Linux admin with 20 years experience, looking for "beginner" distro [Solved, the real beginner distro was the Debian I've used along the way]

I’m over tinkering with my OS. So I’m looking for a distro that “just works” out of the box for my laptop. Also I want to test an “easy” distro I can install for my grandpa.
I don’t care for immutability, declarative config, being fully FOSS or having the newest stuff. I don’t want snaps, or a software center that relies on them. So no Ubuntu.

What I do want (ideally out of the box):
Important:

  • as few annoying visible bugs and crashes as possible (looking at you, Ubuntu)
  • Wayland support
  • good package selection, so no independent fringe distro
  • fluid YouTube videos, streaming, pre-installed codecs

Less important:

  • ideally with Gnome
  • encrypting the hard drive from within the GUI installer
  • nice font rendering (used to be a problem, but I guess not anymore)
  • installing Steam with a button press
  • pre-installed sane-airprint and sane-airscan (automatic setup of my networked printer-scanner-combo)

You get the idea. The usual stuff (low-end gaming, browsing, streaming, printing, scanning) should just work. I don’t have any hardware that poses a problem.
From what I’ve read, Mint doesn’t yet support Wayland and doesn’t ship with video codecs anymore. (Or am I wrong?)
What are the other options? Is Zorin king of the block now? Is Manjaro good now?

Thanks for any and all input.

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

You are literally just describing fedora. So yeah, give that a try.

urska,

Dont go for Mint, Zorin or Manjaro. Old stuff. Keep it to Fedora, Opensuse, Ubuntu or Endeavour.

DriftinGrifter,

bro literraly said no ubuntu you canonical shill

HATEFISH,

Why would mint be considered old but not ubuntu?

urska,

Technologies implementation like Pipewire, Wayland etc.

some_guy,

And that’s how I decided to install Debian as my next Linux VM (just got back into VMs in the past week with Proxmox). We’ll see how it does replacing my former favorite, CentOS, now that IBM / Red Shat have borked things up on that end.

gerdesj,

I usually do Arch myself these days and spent many years with Gentoo. So I’m not too terrified of breakage!

I am putting together a Linux distro strategy for my company. I am the MD of a very small IT company in the SW of England. I already have my office manager asking me to liberate her from Windows! I recently had a techie asking me to help his transition! This is organic stuff and not pushed down by me. The techie is a dyed in the wool Azure lover.

I am used to being patient. It took me roughly five years to get a helicopter company that I worked for back in the day (late 1990s) to use DHCP properly - ie let them “roam free” and let DDNS pin them down. Sounds a bit ridiculous until you encounter “enterprise” grade nonsense.

I have set up laptops with most of the usual suspects and tried them out. However, I have to comply with Cyber Essentials Plus which is a UK standard. It is fine but rather Windows n that 'centric. That means I need full disc encryption and anti virus (AV) and Secure Boot. I got away with ClamAV in the past but ideally I get cross platform and that means ESET for AV/web etc. I use the usual Linux FDE.

I also need to join an Active Directory until I have got rid of AD! Oh and there is Exchange.

cid-doc.github.io - AD and Evolution with the EWS addon for Exchange.

So I dive in with Kubuntu after trying Rawhide and all sorts. Ubuntu is flexible enough whilst being stable enough for me. For example, Kerberos is screwed for the Firefox snap. I need Kerb for auth to my corp websites such as our wiki. Mozilla does a PPA - I dump the built in FF snap and use the Mozilla blessed PPA. All documented and all controllable in an enterprise sense.

Closed In Directory (CID) is a configuration for Linux boxes joining into the MS world. Its a super piece of work, getting Samba, krb etc all working together well, and with a GUI. You can run scripts from your DC for that GPO feel with it.

My needs are a bit more corp than your gaming shenanigans but my notes might help you decide what you want, what you really (really) want (zigazig … ahhhh!)

