I have an old laptop that I use as a Minecraft server as well as running RPG campaigns during game night. I’m getting tired of Windows 10 and I’m looking for a good replacement. I don’t have a lot of experience with Linux lately, the last time I did anything with it was maybe 10 years or so ago and I used Ubuntu, which I’ve read here is maybe not a good choice any longer. Stats of laptop are below. Recommendations are appreciated, thanks.
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.70 GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable) Graphics Card NVIDIA Quadro K2100M (2 GB), Intel® HD Graphics 4600 (113 MB)
Fedora (Gnome or KDE version) is what I recommend to people looking for the stock experience and a large community. I generally point people away from anything Ubuntu because of the Snap fiasco.
I’m a Fedora user but I prefer to point new people to Ubuntu over fedora. The snap v flatpak debate is irrelevant to new users compared to fedora not shipping proprietary gpu drivers out of the box which causes so many problems for nvidia users. Kernel updates often end up braking their gpu driver.
It’s relevant for a few reasons with regard to new users:
Switching somebody with 256GB of storage to Ubuntu and pointing them to the Gonna software store to install whatever they want is just asking for confusion and problems.
What happened to all my disk space?
Why does it take 8 seconds for a browser to start?
These are new users who expect things to operate as they’ve known them to operate coming from Windows or MacOS. Ubuntu is just problematic to that point of view.
I’ve switched hundreds of desktop users in the past few years, and the above expectations and experience is what made me switch to Fedora.
Ubuntu is problematic at current.
No one switching from win10 is going to notice the package being a few MBs larger. For opening speed I think taking a few more seconds to open is a tiny price to pay compared with the extra setup work that is required on Fedora. Look if Fedora shipped with the proprietary repo’s enabled and Nvidia driver preconfigured id recommend it to new usres but until then its just to much for new users to enable proprietary repos and setup their nvidia drivers.
You’re not getting it…
A 125MB package like Firefox has up to 5 versions by default kept under the Snap system. Do this 10x across different packages, and suddenly you’re missing a lot of storage you can’t account for.
Second, SNAP IS JUST SLOW. People don’t like when it takes 5-10 seconds to launch a very simple app. Let’s not even get into the performance being absolutely horrendous when you need direct access to memory or GPU. It’s not what people want.
Last, your problem with Nvidia drivers lies with Nvidia themselves. I run a cluster of a thousand instances which never hiccup on the Nvidia server+CUDA drivers.
Desktop is a shit show, and that’s their fault. Don’t blame your misunderstanding of these two things to be the fault of the distro.
Oh no 1gb of space is being used windows users totally care about that as they go from an OS that out of the box takes 100gb to one that takes 30gb. Thats pretending what you said is true because Snap doesnt store 5 versions by default it stores two. Secondly the common runtimes are shared between applications and versions so the amount of extra space when storing multiple versions is minor also distro packaging also stores multiple versions by default 3 if I recall correctly for dnf.
I think the fact that you think a win10 user cares more about an app taking a few seconds longer to open on first load than their GPU driver being unstable(from a new user perspective) is everything. Yes! the driver is nvidia’s fault but its also fedora intentionally choosing to not ship it out of the box. Many other distro’s do this so nvidia users dont have to go through the hassle of foss drivers and them breaking every kernel update.
Also I dont blame fedora for this, fedora doesnt target new users and as a fedora user I like that they aim to ship a fully foss system and I think they make it easy to include properitary packages if thats something you want. However its pointless to point someone to a distro where you have to then give them a bunch of extra steps to enable basic functionality when there are plenty of distros that work out of the box.
For a new user one of the ublue spins is a good choice. They get the base fedora experience with nvidia gpu’s sorted out of the box and flatpak.
You apparently don’t deal with actual end-users, so let me inform you…they absolutely fucking care.
You seem to keep skipping the part where SNAP IS 10X SLOWER.
Get lost with your lazy argument.
I’m installing snap on fedora to spite you.
👍 have fun with that
Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about
aptalready. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.
On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.
If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don’t want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.
Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I’ve used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.
+1 for fedora kde
I’ve tried dozens of distros this year. Kept arch for my personal use and fedora for shared. Fedora was the easiest to setup with everything working as they should out of the “box”.
unless you use a touchscreen, don’t install gnome
@ImminentOrbit@lemmy.world
Gnome is different and at first I was lost, but after figuring out the basics is amazingly well integrated and just works as expected. KDE is super configurable but always feels a little off in a hard to describe way, like little quirks or lags or other papercuts.
Yeah, gnome is built for touchscreen and mouse. People prefer different things and I love gnome for it’s minimalistic style and modular customisability via extensions. KDE is also great, but I tipped my favour towards gnome for something different.
Gnome has touchscreen in mind, but you can totally use its hotkey system and navigate much quicker than point and click functions in Windows. Its a simple DE that gets out of your way to focus on your task, whenever I go back to Windows for work I’m frustrated by all the nonsense