If you're of a "try out linux distros to see what you like" bent: I don't see a lot of people out here showing it a lot of love but KDE is very good, and has been for a while?
@grillchen I criticize KDE for being a bit buggy at times and having poor interactions with their devs (I no longer bother filling bug reports). I continue to consider KDE one of the best desktop user experiences available.
It’s interesting how light KDE has gotten. It used to be the big, bloated desktop environment that you wouldn’t even try using on old hardware. It seems to have traded places with GNOME.
Adding myself here: I'm happy to chat about #Linux and answer what I can or help find resources. I don't know a lot about the latest, fanciest KDE and Gnome desktops but maybe you don't want that anyway and want to run something like xfce or another lightweight desktop (and yeah, for better or worse, there are lots of options with this stuff). Or #BSD. OpenBSD has been the daily driver for years now. One starting point might be https://fedoraproject.org/spins/ to easily try different desktops...
Hi! I’m getting a new laptop any day now and I plan on going back to Linux after maybe a decade on Windows. What works best for gaming nowadays? Is manjaro good for that? I prefer a distro with a nice name but of course that’s not the central thing. I’ll also do some book keeping, writing et cetera but I don’t think...
It seems like the more interested I get in Linux, the less appealing it becomes. The community seems to have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, because everyone is just constantly talking over each other and contradicting themselves! I have spent so much time reading about Linux and distros and such to prepare for my...
Is your version of Windows a Pro? Find out in Settings -> System -> About. If so, you can install the Optional Feature (under Apps, Windows Features in 10 or System -> Optional Featues -> More Windows Features on 11) called Hyper-V.
If you do not have Pro, then install VirtualBox. Either one will let you create a Virtual Machine (VM), which lets you test drive anything as an operating system running as an app in an operating system (Xzibit meme here). From here, I would strongly recommend the mainstream linuxes, which are typically in the “just works” category and support Secure Boot out of the box, which lets you install it alongside Windows. These are:
Ubuntu Linux (preferably Kubuntu for the best Windows-like interface or Lubuntu if your computer is not very powerful)
Ubuntu is old reliable. A lot of Linux users are salty because a major corpo (Canonical) runs Ubuntu, and they’ve made design choices in the past and present that a bunch of Linux users are salty over (particularly by explicitly not supporting the now popular flatpak app format in favor of their own snap format), but reality is, Ubuntu works on just about everything I’ve ever put it on with the least amount (read: none) of dicking around to get it working. Ubuntu and its base, Debian, are very well supported and extremely stable. Most programs with a deb installer are designed for one or the other. Note that unlike Debian, Ubuntu is a bit newer with stuff, but still a bit behind compared to the frontier option below. This is the tradeoff for stability. Less cutting edge.
If flatpak support is more important to you, Linux Mint is a good interim between Ubuntu and Debian. It’s community run, has a very Windows-like simple desktop design, and supports Flatpak natively. However, Mint is behind on the latest shift in Linux backend systems, known as the great Wayland migration, among other things. They’re still working on it.
This is the bleeding edge Linux, maintained by another major corpo, RedHat. A lot of Linux users are salty about Fedora because RedHat is proprietary, and they recently killed off CentOS, a source code clone of RedHat a lot of people relied on, by buying it up and changing it from a clone to a testbed, probably to try and force users onto buying RedHat Enterprise Linux. However, Fedora is very up to date on the latest Linux tech, but is packaged in a very good “least pain to install and run every day” manner. They have very good support, due to being a cutting edge testbed for RedHat Enterprise, and anything that has an rpm package is probably for Fedora or RedHat. They also support flatpak natively, which makes it more likely whatever you want is going to be here. In addition, Fedora runs Wayland (the new, better performant graphics backend), which means it’s already future proofed.
Any other Linux you use will make you jump hoops to get Secure Boot working. I also know that there will be 12,000,000,000 replies of people saying Secure Boot is evil Microsoft conspiracy and stuff and you shouldn’t use it, but you need it for Windows dual boot, and platform security is something that people ignore until it becomes a problem, at which having it in the first place would have prevented the issue, as it’s too late after the fact to address it.
