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.

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.

Tbf, my current laptop looks pretty similar, and I'm running Bazzite with KDE.

Lol Linux is awesome

if you're doing kde then i think debian would make more sense (their netinstaller is very good)

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

Ooh that's a good point. I mean, not Linux Mint because as thanksforallthefish said below it's not a Mint-supported DE but I actually installed Arch (btw) with the KDE Plasma DE onto an old laptop I have and yeah it definitely gives early-2010s OS X vibes. :)

Not really possible, because how a desktop feels or what can be configured it's hard to show on a website. Especially how you can visually adapt it. And what you can configure in general. Running it from a live USB takes like 5 minutes.

For example KDE is also very close to Windows, but can also be configured to behave more like a Mac. Visually most desktop environment can be themed. Cinnamon just got additions to be able to theme gnome apps globally I think? If you want to use a central dock like a Mac and have running apps at the top, that's just a master of setting that up on KDE.

Cinnamon is a great choice. It's the default on Linux Mint for good reason.

For distros, not desktop environments. You can choose DEs for distros though. But there it is: https://distrosea.com/

Yeah, I switched to Ubuntu in 2008, and it was great for years, but lately it’s just been so awful.

Ubuntu has started going off the deep end. They've been heading in that direction for a while, but they recently (I guess like 5 years-ish ago) hit this corporatey, money-grabbing, mentality that's so completely opposite of what made Linux great.

The feel I get about it is 10 years ago, tutorials were written using Ubuntu because it was an easy distro to use and was a great platform for beginners, so people used that as their platform to teach. Now it feels like tutorials are written using Ubuntu because they're being sponsored to. A lot of how-tos I come accros have the same vibe as watching a video animation tutorial that uses adobe and oh gosh, it's also sponsored by adobe. Or a networking tutorial sponsored by Cisco. I've actually started just looking to see if another distro is acknowledged before I actually see what they have to say.

There's a very different feel if you're trying to set something up and a website has "if you're in this family of linux, here's what you do, or if you're in this one, do this" versus "so you want to set up x in linux? Here's how you do it in Ubuntu". It's as if no other distro exists.

Anyway, ignoring that rant. Linux is super stable these days, you can take pretty much any distro and you'll be fine. I tend to gravitate toward the base distros, like fedora, opensuse, and Debian over Rocky, mint, etc. I haven't come across one in the past five years that gave me any trouble, except when it came to updated nvidia drivers and wayland. In which case some distros were behind a month or two on getting those updated.

My advice would be to just give up on the dual boot (unless you still need it, and even then, maybe keep Windows on a different machine maybe?).

I think the best way to go is full Linux immersion.

While Mint is an Ubuntu-based distro, it tries to un-fuck the worst of Canonical. Other Ubuntu spins with a different desktop environment don't do this, like Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. They end up as just Ubuntu on a different DE, with all the decisions made by canonical.

Base Debian might work, but afaik, is "not as beginner friendly" compared to Mint.

Not for beginners.

Like 9limmer mentioned, Bazzite would be a good gaming focused choice for a beginner. There are alternatives like CatchyOS, but those are geared towards more experienced users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite_(operating_system)

slow clap

They should change their name to Antitethical then.

Thx for the tip. I just got a 5x FPS boost in a very poorly optimized sim game "war at sea" thing was chugging along at 5-6 fps when lots of ships were on the screen. Was maxing out all 32 threads on my 5950x. Now it's running a cool 20% utilization.

Thx for the tip, will give it a try.

I got it from the protonup app that is pre installed.

Its both

It uses an atomic update system on an immutable base. They don't refer to the same thing, but you sort of need the one when you use the other for it to make sense.

Those are different?

Isn't Zorin very out of date?