There are a few core versions of Linux that all the others are based on, so Red Hat and Debian are the two “teams” that you’re going to want to choose from. I use Fedora, which is based on Red Hat and its main selling point is that everything is as updated as can be. The biggest Linux for people in your situation is Ubuntu, and it’s good to pick one that everyone else uses too because things will break and need fixing. So Ubuntu is very popular with beginners. A third choice would be Linux Mint, which is designed to be easy to use. My advice is to pick one of those three; you can configure any one of them to effectively become a different one if you’re good enough, although that is challenging. If you need help choosing which one to go with, ask yourself how much you use your desktop (anything that uses Gnome for its desktop won’t let you have desktop icons - I agree that this is idiotic but there you go) and whether you want to type “dnf install” or “apt-get” to install new software.

There are a lot of possible answers, but my recommendation would be Lubuntu. It's a lightweight variant of the very popular Ubuntu distribution, so it has good compatibility and documentation. I think it's the option that's most likely to give you a good experience out of the box

https://lubuntu.me/

Oh, and if you want a list of all the many hundreds of different types of Linux, there’s a website called Distrowatch which compares them all. You might enjoy such a thing, but be warned that if you pick one with no users, or one that is legendarily difficult to use like Arch or Gentoo, you’ll be doomed before you even get started.

>>29175

>If you need help choosing which one to go with, ask yourself how much you use your desktop (anything that uses Gnome for its desktop won’t let you have desktop icons - I agree that this is idiotic but there you go) and whether you want to type “dnf install” or “apt-get” to install new software.

Definitely the former over the latter.

You remember back in the 00s when you'd customise your windows desktop with some minmalist flat pastel theme and then use Rocketdock and Rainmeter for everything instead of the start menu/explorer? In my head I am picturing something like that to make the laptop end up like a sort of knock-off personalised Chromebook, only not shit.

>>29178
In that case, make sure your Linux version comes with the KDE desktop environment rather than Gnome. There are other desktop environments as well, but those are the big two.

>>29176
>>29179

Cheers lads. Chads.

This is now Linux general thread, I suppose. Programming socks are to the left, strictly one pair each. We're not made of money.

I'll be monitoring this thread until October when I'll flake out and install Windows 11 like the worm I am anyway.

>>29182

Windows 11 is a bit underwhelming if you are coming from Windows 10. It's not radically different, mainly the windows and menus are rounded and everything is sort of a light grey with a tiny hint of baby blue. And the settings are even more reminiscient of modern smartphone settings menus.

The desktop, taskbar and start menu have some annoying quirks that actually make them much more frustrating and less useable than Windows 10. Everything feels a bit more dumbed down and rigid and almost child safe, a bit like Mac OS. One way to regain some Windows 10 functionality is to install StartAllBack. There are rumours and suspicions that it's Russian spyware, as most of the servers it contacts for updates and other things have Russian IP addresses. But if you can live with that residual risk, it's definitely a good addon.

>>29184
> a bit like Mac OS
MacOS at least has a proper unix under the hood, Win11 feels like fisher price in comparison.

>>29185

>Win11 feels like fisher price in comparison.

That was more Windows XP, which was actually called Fisher Price OS by some because of its gaudy primary colour scheme.

>>29186
Green isn't a primary colour.

>>29187

Yellow is a primary colour if you're a schoolteacher, green is a primary colour if you're a programmer, nothing is a primary colour if you're a colour scientist.

>>29187

The taskbar and start menu as well as the top bars of windows were blue. And not a subtle blue, but the kind of blue you find on children's toys. And compared to Apple's very sleek and sophisticated Aqua design language at the time, it really did look like something Fisher Price would have come up with.

Which is why addons like Style XP were so popular, because they allowed you to completely alter the appearance of XP, far beyond any of the customisation options that it came with out of the box.

>>29189

Custom Windows XP themes were the shit. I think people were still doing this well into the Windows 7 era. It only ended when Windows 10 came out and had a nicely designed UI for the first time ever.

And that's kind of why I don't want to go to Win 11, it looks like a knock off operating system. Win 10 finally had it right making everything an unobtrusive minimalist flat colour on flat background. They did it by accident because that was in fashion at the time, but making things colourful and somewhat skeumorphic again is a regression.

Trouble with Windows 11 is they have made a lot of minor changes, but they are all to some of the most common things you do with your OS, and that adds up to something much more annoying than the bigger but less intrusive changes we got between XP, 7 and 10. Changing the control panel to the settings menu was annoying but you don't need to go digging for settings that often, so it was okay. One extra click every time I want to do something with a folder adds up fast.

I dunno, I might experiment with allowing my living room PC to update to 11, see how it is. I'm definitely not letting my office PC do it until I absolutely have to, because I'm still using ancient copies of ProTools and Reason and I am sure it will break them. In music I have found there's no need to stay with the "latest thing", you get better results using outdated software that you know inside and out, than faffing about figuring out how to do the same thing in a new software.