Once you’ve checked out the Linux of your choice in a VM, next is to get a USB stick and use Rufus to make a live boot stick, to see if it works on your PC. From the live stick, you can also install the linux on it.
Note that in many cases, if you’re not using the Linuxes above, you may have to disable Secure Boot, then do some linux magic (it’s different for every linux, which means googling or wiki searching, which is why I am not recommending everyone’s favorite distro, Arch, which is like a pro race car driver telling a person who’s never driven a motor vehicle before “it’s easy to drive a stock car” or “it’s easy to drive an F1 car”) after installation to get it enabled.
As for Windows eating the boot loader in dual boot configuration, this should not happen if you have UEFI, which every computer since Windows 8 is configured to boot with and uses Secure Boot, unless you changed that yourself in the bios or installed on ancient (pre-2012) hardware. What happens is when a boot loader is updated, either in Windows or Linux, it will establish itself as the King of Boot and be the first one to boot. Both boot loaders are still there in the EFI boot partition, but you may occasionally have to go into your UEFI Firmware Settings and change the boot order to your preference.
The reason I am pushing KDE versions is that both the mainest stream Linuxes push GNOME as their default desktop environment (DE). GNOME is nice, but it’s been trying to reinvent the wheel for a solid decade now with a completely unique interface, and coming off Windows, KDE is lighter weight on the system resource-wise and feels more familiar, with the bottom taskbar and start menu on the bottom left layout (you can still move it to another side if you’re one of those people).
The reason I have not recommended Pop!_OS is that they run LTS Ubuntu (which is older but supported for years version), they use a GNOME-like interface, and most importantly, they do not support Secure Boot at all.
From there, have fun. Linux is like a kit car, it’s made of lots of custom parts somehow working together in chaotic harmony.
I see there's some sort of "how's Linux now" discourse going around Mastodon and so I'll give my brief summary:
To be blunt, Linux is just the least-shit option to run on your PC nowadays lol.
If you want a good start, try Kubuntu https://kubuntu.org/, I get along great with it. Familiar interface, without all the shovelled shit Microsoft constantly try to force on you. Same KDE Plasma interface Valve use for Steam Deck's Desktop Mode.
I'm doing another one of my little surveys, this time to see which parts of using #Linux on the desktop are the most problematic, and the various issues people are having.
I'll make a video on these results next week, and depending on the answers, maybe I'll make more videos on specific issues, either to explain these topics, or to see how we could improve.
So, here is the form, feel free to fill it out and share it around, so we have as many answers as possible!
@thelinuxEXP I think this is a great initiative! Figuring out what is offputting to new users and providing tools to make it a little bit easier.
I've been learning and getting familiar with #Linux and #KDE plasma recently. It's generally considered to be one of the most familiar desktops for moving Windows users.
What I had most problems with is installing and configuring software that isn't in any default package manager so having guides/wizards helpers built in would be my suggestion. 😊
@hopfgeist Because a window manager could just be Kwin in KDE or Mutter on GNOME. A Tiling WM generally doesn’t come with a desktop environment attached :)
It’s not like anything he says is a secret: www.linuxfoundation.org 900 open source projects 3M+ developers trained
It’s right there on the front page.
Linux foundation never supported desktop development, and I suspect they have their reasons. Maybe that a GUI is a very subjective thing, there are dozens of desktops, supporting one would probably cause major wrath from everybody else, so if Linux Foundation were to support the desktop, they’d have to support all. But Gnome has often shown to be hostile to outside influence, so maybe they don’t really care to mess with that. KDE is based on QT, and maybe the QT dual license isn’t within the scope of Linux Foundation to support? So with the biggest desktops being somewhat problematic, maybe it’s better to just leave it alone.
The real question IMO is why Linux desktop doesn’t have better support from other foundations? Why aren’t any of them able to attract more financial support?
Personally I liked Gnome 2, and I think Gnome did a lot of harm to Linux when they deprecated it before Gnome Shell was ready, and I think Gnome alienated many users with the design decisions of Gnome shell.
Then the problem is that almost every GUI Desktop on Linux is based on some flavor of GTK which is under Gnome, or based on QT with the dual license.
