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Screw it, I’m installing Linux (www.theverge.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 10 points 11 months ago (23 children)

What's the easiest and most secure linux distro for a non-techie? This is for a spare thinkpad I want to try linux on.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

    Mint. Cinnamon is great. MATE if you have a less powerful computer. XFCE for potatoes.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    It's thinkpad T420. Is it powerful enough for Cinnamon?

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Note that I'm not that knowledgable. That's an decent laptop from 2011. You could run cinnamon, but I think you want MATE or even XFCE. You can install cinnamon and if you want more performance then switch to MATE. Cinnamon to MATE is a big improvement, MATE to XFCE a little more. Switching again may sound insane but most of the work is in backing everything up and then setting up programs, so you can try cinnamon for a week or two (without perfecting everything) and see if you want a lighter OS. Don't worry it's really easy the second time once you know how to do it (and mint has all the verification stuff built in).

    (PS The other guys celeron is actually better.)

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I'm running Fedora Cinnamon with Celeron N95, 8 gigs of shared memory, and Intel HD graphics with a little mini desktop. Runs fine. You have a better processor and if you have 8gigs of memory, you should be more than fine for office needs, web browsing, and light gaming to get your feet wet. Heavy coding or gaming might be a bit of a stretch with your ThinkPad though. I find heavier CAD sessions can be a heavy chore if the renderings get hard, like modeling threads or even moderate assemblies.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Mint. It’s a great, simple, well supported first distro. And last distro, TBH. I know plenty of people like to distro hop as a hobby, but if you just want to use your machine pick a well supported basic distro and stick with it. Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora are all good options, but Mint is really aimed at newcomers.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    3 weeks with Mint after 25 years of windows. It's good and it has solid support. Most things worked right away, some refused, like gaming peripherals and some games. Wine and Proton work most of the time. It has a learning curve bit it's manageable.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    I've installed mint, pop os and Ubuntu. TBH if it's a spare, just download one and give it a go.

    I really just play games and use a browser, so it's been easy peasy for me. Look into making a partition for /home if you feel like you'll swap around it makes it pretty easy. Then you can try a few out without too much of an issue.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

    Ubuntu

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Good mix of usability and learning curve. You will need terminal, but that's never been easier with AI assistants to learn how. Plenty of support for applications or open source workarounds. It also is familiar enough to use rather quickly, but not so much that it feel like a Windows clone. Highly recommend starting with Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    Fedora (with KDE Plasma) or OpenSUSE tumbleweed (with KDE Plasma)

    Mint is good but its kernel is usually slightly out of date and it still has upstream Ubuntu issues.

    Other Ubuntu downstreams are subpar imo.

    Plus Fedora & OpenSUSE ships with SELinux if you want MAC security support.

    The only downside for Fedora is you have to enable 3rd party software after install and run a couple of commands to swap to full ffmpeg and Nvidia drivers if you have Nvidia hardware. I think OpenSUSE might ship with these enabled but I forgot.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Wait, I've been on fedora for a few years now and never noticed any ffmpeg problems, am I missing something? Maybe I ran the command at install and forgot, but I don't remember that being one of the things I did on set-up.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Multimedia

    Check if you have ffmpeg-free or ffmpeg (from RPMFusion)

    Honestly forgot which codecs+encode/decode aren't included in Fedora's free build, but I think they don't include some parts of H264, H265, and other proprietary codecs.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago*

    Lots of good suggestions there.

    I'll also add AntiX. (I, non-techie, started with SuSe (over 2 decades ago.))

    Or if you're a bit wacky like my uncle, Puppy (~ boy I really did not expect him to pick puppy as his distro, when I showed him several, but he's been on it over a decade now, utterly loves it.)

    You may not initially be techie, but I have heard some users started with arch (or artix or other non-systemd forks of arch), gentoo, GuixSD, or NixOS, and learn, just by following the documentation, becoming more techie. I think some even went as far as starting with LFS. O_O It may seem daunting at first, but it's not actually hard, is easy, just takes some time and attention. And, makes things easier in the long run.

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