So like it says in the title. I’m looking to make a change. The only coding I ever did was like, some very light HTML on stuff like LiveJournal 20 years ago (because I’m ancient in internet years, haha) and even that I barely remember.
I’ve seen people talk about LinuxMint in other comment sections and how that one might be closest to something like Windows (in that a layman like myself can use it out of the box like buying a new laptop from Best Buy or whatever store). Is that actually a good one or is there something better for somebody like me?
I’ve seen enough people go ‘NO UBUNTU!!!’ to steer me away from that one, but otherwise I have no clue what would actually be good for somebody in my shoes.
I have a laptop that still technically runs Windows 8 that I just use for downloads so I’d be trying it on there so that if something goes wonky I’m not fucked. After looking at the LinuxMint website, the specs on that laptop meet the requirements for it.
Thanks so much!
ETA: Because it’s come up a few times and after the first time I didn’t want to reply the same thing a over and over, I associate Linux with coding because everybody I’ve personally known that uses Linux is a programmer by trade, by hobby, or at least has a CompSci degree and understands this stuff on a level a million times higher than I do (even if they didn’t end up in the field). Clearly I misunderstood something about what they were doing with Linux somewhere along the way. It looked like coding to a layperson at any rate so that’s what stuck in my mind.
Mint is good. It might be worth trying a few different desktop environments to see what you like - you can probably run all of the major ones from a LiveBoot device.
BUT, and this is VERY important, ypu do not need to do any programming or coding on a Linux desktop. Ever.
If you’re not a programmer then you are never forced to peel that onion. You can do EVERYTHING from a GUI if you want.
You’ll lose the ability to run some games and software, but between alternatives and emulation, that list is getting smaller.
You don’t need to know how to code to use Linux. It helps to know how to use the terminal, but you don’t even really need to know that anymore either.
Mint is a great choice. Fedora is another great choice, and it’s what I use. IMHO, Cinnamon (Mint) and KDE are easier to use coming from Windows than Gnome (Fedora). So yeah, I’d agree with the sentiments you’ve read and cited in your post. You can also use Cinnamon or KDE on Fedora if you like though.
I haven’t once in fifteen years needed to do any coding whatsoever to use my Linux computers day-to-day.
First and foremost, you don’t have to stay on the distro you start with. You can try a few, spend a week running it, and then reinstall with something else. Distro hopping is the process if changing distro frequently and is in my opinion a very useful start for learning Linux.
Second, Ubuntu is a perfectly fine distro. I don’t like or use it, but I also don’t really like chocolate but love licorice, it really is a matter of preference. If you never try it you will never know if it is good for you.
I think the best path would be to either use virtual machines on your main system or try a few distros out on your Windows 8 machine. I would recommend trying a few of the most popular distros including Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, EndeavourOS, elementary, and maybe Pop!OS. That should cover most of the different desktop environments, packaging systems, and overall design methodologies and give you a really rounded sense of what is out there. It should also give you opportunities to have things break a little and for you to try to solve those problems. I find that different distros present failures a little differently and their solutions also work differently, so finding one that works well for you is key.
I personally ended up switching from a vanilla Arch install to EndeavourOS a year or two ago because it had great sane defaults, good packaging, and fantastic performance. The clarity of the logs was better in my mind than what was available in Ubuntu based distros and while I love Arch it was a bit too demanding of my time to figure out each and every choice of package. EndeavourOS gave me good solid defaults and reduced my work load.
Just remember, your choice of distro is like your choice of underwear. You have to wear it, make it comfortable for you and your junk, not for someone else’s.
The sound of virtual machines on my main doesn’t sit well with me. If I do something and brick my main laptop I’m fucked and I can’t replace it and some of the programs I use won’t run at all/run well on my old Windows 8 machine because it doesn’t have the processing power. (I got a gaming laptop so I could have the video processing I needed for video editors to not take a day to render a 15min video on Windows 10, never mind and older Windows 8 laptop. sigh) Experimentation and tech FAFO’ing will happen on the Windows 8! lol
I’ve seen Pop!OS come up in a few comments here, so if I don’t end up liking Mint maybe I’ll try that one out next. :)
I would ask how many times you have bricked your Windows machines in the past? That said, if you did stop it from booting it would be the same as it not booting a native Linux install.
That said, I would recommend installing first on the older machine. New life for that machine will feel good and it is very low risk. Once you have done a few installs and not botched anything too badly you could give it a go on your new machine. I find the performance boost from using Linux over Window is enough to out weight significant hardware differences most of the time.
A Windows computer I had got massively fucked once like, 15ish years ago. No idea what happened. No new downloads or installs, I hadn’t done anything different from any computer I’ve had before or since, just one day it stopped and it wasn’t even that old, two years tops. Not a custom build, straight outta the box from Best Buy (maybe even Future Shop it was so long ago). My friend couldn’t tell me what happened when they figured out how to get it at least booting up again. Only time it’s happened. It was weeeeeeeiiiiird.
