What Linux distro should I use as a beginner?
- Thread starter vernonmiddleton
- Start date
I use Puppy Linux exclusively, as most of you know. I fell in love with it a decade ago, and can't get enough of it.
I also wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially not beginners. Why?
Because it's designed for "hobbyists". For those that enjoy tearing their OS to bits, then re-building it to work exactly the way they want it to. Newbies just want something easy to use OOTB, with tons of available help & support. (That's cool).
The Puppy community can give you that, too.....but you may not always like what you hear!
Seriously, though, modern Puppy is a-changing. She now supports Wayland, PulseAudio & Pipewire.......thought the desktop still looks like - to quote one disgruntled newbie from a couple of years ago - a "mangled, over-recycled copy of Windows 98". But we like to let the user come up with their own vision of what they want.....and then we'll give 'em whatever help they need to achieve it.
Who says Linux ain't for the end-user?
Mike.
I also wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially not beginners. Why?
Because it's designed for "hobbyists". For those that enjoy tearing their OS to bits, then re-building it to work exactly the way they want it to. Newbies just want something easy to use OOTB, with tons of available help & support. (That's cool).
The Puppy community can give you that, too.....but you may not always like what you hear!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seriously, though, modern Puppy is a-changing. She now supports Wayland, PulseAudio & Pipewire.......thought the desktop still looks like - to quote one disgruntled newbie from a couple of years ago - a "mangled, over-recycled copy of Windows 98". But we like to let the user come up with their own vision of what they want.....and then we'll give 'em whatever help they need to achieve it.
Who says Linux ain't for the end-user?
Mike.
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I usually always recommend Linux Mint for people new to Linux, for the main reason that they have a very friendly forum (friendly like this one). Some distro's forums will lop your head off if you ask a noob question. As for the DE, when I made the switch I found Mate to be the easiest (I tried that, and Cinnamon and Xfce).
EDIT
Just noticed this thread is 8 days old. I wonder if the OP came back to look at it?
EDIT
Just noticed this thread is 8 days old. I wonder if the OP came back to look at it?
I think an ideal beginner (and for that matter advanced) user distro would entail not having to mess with sound settings to get sound to work, to mess with wifi to get wifi to show up. I had to do both of the above with Ubuntu. Unacceptable.
I don't know what to recommend but know what not to.
I have seen too many bugs in Xubuntu to recommend that branch to a beginner. I overcame the issues but who a beginner user many just give up. All you have to is restart this service, run that command, install this package, Yeah right. This stuff should be plug-and-play.
some of the distros seem to be designed by people who have no idea about user interface.
I think surprisingly a Redhat clone installs nicely. Aside from the a bit weird Gnome environment. Everything was plug and play out of the box. Less work than with *buntu.
Not sure if a RH branch is best for a user however outside of a data center. But it works. Fedora, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Rocky.
I don't know what to recommend but know what not to.
I have seen too many bugs in Xubuntu to recommend that branch to a beginner. I overcame the issues but who a beginner user many just give up. All you have to is restart this service, run that command, install this package, Yeah right. This stuff should be plug-and-play.
some of the distros seem to be designed by people who have no idea about user interface.
I think surprisingly a Redhat clone installs nicely. Aside from the a bit weird Gnome environment. Everything was plug and play out of the box. Less work than with *buntu.
Not sure if a RH branch is best for a user however outside of a data center. But it works. Fedora, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Rocky.
