Amen. Even Arch shouldn't be recommended to new, non-techie users. Much less stuff like NixOS, which has horrendous documentation.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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As someone who uses Arch (btw) I would never recommend it for a beginner.
I've heard that the Arch wiki is fairly helpful for people using other distros though. Haven't made the jump quite yet. Trying to figure out what reasonably cheap monitor to get.
It really is, I learned a lot when I played with Arch. I don't use Arch anymore but it was a great learning experience. If you have an old machine that you don't need to daily drive. Install it and play, break things, fix things, and don't ask questions in the form. If it is a question that is answered in the wiki you will just be told to go read the wiki and maybe roasted a little.
While I do have an HP2000 from 2010, I also just built a gaming tower that has nothing but a BIOS. I just need a decent and fairly cheap monitor. Suggestions are welcome, as I'm somewhat lost as to whether a tablet or an actual monitor is the best solution here.
Sorry I am the wrong guy to ask. I don't do desktops and I don't follow specs. I am a bit of a luddite who happens to use Linux. Not sure how that happened.
Thank you for not recommending to throw newbies into the deep end 👍 You're a rare gem
On the other hand, Manjaro asked me to preserve contents of my /home partition automatically, and that used to be the most difficult part of my Ubuntu reinstallations.
I had no opinion on nixos until I got sick of reading about it in so many places unprompted. I'm assuming that's how it was for arch but that was before I used Linux so wasn't around any spaces that talked about it
Nix is very well documented... It's just understanding it all.
I only ever recommend Red Star OS
Really. Most people just want their computer to do Internety things. Some officey things, and then show them a film.
If someone doesn't get those pretty easy the first try they are going to head back to their corporate masters.
Honestly most of us really just need the same thing. I have run a number of different distros, and yeah Arch is really fun. The thing is I realized I just need the basics and I want free time. So I came full circle and went back to Mint. Is it one of the most vanilla flavors of Linux? Absolutely, but it usually just works and I appreciate that now in my life.
Is it one of the most vanilla flavors of Linux? Absolutely
it's really not though. Distros like Debian, Fedora, and Slackware are a lot more vanilla. Linux Mint develops a lot of their own tools and rices the desktop a lot.
I have always used the Xfce DE so mine is pretty vanilla. I have no idea what cinnamon is like.
I don't know if maybe it is a difference in definitions. I would say those are simpler and very stable. But they are harder to use as a daily driver's personal computer. I have never used slackware or Fedora, but Debian is so held back to keep it stable Often you have to go find software that is newer to get it to be able to deal with everybody else. It seems much more of a server than a daily. But IDK it has been a while since I looked at it.
Mint has good moderation updates, tends to play better with proprietary codec, Nvidia, etc. without having to mess around with it too much. At the same time at least for me it's very stable.
When I think of a vanilla distros I think of the ones that ship packages straight from upstream with no or minimal changes. Mint is a good distro, but I wouldn't call it vanilla. Also Mint would have to be mint flavored not vanilla :P
I get what you're saying. I guess I'm using vanilla in a slightly different context. I was more talking about the end user experience and how much you needed to know first how much it did itself. To me it is the changes to packets that makes mint vanilla it is somebody else doing the work for you.
As for the flavoring I think you got me there
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As someone who started in the deep end back in 2001 (My first distro was a Slackware derivative) I actually enjoyed the satisfaction of trying to get XFree86 to work and seeing all the available command line tools. Of course this was back in the Windows 98 days so I was already used to going into MS-DOS mode. My first computer was a Commodore 64 as well so didn't get mollycoddled at all when learning to use a computer.