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Joined 13 days ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2025

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  • There are a lot of different reasons that people hate Ubuntu. Most of them Not great reasons.

    Ubuntu became popular by making desktop Linux approachable to normal people. Some of the abnormal people already using Linux hated this.

    In November 2010, Ubuntu switched from GNOME as their default desktop to Unity. This made many users furious.

    Then in 2017, Ubuntu switched from Unity to Gnome. This made many users furious.

    There’s also a graveyard of products and services that infuriated users when canonical started them, then infuriated users when they discontinued them.

    And the Amazon “scandal”.

    And then there’s the telemetry stuff.

    Meanwhile. Arch has always been the bad boy that dares you to love him… unapproachable and edgy.




  • I daily drive Fedora and I think it has the best Gnome desktop.

    But in terms of “best at what they do” I’m blown away by Mint as an apporoachable easy to use “just works” OS. It instantly became my recommendation to new linux converts. Everything is easy to set up. It’s remarkably user friendlly. Good software store, flatpack support out of the box. Brilliant hardware support. I like the aesthetics as well.

    I have an old Core 2 machine and I tried to get every potato grade distro running on it. I tried Puppy, and Linux Lite, and AntiX and all the “this will run on your toaster” type distros and had problems with every one of them. Mint XFCE installed no problem. It ran beautifully. I pressed my luck and installed a Quadro K620 and an old firewire card (trying to back up old Mini-DV videos). It handled ancient hardware perfectly. Butter smooth 1440p desktop computing and light video editing on an 18 year old machine.


  • You don’t need a high level of technical skill. You can learn everything you need to get started in a few minutes of tutorials or walk throughs. The rest you learn as you go.

    Bear in mind no every linux user has memorized every terminal command and the whole file structure. Lots of people are just casual users who learn what they need.

    One of the things I wish someone had told me at the start of using linux is that initially your desktop environment will effect how you feel about linux more than the distribution or specific architecture of the OS.

    The good news is they’re all free. Try a few things and see what you like. IMO Fedora is a great, beginner friendly Gnome or KDE experience. Mint has an excellent Cinnamon and XFCE desktop either of which will feel somewhat familiar to a windows user. Mint will also run on just about anything.

    Also, it’s not binary. You can dual boot. If there’s something you need windows for you can use it. Over time you’ll eventually find that you don’t really need windows anymore.