Ubuntu PPAs are a bit like the AUR for Arch … well you have to decide what you really want. You could start from scratch: www.linuxfromscratch.org

boredsquirrel,

Interesting info but I think they were not relevant at all

TheAnonymouseJoker,

Debian Testing, if you want some of the new shiny packages. Stable if you want… hardcore stability, like me.

Former Ubuntu LTS user, switched to Debian Stable after 6 years. It has been almost 1 year with Debian, love it, but sometimes I prefer the ease of Ubuntu (based on Debian Unstable branch). Also a big fan of GNOME and its stability and reliability. No DE comes close.

Ubuntu LTS or Debian stable/testing branch. Pick your choice.

I left behind Ubuntu for Debian as I became a better Linux user, and was able to leave behind the convenience and little bit annoyance of Snaps. Snap arguments are mostly overblown, cultist and garbage, so do not pay much heed to them. They are just as bad at performance as the beloved Flatpak system (which means fairly good).

ryannathans,

Pop os, ticks all your boxes and nicer than debian

299792458ms,

Could we know what was your distro?

KISSmyOSFeddit,

Debian. I had run such a stripped-down version for many years, I forgot it now has everything a beginner distro needs in the default install.

299792458ms,

Glad to hear

turkalino,
@turkalino@lemmy.yachts avatar

I know Gnome is in your less important list, but Wayland is in your important list, so I’ll recommend KDE Neon. It’s Ubuntu without snaps and moronic auto updates, so it really just feels like a more desktop-ready Debian

polskilumalo,
@polskilumalo@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Literally Debian

InternetCitizen2,

I got my start with Ubuntu and feel its still quite solid. Many say that Mint is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu these days. Personally running popOS as I have their hardware.

chronicledmonocle,

Debian ticks all of these boxes.

Stable release

Wayland or X Server

It’s Debian, so literally everything is built for it, except maybe some obscure arch packages

Has options for any DE you want

Steam can be installed via Flatpak

Only thing I’m not sure about is your air print stuff. I’m sure there is a package that a quick apt install would get, though.

KISSmyOSFeddit,

The print stuff does work.

boredsquirrel, (edited )

Yes Debian and use Flatpak for any app you need with a recent version. You can also use a Distrobox with Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing if you need system packages that are more modern.

I dont know if Debian Testing is rolling, but Distrobox basically doesnt work with release distros if they need to system upgrade via a reboot, like Fedora. So Fedora Rawhide (dont) or Tumbleweed, Arch etc. are best.

rotopenguin,
@rotopenguin@infosec.pub avatar

I think “cups, just cups” pulls in enough to do airprint as is.

GravitySpoiled,

Fedora atomic GNOME (silverblue) or a ublue variant

KISSmyOSFeddit,

Which parts of those immutable distros are actually immutable?
To be more specific, on Debian I usually copy the Android Universal Debloater and other bins from Github into /usr/local/bin so they’re in my PATH. Can I still do that on those distros?

wreckage,

Yes. You can read about it here: docs.fedoraproject.org/…/technical-information/#f…

GravitySpoiled,

You may want to uninstall firefox and install it as a flatpak to have codecs out of the box. Or use a ublue variant which ships with flatpak forefox. if you’re into gaming, look into bazzite.

You can add any path to your PATH variable in your .bashrc or whatever you use anyway.

There are live USBs. It’s usually best to check it out yourself.

AChiTenshi,

Out of curiosity why do you not want snaps? I consider myself a beginner with Linux and would love to know what makes you not want to use them.

KISSmyOSFeddit,

I don’t have personal experience with them, but I keep hearing they’re very slow to start.
And I dislike them on principle, because Canonical tries to push snaps as the main distro-agnostic way of installing software, but they are hard-coded to only work with Canonical’s servers. It reminds me of the embrace-extend-extinguish strategy of Microsoft.

theshatterstone54,

I’m far from an enjoyer of snaps BUT snaps do support other custom stores and aren’t tied to the snap store, contrary to popular belief.

Also, the fix for making snap startup times has been developed and released but most existing snaps haven’t patched their snaps to support it (last I heard, the only notable exception (aka the only know snap to have good startup times) is the Firefox snap).