Glad to know about the performance boost. :)
Yeah, I’ve had bad random things happen with tech, only with systems that are closed though. When they are more open you can get logs, see what is happening, and eventually modify things until they work again. I had a phone that just wouldn’t stay online for more than 5 minutes if the screen turned off. Screen on, internet working just fine. Screen off for 4 minutes, perfectly happy most of the time. Then suddenly around 5 minutes it would just die. It was running Android so I could see some stuff but I simply couldn’t get the information I needed to figure it out. Linux is much more forgiving with logs and such giving actual error messages which with a simple copy paste can get you to a reasonable next step.
The only time you might have issues with Ubuntu is when it comes time to update/upgrade it. I’ve seen people on Mastodon, every time an update rolls out, say that its broken something. But I think those cases are few and far between.
Mint is a good choice to get your feet wet. Install it with KDE Plasma so it will at least feel familiar to you. Cinnamon is fine but I always found it a little bit wonky. When I first started on linux I got kinda carried away with customizing Cinnamon and it totally just wrecked my install.
There’s a lot of documentation and support for Mint/Ubuntu so you can pick up stuff pretty quickly. Once you get comfy with it you can always switch your distro to something else. But yeah there’s nothing wrong with starting on Mint to get a feel for it.
I don’t understand coding either and I’ve installed different Linux distributions before! You can do it! Are you perhaps confusing coding with running commands in the command line? Because even running commands may not be necessary for a graphical installations like the aforementioned Linux Mint, Pop OS or similar.
I will say the nice thing about picking a popular distribution like Ubuntu, Mint, or Pop! OS, is that it’s easier to find solutions to problems, because it’s more likely that someone has posted about it online and found a solution
Do:
- Mint if you’re coming from Windows
- Ubuntu if you want lots of help online
- Fedora if you want strong and stable
- Bazzite Gnome if you want indestructible, grandma-safe and Apple-like.
If gaming isn’t a priority, Bazzite’s cousins Project Silverblue (GNOME) or Aurora (KDE) are pawbably better choices. Much more grandma-safe in my opinion, both having automatic updates enabled by default.
Telling someone to use gnome feels like a hate crime.
We are trying to help people use a PC the way they want. Not just give them a different boot heel to grovel under.
So we can’t suggest it because you don’t like it? Check.
Won’t happen again, sir.
I was with you in the first half, Bazzite GNOME seems like a wild recommendation over the KDE build which is far more Windows-like. But seriously, calling GNOME a boot-heel? I assume because of Red Hat contributing heavily, but you know the GNOME Foundation is a fully independent non-profit entity, right? The closest thing to a boot-heel on that list is Ubuntu/Canonical and even that is a stretch. Grow up.
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In what ways is mint more compatible? I would expect them to be exactly the same since isn’t mint based on Ubuntu?
Mint is a great starting point. I might also recommend having a look at KDE (the desktop environment) which will feel very familiar coming from windows and is available on quite a few distributions. I use it with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - less beginner friendly than Mint, but still an ok plafe to start.
Mint is a great distro for beginners. Coding is not required, but coders prefer Linux because it makes our lives easier in some ways.
I would like to take the opportunity to give you two advices that I think everyone who wants to use Linux should hear:
Install from package manager
In windows the way to install something is to look it up on a browser, open a sketchy website, downloading a binary and executing it on your machine. That is definitely NOT the way to do stuff on Linux. Think on Linux the same way you do Android (which is actually a Linux distro), if you want to install something you look it up on the play store, and only if it’s not there you consider alternatives like downloading a random .APK from the internet. Linux should be the same, except there are several alternatives before downloading a binary from the internet, like adding a PPA in debian based distros (Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, so this applies to you) which essentially gives extra packages to the package manager or using flatpak/snaps (two different technologies that try to do the same, i.e. a new way of packaging software for Linux)
Keep /home in a different partition
In Linux any folder can be in any hard-drive/partition. So it’s possible when you’re installing your system to have what you would normally think as
C:\(which is called/in Linux) in one partition and/home(i.e. the folderhomeinside/) in another. This is great because it allows you to reinstall or change your Linux distro without losing your personal data.Ok, wait…I thought a partition meant that it was in effect a wall between different OSs if you had multiples on one computer, not like separate folders like in Windows Explorer (which is what I’m getting from this comment, if I’m wrong please let me know).
A partition is a dedicated space on a disk. In windows there’s not much use to partition a disk, but it can be done, and you would have a C: and D: drives with only one physical disk. I used to do that back in the day to have a partition for backups.
