to-date, yet fairly well tested. The distro has a lot of polish, and the updates have been pretty robust in my experience, not breaking shit. Anybody I know personally who asks me to set them up on Linux I usually set up on Fedora, and they more or less are set.
Fedora doesn't include proprietary software in its repositories, so you should head over to RPM Fusion to get things like Steam, Nvidia drivers, additional media codecs, etc.
Fedora serves more or less as a testbed for Red Hat (recently acquired by IBM :doomjak: ). As a result, they tend to push the bleeding edge. There is corporate funding behind R&D going on here, but this has also lead to controversy over the years. (At least Red Hat isn't run by a South African :joker-gaming: ).
Debian is also fucking solid, (I run matapacos.dog on it) but its release cadence is much slower (2-3 years, with regular security updates and some backports along the way), which can sometimes be a nuisance for desktop users. Basically, you get much more testing, much more stability, but you have to give up the latest bells and whistles (unless you run testing or unstable). If you are running very new consumer hardware, you will want a more bleeding-edge distro. If you have had your machine for a while, this bleeding edge stuff is less important.
Debian probably has the biggest variety of out-of-the-box CPU architecture support as well. If you are trying to run Linux on old / weird systems, Debian is the GOAT. It is the basis for the official Raspberry Pi distribution, for instance.
Debian isolates proprietary software into its non-free repository, which you will need to enable for additional firmware, Nvidia drivers, Steam, etc.
Mint is based on Debian and inherits much of its traits, but has a faster release cadence (biannual) and some additional user-facing polish. I haven't used it in a long time though. :shrug-outta-hecks:
I run Gentoo personally, but I've been fucking around with this shit for nearly 20 years and am very opinionated. Gentoo is an operating system for people who enjoy reading manuals and setting things up in unorthodox ways.
Gentoo is for casuals, use the Linux kernel documentation as a setup guide and write your own kernel from scratch.
I did LFS once sometime around 2008. It certainly is an experience, but much of it boils down to downloading a tarball, extracting it, compiling it, then installing it. Then doing that again for 60 other packages. It is a great learning tool, but we invented package managers for this. There is no practical way to keep an LFS system up to date.Sorry I misread your post. I hung out in an IRC channel some time back. Probably earlier, around 2006-2007. We decided one day we wanted to make an OS from scratch. Personally, I got no farther then fucking around with bootsectors. A BIOS system will load the first 512 bytes from the boot media into memory, and then it is up to that half-kilobyte of code to start the rest of everything. The partition table is also stored in this sector, so you actually get less memory than that.
I managed to write a boot sector which was capable of loading the second sector from a floppy disk into memory (you do this by sending interrupts to the keyboard controller 🙃) , as well as one which would draw a bunch of lines on the screen. That is about as far as I got.
All x86 processors (including modern ones) boot in 16 bit real mode. DOS shit. The UEFI firmware takes the responsibility of transferring the machine into 64 bit protected mode and loading an ELF image, but if you are booting from BIOS, this is also a thing you need to do from scratch. You basically get maybe 300 bytes to write a minimally functional filesystem driver and disk IO layer. On the bright side, the opcodes and pointers are only 16 bits long.
At the time I was fucking around with this, you could order print (and delivered to your door) x86 architecture manuals from Intel at no charge. I was 16 and was able to order them without even having a credit card number. The manuals spanned 5 volumes, and two of them were dedicated to just the instruction set alone.
Under communism, all CISC CPUs will be destroyed and their creators will be sent to the gulag.
Under communism, all CISC CPUs will be destroyed and their creators will be sent to the gulag.
Hell yes.
When I did something similar it was on a PowerPC machine I found at a thrift store in Mexico city, and PPC is at least a lot nicer to work with on account of Open Firmware being nicer to use and supporting things like loading from a filesystem.
I also just get pain from looking at x86 assembly in a way that's even worse than other CISC architectures like 68k.
At the time I was fucking around with this, you could order print (and delivered to your door) x86 architecture manuals from Intel at no charge. I was 16 and was able to order them without even having a credit card number. The manuals spanned 5 volumes, and two of them were dedicated to just the instruction set alone.
this has the same vibe of having cern send you the particle data group's "Review of Particle Physics." it's 2000 pages long. this thing has over 200 authors and i hate some of them personally.
:data-laughing:
gentoo is an operating system for people that realize that most of what they're installing through pkgbuilds and yay/paru is compiled on their local machine and pulled off github anyway, so why not make it official and compile every goddamn thing
Debian isolates proprietary software into its non-free repository, which you will need to enable for additional firmware, Nvidia drivers, Steam, etc.
I believe this will not be true beginning with the next release of Debian, and the nonfree packages will be rolled into the free release. I mean, nvidia and steam and stuff like that will be not be from the debian repos, but proprietary firmware will be accessible.
Debian's my daily driver. Never felt the need to use anything else, only ever encountered Debian & Redhat in the wild (work), other than IBM AIX or something old as shit.
modern fedora is pretty cute, probably compatible with the laptop as well. debian is a classic for a reason. my favorite modern spin of it is pop, which does feel much more modern than the shipped desktop environments of some distros.
I heard the latest Ubuntu was actually really good, it even uses Wayland by default
edit: apparently snap is bad lol and it's pushed to the point that getting through apt-get actually retrieves it from snap lol, maybe do steer away from fucky wucky shit like that. it's too bad that Ubuntu's gnome implementation goes to waste for a dumb canonical decision.