KISSmyOSFeddit,

snaps do support other custom stores

From what I read they only support one single snap store though, so if you don’t use the Canonical store, you lose access to all the third party software that’s actually the point of snaps.

RmDebArc_5,
@RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works avatar

Snap does theoretically support other stores, but the code for the canonical store is proprietary so you’d have to reverse engineer a snap store and hope that canonical doesn’t break it with an update. Also apart from Ubuntu nobody uses snaps so why would anyone make a snap store? Btw they have improved snaps with faster start times and such, so they aren’t that much slower than packages or flatpak.

GravitySpoiled,

Snaps aren’t that slow anymore. They closed the gap a couple of months ago. (I still dislike snaps and ubuntu for pushing them)

bigmclargehuge,
@bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world avatar

Performance issues/bloated disk usage and their forced use within Ubuntu.

The performance issues come from the fact that they run via virtualization. Similar to running a game on an emulator. This helps with compatibility, ie being able to run a Snap on an ARM computer when the native version isn’t available, but again, performance can take a hit.

Bloated disk usage is a result of each Snap including all dependancies with the base package. For example, if two Snaps rely on the same font, you get two copies of that font. If two native packages rely on the same font, you get one copy, and they share.

The forced usage literally boils down to this; on Ubuntu, typing “apt install example-package” actually runs the command “snap install example-package” (Edit: I should note this isn’t the case with all packages, but there are some pretty high profile ones on the list, ie Thunderbird). Canonical A; isn’t up front about this, therefor leading users into believing they are getting native packages when this isn’t the case, and B; make it frustratingly difficult to disable this behaviour and get only native packages

IMO if a company creates a product and then feels the need to force and trick their users into adopting it, that alone is enough to discourage me from ever choosing it over the alternatives.

Pekka,
@Pekka@feddit.nl avatar

Fedora might be a good option, but it might require more setup with an Nvidea GPU. They use Wayland now, are a Gnome based distro, support full disk encryption. For me the package mangar has been fine, and they do support flatpak. It is a very large distro with backing from RedHat. So it should generally be stable.

Pop_OS! Seems to be the great distro if you just want to game and watch videos without any issues arround setting up the drivers. It has been a quite stable distro for me and it is quite similar to Ubuntu. Unfortunately this distro doesn’t have Wayland yet.

Manjaro is an Arch based distro, but it had some issues with using packages from the AUR. They do run Gnome on Wayland by default.

RobotZap10000,

[Fedora] might require more setup with an Nvidia GPU

rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

I only needed 3 Ctrl-Shift-V’s for that. Multimedia codecs are also about the same difficulty.

mski,

I’ve had a pretty good experience with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with a pretty similar use case / criteria.

I’ve done my share of tinkering, and while I learned a lot, and enjoyed Gentoo, Arch, Debian, NixOS, and others (Mandrake, Ubuntu), I sometimes I just want get my work done…

With Tumbleweed, there are a few packages that you’d need to install for codecs, but that’s easily done via the CLI zypper package manager with a single command.

I’d definitely recommend checking it out - its been a solid daily driver for almost 3-years now with very few issues, and lets me focus on getting stuff done. I wonder if this is due to their QA build process (OBS)?

Anyway, good luck & have fun whatever you choose!

KISSmyOSFeddit, (edited )

When I tried it a year ago, printer setup failed with a permission error until I disabled the firewall, and I had to install a community repo by a random person and manually edit a text file to get airprint and airscan working. Half the YaST modules didn’t seem to do anything or work correctly, or duplicated KDE settings. That’s what I consider to be “annoying visible bugs”.
I also find their software selection to be limited (without said random community repos), and you can only update Tumbleweed from the command line. It felt like an unfinished mod of their flagship LEAP distro.

OGMudBoi,

I just switched to tumbleweed with gnome and I was shown firmware updates, package updates, and flatpak updates all from gnome software. Also there’s a whole gui in yast for searching and installing packages. I haven’t needed to print anything yet but i haven’t run into any difficulties elsewhere.

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