So that very important day is almost upon us.
October 14th is the day set for when Windows 10 stops security updates (no consumer is going to pay for extended) and begins to really push people to Windows 11. Windows 11 has strict hardware requirements that a lot of “older” devices that most people have do not meet.
And so, I am sure many individuals and companies may be getting rid of their old laptops and even desktops to recoup the vost of new devices.
What is the plan, when should we move in? What kind of deals should we be looking out for?
I want to find a great deal on a great laptop just for the fun of it. Some of my friends (converted to Linux) are waiting to get new laptops and score a deal. I have been waiting years for this day and I hope it can feel like a special day.
Any good places to look for these kinds of deals?
the “just works” category MUST be linux mint. it’s the distro that works the most OOTB.
Before you ask, i have tried about 12 distros and i can confidently say that Mint just works OOTB.
But, i don’t give a fuck to stability; i want the blreediest of edges. So i use arch and the AUR often.
No.
Mint works ootb but that is just one criterium. People can help you with setup. What about
why should an underdog nieche distro with ¼ the maintainers of KDE or GNOME (rough approximation, may be way worse) be better for beginners than the actual standard?
You just had a very bad experience because you are already very tech savvy.
why would you recommend an experimental DE to a newbie? it breaks in 2 weeks and all you hear is “linux from shit”. not even directly, but through a friend of a friend, because they won’t ask for your help again.
when I was looking at the viability of installing mint for common people, one of my criteria was to have kde plasma, because it’s user friendly and evolves relatively quickly, in a good way. a common theme I was reading that yeah it is possible to install it manually, but it’s less stable. I think I cannot afford the burden of taking upon the yech support for people and fixing an unsupported DE when it breaks, because it is complex software, with many moving parts that if the distro does not focus on always packaging correctly, if they don’t test it but only rely on users to report issues, then that won’t work reliably. If I want kde, I need a distro that takes it seriously and allows it as a default DE.
No not true, dont pretend you know me lol XD
Mint was my first distro, fine but random crashes.
Then I dealt with it on some occasions, as everyone installs it. Nobody needs to advertize that small extremely overhyped distro, as everyone always uses it!
Timeshift has nothing to do with hard upgrades. It might not break, but it will not upgrade as it has complex issues with package conflicts and whatever that need to be figured out.
Try Fedora Atomic desktops please. This discussion is senseless. They are very easy to use and extremely stable.
What? PPAs are unofficial repos meant for developers to test their software. They shouldnt be added to your system and will introduce breakages that will then give you a pain when upgrading.
And this is not about “bleeding edge” but security fixes.
What? Linux mint is based on Ubuntu because that is supposed to be the great distro. If tutorials for Ubuntu suddenly dont work, that is bad.
LMDE was reported to work way less well than regular Mint. But for sure that is a good path onwards.
First you tell me that I am tech savvy and thus have issues with mint. Then you assume everyone should evaluate if updates are needed or not? People are not distro maintainers. Distros apply updates, and users should not need to press buttons and wait all the time.
On Atomic desktops you reboot to apply an update and you are not forced to reboot. Updates are done in the background with no user interaction, as it is pointless. If you rely on users manually pressing a button, then your automatic updates are bad.
Updates should not be done
If you detect that and include it in the system (like uBlue does for theirs!) users dont need to press buttons. There is no decision, you update or you are behind on security fixes.
Introducing decisions for things that are not in question is bad UX and leads to people randomly ignoring upgrades. Updates should not annoy you or break the system, or the system itself is not well made.
Man, please just try them, you dont know what I am talking about.
You dont know how Flatpak verification works or dont care to understand it.
All Ubuntu/Mint packages are “unofficial” as they are packaged by maintainers and not the devs themselves.
Only exception are external repos for things like Firefox.
Normal flathub is the same, while flatpaks are more up to date and containerized. It is a silly and harmful decision to prefer unverified .deb packages over unverified flatpaks.
Deb packages have access over EVERYTHING. Literally and deb package could be a virus, as they dont have any isolation apart from some weak Apparmor profiles.
