Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.
I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.
So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.
Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.
And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.
The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.
And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.
Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.
If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.
Thanks, that’s a really cool hint!
I’ll try whether that works in the locked-up state
Yeah, heared that a lot.
But I didn’t specifically buy my laptop for Linux, 5 years ago. And the purpose that would really urge me over to Linux is that this laptop has a 7th gen Intel CPU which just about doesn’t qualify for Win11.
So buying a new device to use Linux kinda defeats the point.
But yes, I’ll buy AMD next time.
I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.
If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.
I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.
So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.
I can second Xfce. I’m using it on the chroot Linux I run on my phone. It doesn’t get much lower end than that, and Xfce performs perfectly.
And it feels much more polished than LXDE.
I think, there is another underlying problem, and that is that many Linux users are overly defensive about their OS.
If Windows frequently bluescreens due to a driver, people also say that Windows sucks. But I’ve never seen a single instance where then a more experienced Windows user says “You are wrong, Windows is great, it’s just the manufacturer of the hardware who is at fault.”
To an average user, there is no difference between OS, drivers or even user space software.
And, tbh, if the system doesn’t run correctly (no matter which part of it) nobody really cares who is at fault. Because it’s not about putting blame on someone, but rather about the user wanting to do something and it doesn’t work.
For a bad comparison: Imagine you got a new car and directly after the warranty expired, the motor breaks down and needs to be replaced.
Would you then say “The car is ok, it’s just the supplier of the sealing rings of the piston who sucks”?
I’d rather say, “This car sucks”.
Yep, it’s an argument outdated by about 20 years. At that time 10 years difference between two machines meant that you had completely different machine.
But having a good 10yo machine now means it’s about on the same level as an entry-level machine now. My laptop I bought in 2013 for ~€700 had an i7 4th gen, which is totally fast enough for non-gaming usage, 8GB RAM, 500GB SSD and a dGPU that’s still faster than most iGPUs.
That are specs you can still find in modern entry-level PCs.
And that laptop has no issue running Win10 at all and if I workaround the arbitrary requirement for TPM2 and Intel Gen 8, it also runs fine. But I don’t want to risk that Microsoft sometime arbitrarily decides to not give me updates any more.
And also, the argument that it’s not a good choice to run a modern OS on a 25yo machine is a pretty dumb counter against the argument that a 10yo machine can run a modern OS without issue.
That’s an argument that wouldn’t even hit a barn door from a step away.
Sure, it’s much better than it has been a few years ago.
But it’s still not nearly at the point where I would blindly recommend it to non-technical people and call it easy. There’s still a way to go.
On the other hand I have no problem recommending Linux to the typical “I only use an OS to run a browser” user. That wasn’t the case 5 or 10 years ago.
I guess your experience must be universal and everyone who has issues must be really dumb. Is that how you see the world?
You are right with what you are saying, but for an average user it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is that their hardware and the OS don’t play nice together.
If they have Nvidia and it works perfectly out of the box on Windows, but not on Linux, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s the fault of Linux or Nvidia.
And sure, if you are buying a new device to run Linux on it, you can use that info to buy an ATI card that works better.
But more often than not people are switching from Windows to Linux on their existing hardware. Mostly because something doesn’t work (e.g. receiving updates on Win10 past 2024), and they’d rather switch OS than buy a new PC.
It’s kinda like IPv6.
But if I have to have a full Windows installation that I need to keep up to date, with the full setup of drivers and other software that I need to run games, what advantage does an average person (not software dev/IT enthusiast) have from running a second OS for the things that do work on both OSes?
It’s kinda like saying “This racing kit car is amazingly fast, you can tinker on it and reconfigure it, and for everything that you can’t do in the kit car, you can just keep a family minivan around”.
That’s nice for a racing/car enthusiast. But most people just want one car to do all they need.
I guess most people still access the internet. Websites track you no matter what OS you use.
You really want to run an OS from 2021 on hardware older than 2016? That’s not going to be a good idea, TPM or not.
Why?
10+ years of usage for a PC or laptop is completely normal outside the gamere/tech enthusiast bubble.
If you only use your PC for Amazon, Streaming and occasionally Word/Excel, a 10yo laptop is totally enough.
There’s some bug between KDE, my Nvidia GPU, Prime, Proton and DXVK that causes my whole system to freeze (can’t even switch to console) if I try to play games with the GPU selection set to “on-demand”.
If I completely disable the Intel GPU, it runs fine, but that means I basically can’t use the laptop without a charger (because the battery drains so fast), unless I switch the GPU setting (requires a reboot) every time I want to game.
And if you want both piracy and the convenience of Steam, there are always key resellers.
Most people I helped getting Linux to work are actually not techy at all and they haven’t touched the CLI at all so far…
I guess it differs if you use Linux because you are interested in the technology or if you use it because Windows 11 doesn’t run on your PC.