Purely from a user experience, Windows11 is okay once you get used to the changes, but before that it's horrible. There're some annoying features like regular behind the scenes updates running outside of the regular update interface and seemingly perpetual Edge monitoring that phases in and out of detectability.
Trying to disable some of these 'features' requires registry editing, and there appears to be measures to prevent other methods - for example I tried the 'change Edge folders to 'read only' or delete or something (can't remember exactly), but it caused more Edge processes to run in the background.

Thats not to mention the smaller bugs that take weeks to fix and inevitably break something else minor, but frustrating. Most recently it's been some MS service preventing shutdown - it took at least 2 weeks to patch but it doesn't appear to be fixed rather bypassed or something as you occasionally still see the interrupt screen moments before shutdown.

>>29190

>Trouble with Windows 11 is they have made a lot of minor changes, but they are all to some of the most common things you do with your OS, and that adds up to something much more annoying than the bigger but less intrusive changes we got between XP, 7 and 10.

Exactly. It's not as bad as Windows 8 where they completely abandoned the tried and true start menu in favour of the confusing and inconvenient tiles, until public outrage forced them to return to a start menu after all. But Windows 11 just feels dumbed down and restrictive in many subtle ways. I was also not a fan of the start menu suddenly being centered on the screen. That was unnecessary and just aping Mac OS and Chromebooks without really adding functionality. I also didn't like the way that you couldn't really ungroup different windows of the same application. And many more little things like that. Much of it just feels like Microsoft desperately trying to catch up to the competition, but not really succeeding.

>>29191

Speaking of registry editing, probably my biggest gripe with Win 11 is how deeply integrated Microsoft Edge is into the operating system. I want to be able to choose my own browser, and not be pushed into using Edge at every turn, without the ability to uninstall it, as that option is then greyed out in the apps settings.

There are tutorials on how to completely remove Edge from your system, it involves a bit of fiddling with PowerShell commands and manually deleting registry keys, but it usually works, and even keeps Edge from reinstalling itself, which it has a habit of doing if you try to get rid of it in other ways.

>>29182

I'm convinced support EOL is the computer equivalent of the Big Fridge sell by date conspiracy. Your computer isn't going to explode, and viruses have been irrelevant ever since Windows itself and every major app you install became spyware in its own right. Unless MS is planning a remote killswitch that forces you to upgrade, I don't think I will bother.

I mean it's been close to ten years and I only just realised I can set explorer to open to This PC instead of Favourites a week or two ago. How long have I been faintly irritated by that but just lived with it?

>>29194

Remember when half the NHS got shut down due to a ransomware attack? Security updates matter.

>>29184
why use this closed source possible russian spyware when openshell exists

>>29194

>I'm convinced support EOL is the computer equivalent of the Big Fridge sell by date conspiracy.

I unwittingly bought a PC for my mum in 2021 whose CPU is not supported for a Windows 11 upgrade. It's got an Intel Core i5 CPU which Intel's website says first came out in early 2017. Bit harsh that Microsoft were excluding CPUs that were just over five years old at the time that Windows 11 was released, but they did. But I'm going to keep that computer, because it's really seen very little use since my mum died almost two years ago, and it'd be a shame to throw it out just because it won't run Windows 11. Maybe at some point I'll put in a new motherboard with a newer CPU. I've read that it's not just the CPU that matters, but hardware components on the motherboard as well. But other than that, I'll just keep using it with Windows 10 for the time being. It does everything I need, and whatever's on it, Russian hackers are welcome to it.

I went for Mint in the end, because it looks nice. So far, so computery. It helps that they have consciously made this one as much of a We Have Windows At Home as possible, I suppose. I do like a lot of the customisation, but it will take some getting used to the file system when I am so conditioned to the windows explorer c: > users > etc etc paradigm.

Going to try the Lubuntu one on my other old machine, which is currently nothing more than a very noisy YouTube player for my bedroom telly, because I got bored of having to watch ads on my firestick. Hopefully if it's less resource intensive, it won't fire up the fan as loudly when I'm trying to listen to 12 Hours Medieval Peasant Black Death Spanish Inquisition Bedtime ASMR.

>>29198

If you've got a spare computer and an inkling to tinker, you could try Pi-hole. It's a network-wide ad blocker, so it'll block ads on your Fire Stick and in-app ads on your phone.

https://pi-hole.net/

To continue the Win11/Edge convo in an inapropriate thread, this is a clipping from Ccleaner after using a seperate browser. The most interesting things are that Edge files only see, tp appear after I've been browsing porn, and that the particular file is usually registered as '-1 files'.
And yeah I know Ccleaner was bought out years ago by a questionable company. I'm only larping as a security concious user.

I've tried using Brave before but it behaved unusually and the impression I got was that unless you actually know what you're doing, even following a settings guide you're probablly far more vulnerable than using regular spywared software and systems.
By the same thought I've avoided open source systems because I simply don't know what I'm doing - my unfamiliarity with them would surely allow everything through that shouldn't be, given that I can't recognise threats and rely on security measures as I might on Windows.

It's all about the target you present, init? Windows must act as a basic security blanket while you've got to be experienced enough to patch a better one together.