LOL you call XFCE and Mate modern desktops ? XDDDD
also, we are talking about beginner friendly distros. Installing Plasma on Mint will result in an ugly frankenstein, that might also suffer from being “stable” with unfixed bugs.
Yes. GNOME and KDE, as well as many window managers, support Wayland perfectly since years. On Mint with Wayland last time I tried it, even keyboard input and scaling were broken.
A small downstream distro using a nieche nonstandard desktop environment is not the beginner friendly distro people should use. The best experience will come with GNOME or KDE as they get the most work done.
And additionally, as I clearly separated, a package based distro is not suited or needed for most workflows.
Try an image based Distro first, then argue about them.
mint is supposed to undo shit decisions of ubuntu
I don’t get it either, LMDE is treated as a testing project by mint
distros should let the user be able to defer updates, but make them effortless to install. people complain about forced windows updates all the time and for good reasons.
did you see how kde plasma 6 does it nowadays? its on the shutdown button. that is the way.
Yes for sure. I just meant software compatibility, but I assume I made that up from the back of my head. I only had one Docker issue, thats it.
No idea what is so hard about it, things like these just show how small this project is! It is literally an Ubuntu LTS downstream, nothing crazy. But 2/3 beginners use it, which is kinda insane.
Agreed. Though as said, a good software management concept with atomic updates and rollbacks, as well as tested software (and a damn longterm kernel, Fedora) doesnt need people wondering if they should update.
Unless you are a power-poweruser, not updating is a baseless gut decision. With a good system you dont need to do that.
Because Windows updates take long and cause downtime. Also forcing reboots is not great (though I dont know if they just do that if there was a real vulnerability, that would be fine)
Windows updates are pretty damn fine. Overengineered, maybe? But the system is not immutable, so they do checksums everywhere, to validate the OS.
OSTree or NixOS do it better, but have way bigger downsides. Maybe not compared to Windows, they should just fix their stuff.
But I guess Windows updates are more stable than typical Linux updates, more tests etc.
That is fine, but only makes sense with package-based distros that have some kind of parallel miniature system running the updates.
Basically what Windows does, and Fedora now too.
Atomic updates are WAY better. No downtime and still more stable than running a very small live OS replacing itself. Maybe the live OS is in RAM, idk.
and also the fear that whatever will break. I often hear that people are afraid of temporarily broken drivers, but also windows updates often reset (unknown!) settings, things like audio device IDs that matter for pro audio software and systemwide audio effects (think device specific EQ and filters).
but on linux the system updates your software too, which is then again, if you are doing something professionally on the system, you are almost guaranteed from time to time to come across bugs that are in the way
It’s weird because it’s true even though the filesystem and updates are much better organised on Linux. I mean the weird part being that windows is that stable even with the chaos it does in its system files.
Which is an effect of trying to manage a chaotic system. NixOS solves this by having strict checks but giving users the ability to configure their system.
The system is very mutable but centrally controlled.
Windows has an idea how it wants to look like, but at the same time grants software all sorts of crazy permissions. Adobe software doesnt run when “storage protection mode against ransomware” is enabled for example.
The Windows store apps are better isolated, with permissions etc. But same as on Linux with Flatpak, Software vendors dont want to change their software to be less invasive.
I mean Windows pretty much thrives off the fact that you rely on random 3rd party software like drivers to be able to be installable externally and run with very high privileges. So they dont need to do the work.
Microsoft is 1000 times the size if RedHat, Canonical or SUSE, if not more. They just throw lots of money at it.
Also it is mission critical, so you can kinda expect vendors to test their software better, a bit.
Not always (crowdstrike lol)
i ALREADY tried image-based distros. Several of them. In both VMs and bare-metal.
And also, are you too lazy to update your system occasionally, which is a simple command or a few clicks? Because how is needing to click a few buttons every few weeks/months “bad UX”?