If you only have one disk and want to have multiple OS, you need to partition the disk, so that each OS can write their data without interfering with one another. Essentially what you’re doing is, like you said, putting a wall between areas in the disk, but you can do that regardless of having different OS in each side.
In Linux things are a bit different, the representation of your disks is a file inside
/dev, for example the first disk (non-nvme) Linux finds will be/dev/sda, the next one will be/dev/sdbso on and so forth, but since disks can be partitioned the first partition in your first disk is/dev/sda1, then/dev/sda2, etc. Then there’s a file called/etc/fstabthat has lines like/dev/sdb3 /home, this means that the 3d partition in the second disk will be accessible in the folder/home. You don’t really need to worry about this file in general, during the installation there will be a nice GUI to let you say which partition goes where.How is that useful? Well, if you have the system in
/dev/sda2and your/homefolder in/dev/sda3you can format/dev/sda2and reinstall the system or change the distro entirely without losing your data stored in/home.PS: I’m simplifying some stuff, but for reference :
- you might see partitions jump from 2 to 6 in older systems, this is due to limitation in partitioning schemes for old disks
- if you have a really old computer you will see
/dev/hda1, this is because the s in sda refers to SATA, which essentially all disks are nowadays - nvme drives are
/dev/nvme0n1 /etc/fstabhas other parameters to tell it certain flags like mount read-only. Also it rarely used/dev/sda1style naming because that might change if you swap the cables in your computer, instead it uses a unique identifier that’s points to the correct partition regardless of order.- Partitions are not really a wall, instead the first bytes of a disk contain a table saying stuff like byte 0-61648716832 partition 1, bytes 61648716833-9274816418393 partition 2, etc. Old drives had limited space in that table so you had to create one partition for the rest of stuff and repartition that again, which is why partition numbers jumped from 2 to 6.
but all that’s besides the point.
Pop! OS is also a good beginner distro.
I found the software manager to be much nicer in Mint than Pop, so if someone is looking for GUI preference, I could understand the lean towards Mint
I have several older laptops that would not perform well on windows 11 running Linux mint, Debian, Ubuntu with no problem. If you stick with distributions that let you try the os from a bootable usb first, this should increase your comfort level and help you feel better about your decision.
One note, depending on your laptop BIOS, you may have trouble booting a live USB. I experienced this with Ubuntu and Pop-os, but the issue is solved by creating the bootable USB with a GPT partition instead of the default MBR. The only reliable way I have found to do this is using Rufus on Windows, so keep in mind you may need a Windows machine around for this purpose.
Good luck and have fun!
Ok, I’m assuming that a ‘live boot’ is something you plug in anytime you want to use it rather than the installed OS that automatically boots? Yes?
Yes, exactly. You would choose your Linux distribution that has a “live boot” option, download the appropriate .iso file, and then make a bootable usb drive using that file, via software like Rufus. When that’s all complete, you would plug in the usb drive and reboot. (You may need to press a key or access your system’s BIOS settings to ensure your system boots from the usb as well - sometimes this is not automatic.)
The chosen OS will load directly from the USB and give you a chance to try it out. You may not have access to the data from your existing system in this mode, but you may not need that if you’re just kicking the tires.
This exercise also helps focus you more on what you actually need/want your system to be able to do. Most of my personal use is web browsing, media consumption, and basic documents and Linux is more than capable of delivering on all of that right out of the box.
If you get stuck on a step, there are probably hundreds of posts out there where someone had the same problem, so you should be able to find solutions to any problems that occur with some patience.
I have found the journey to be very freeing and rewarding, and hope you find the same.
This worked for me when I was first setting up Proxmox.
dd bs=1M conv=fdatasync if=./proxmox-ve_*.iso of=/dev/XYZ
I would say Ubuntu, Mint or Debian. They have a lot of documentation online and years worth of forum posts and stack overflow threads answering various questions a user might have.
If you have a seperate computer or hard drive to install on, you can go wild trying out anything you like. In my case, I had one laptop so I needed something stable with good hardware detection and online resources.
(For context, I’ve tried Mandrake Linux, SUSE, Gentoo, Slitaz and a few others. I keep going back to Ubuntu / Debian.)
My Windows 8 laptop is an old one that I just use to download stuff. My main is a separate device, so all good there!
I think the Ubuntu haters are overly enthusiastic. It’s perfectly fine. Actually pretty good.
Mint is extremely popular as a recommendation for good reasons as well.
Both have excellent support communities, which is important. Linux in general has become a lot more “plug and play” in recent years, meaning that it will do more of what you want right out of the box. In all likelihood, you will want to do something with it that requires help, so having a robust community makes a big difference.
Ubuntu or mint is a good beginners choice.
Once you get annoyed with snap packages or something else you can change it.
