So i was surprised today when my fiancee told me she was thinking about switching over to linux. Surprised because she is absolutely not technically minded, but also because she was weary about having Microsoft AI slop forced on her PC every update. ( i'm so proud!)

Now i've used a little linux but i've always been a holdout. Won't stop me from moving someone else over but i have too much going on in my setup to deal with that right now. So i'm not super versed but i was able to give her the basic rundown of what distros are, concerns when switching, what may and may not be available, shes still on board so we're doing this! Knowing her she would like to not have to transition too much, whats something fairly hands off and easy to learn. I've heard some good things about mint from hanging around you nerds the past few years but also some not so good things, any suggestions?

next concern is what kind of transfer process is this going to be? i have some spare HDD's so we can try and get everything ported over but i'm so busy with school right now i can't quite allocate the time to really deep dive this.

Any help is appreciated, cheers!

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[–] 53 points 1 year ago (22 children)

If she's a Windows refugee, Linux Mint.

If she's a Mac refugee, fuck if I know.

If she's a IBM OS/2 refugee, please let me know how to get the drugs she's gotten. I want in.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    popos for mac refugee? it's very macky

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  • You know, I can see that.

    Still, mac users use macs because they just want the computer to work.

    And the Cosmic DE is rather new so can be a bit buggy from time to time. It might look mac-friendly, but its stability is still largely untested so caution may be advised before recommending it in my opinion.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Windows refugee: Linux Mint or Fedora KDE

    Mac refugee: Linux Mint or Fedora KDE

    PC gamer: Bazzite (or Linux Mint or Fedora KDE)

    edit: fuck markdown, why do line breaks only work in pairs on lemmy, this is not a thing with markdown on discord so why here? it's annoying

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Discord does markdown differently than intended: it's better for non-techies because hitting enter once is more intuitive than the alternative, but the standard way to insert line breaks in markdown is to type two spaces at the end of the line you want to break.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Like this
    I see

    but why is a singular enter character treated just like a space

    look at the raw text of the comment, the above sentence's "spaces" are line breaks
    is there a use for this functionality?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Spaces behave like this because markdown was designed to be like HTML but quicker to write and easier to read without formatting;
    most web services that use markdown translate it to HTML rather than parsing it directly, and in HTML whitespaces are supposed to work like you demonstrated in your comment.

    The reason for this behavior in HTML is "because someone in the 90s said so", I'm afraid.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    If she's a Mac refugee, fuck if I know.

    She could consider Linux Mint with KDE Plasma. KDE Plasma feels very like modern Mac, only nicer, to me.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    KDE is not a Mint supported DE and the KDE files are not in the Mint repos.

    This can be made to work if you're experienced but is definitely not a good idea for beginners. It will eventually break, and dependency hell is a thing.

    For a KDE option suitable fir beginners, Fedora offers KDE as does Ubuntu, or there's KDE Neon

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  • [+] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)
  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    Ubuntu is heresy. Canonical hath turned against the users.

    Also, I'm genuinely curious: why do you hate GNOME?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Nah, Ubuntu is perfect for a Mac user - they love the abusive, arbitrary decisions made by their OS designers lol

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  • [+] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I hate GNOME because it feels like an iPhone.

    That's fair.

    I don’t know much about what Ubuntu is doing but it surely can’t be that bad.

    You would be surprised.

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  • [+] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That sounds like a very specific user case, I'm using a laptop for teaching with a smallish screen so gnome actually improves my workflow and the visibility of the OS. I don't need theming either. Gnome is really aimed at productivity imo.

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