Besides, whatever atomic distro you mention has a small repo; you can’t find shit. (Unless you’re talking about NixOS, which i doubt since you need to reboot to update.)
if you REALLY want an atomic distro that you can rollback, and having packages that are secure, use NixOS.
It’s not the point whether they do. the average people wouldn’t. that’s why it needs to be automatic, or why the easiest way should also do that.
No, as said. This is about recommending distros for people switching from Windows. Not my personal hobby machine.
That is too rare. You should update at least weekly.
And yes it is silly
Why? Updates dont need a GUI and can go fine in the background. An update notification to reboot once done works too.
And NixOS as well as Ostree or bootc based distros offer you multiple boot targets, so if something breaks you can go back.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll are my go-to if I want something more messy (if I want to do changes to the system without caring about packaging), as they have snapshots by default.
No idea what you mean. If you search for “universal blue”, “bluefin”, “aurora”, “fedora kinoite” or “HeliumOS” you will absolutely find it.
Nixos supports fully atomic updates which should be used. The live updates always break stuff.
I am on NixOS, but for beginners I would recommend uBlue or CentOS-Stream based atomic desktops. Fedoras biggest issue is that they have no longterm kernel
typically the default is autoupdate to be activated…
Where? How?
Fair question.
It is something I turn off so I don’t remember for sure. Typically it comes up during the installation process. If your distro is using “Software Updater” it should be an option in it’s settings called “automatically check for updates”. This is on Ubuntu 25.04. Although it has been updated a few times from the version it was originally.
But whatever program is being used for updates should have options that will probably get you there.
why do you care about stability so much?
Because… people need systems that work??
Not everyone can fix a broken system every month
Bro, when is the last time you have booted a recent build of Mint Cinnamon or other ‘flavors’ of Mint? I feel like you tried it like 10+ years ago and have just complained about it since.
Half a year ago or so
Ah, did you use a specific ‘flavor’? Or the default, Cinnamon. What kind of machine was it installed on?
Default Linux Mint, ubuntu based.
Installed on an old laptop, 2 old macbooks, one crazy powerful PC of my uncle.
This is a cinnamon issue. Maybe their wayland session is better now, I can hope so. Still, due to the modular nature of Wayland, either they make their own stack or use something else.
Would be nice to join XFCE, Budgie etc, but they prefer their own thing.
Cinnamon and Mint are fine projects for what they are. Small, pretty outdated community projects. But it is incredible how the ratio of users/developers explodes on Mint compared to anything else.
Probably because it is targeted at non-developers.
Ah, ok that is all reasonable. Yeah, I started using mate or debian version I never had problems since. Something odd about Cinnamon.
To be fair I had Linux Mint installed recently and audio broke on the first update. Never could fix it. I had to reinstall. I’m a total noob on Linux but my experience doesn’t seem that unusual based on the huge number of troubleshooting steps I tried from users experiencing similar issues.
Was this a super new lastest gen computer or? Wait did the reinstall the fix issue? That’s a bit weird. Did you verify iso hash after download? Im perplexed it worked after a reinstalled.
It was on an ASUS Z790 motherboard and if you do a search you will see a fair few examples of people experiencing similar issues. Although there are dozens of different troubleshooting steps that people have tried to resolve it. I’m currently using Bazzite which I’m having a lot more success with, although I only ran Mint for a very short amount of time and I find it hard to believe that I did anything to break it.
I’m starting to hit some points where the limitations of Bazzite are causing me some issues, such as wanting to install hdr10plus_tools, but I’m persevering and might move to another distro as I get more comfortable.
I’m primarily a gamer and have recently started to use my PC as a Jellyfin server when I’m not gaming. So I’m learning slowly. It’s now been 4 weeks since I’ve used Windows which hasn’t happened in the last 33 years since I first used 3.11.
I feel like the switch has been made and I’m going stick with it in one form ity another.
Right-o. Sounds like you figured things out and are slowly progressing. Good on you! Wifey is only one holding me back.
On a side tangent, my next pc buils, if I can ever afford it again, wont be anything asus. Theyve gone to shit and done with their products.