Personally I don’t mind the dual license of QT, but many Linux developers are very idealistic, and don’t like it.
so labwc is occassionally swapping my monitor inputs which annoys me to no end.
it (usually) worked on gnome but i had to fix it manually in gdm. at least its not KDE which would DO IT WHILE I WAS USING MY DESKTOP. Labwc only does after resuming from a suspend, and only sometimes.
i'm currently on a testing branch so reporting is a bit iffy, but i should report it, i'll have to take some time tomorrow and see if i can debug it.
I’m disabled and no way to get anything from what I have now, which is a omen laptop from 2016 and no matter what ditro, and whatever fixes I try, I can’t get Linux to work with my games through steam without a lot of problems....
KDE launched version 6 of its Plasma desktop environment on February 28, 2024, bringing numerous updates and features as well as the major switch to Qt6. I am immensely proud that the OpenBSD team has managed to prepare for this major update so swiftly. All necessary components have been committed to our CVS tree, and the...
@BrodieOnLinux
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this (the message, not the title). It's why when I first wanted to donate to support Linux desktop I gave it to KDE cause I use/love KDE.
I wrote a post to encourage people to consider supporting projects they use. https://libresolutions.network/operations/bankroll/
After years of my desktop environment (kde) being configured the same way, I tried enabling auto-hiding in my panel and I quite like the extra screen estate....
Package management is probably the biggest thing a Linux user might need to use the terminal for. The graphical package managers used by default on most desktop environments are far too limited.
KDE’s Discover for instance is capable of installing (graphical) desktop applications, uninstalling packages and performing updates. Sure, it supports native packages on the majority of distros through PackageKit, as well as Flatpaks and Snaps, but it can only perform very basic package manager operations. I imagine most users will at some point need to install a package that isn’t a graphical desktop application, such as a driver or an optional dependency and they will need to use the terminal for it.
To my knowledge, this is also the state of most other graphical package managers that take the form of “software centers” like Discover. More powerful graphical package managers do exist, usually specific to a specific package manager such as Octopi for Pacman. Few distros ship with them, however. I believe one notable exception is OpenSUSE with YaST. There’s also dnfdragora on Fedora, which is pretty basic, but might be good enough for most purposes.
I loved the default theme, the splash screen, all of the customization options, and how lightweight it was, but it’s missing some of the conveniences and polish of GNOME, KDE, or even LXQt and Xfce. Using an independent toolkit meant that none of my apps looked consistent, even after trying my best to find a theme that supported everything, and if I explored the settings beyond a surface level things started looking ancient and clunky.
Definitely underrated, and really impressive for how much they could pack into a desktop targeted at older PCs, but still missing quite a bit.
I have tried it a few times but I could never really get into it. For one thing, it is a tiny island unto itself where most of what you need to run is foreign to it.
In the end, I found light-weight GTK and Qt options superior.
Based on some Lemmy comments, I tried Q4OS with the Trinity desktop ( basically KDE 3 ) and I was surprised how good it was. I used the 32 bit edition but it booted to a full GUI desktop in something like 110 MB and it was surprisingly usable. I guess I should not be too shocked. MATE is essentially GNOME 2 from the same era and, though not my favourite, it is still fine.
Perhaps the viability of Linux as a desktop has had more to do with the applications than the desktop itself.
I’ve been seeing a lot of bazzite recommendations recently, and it sure sounds great. An atomic fedora, gaming optimisations out of the box. It just works....
For what it’s worth V Rising works fine on my desktop PC and my Steam Deck. Audio can stutter with a lot of SFX being played at the same time, but I have that happen occasionally in a few games on both my PC and the Deck.
PC is a Ryzen 7950X3D + Radeon 7800 XT running openSUSE Tumbleweed with kernel 6.9.1 (worked under 6.8.* as well), KDE 6 under Wayland, Steam Flatpak. Like others mentioned I have above 4G encoding and reBAR enabled, as they were enabled by default on my ASUS B650E-E.
Works on the Steam Deck under Bazzite and SteamOS.
This is nice to see that Breeze on KDE apps will be default on any desktop (if there is no Qt platform forcing a theme).
I always had issues with Qt theming being too global, so forcing Breeze on only KDE apps was not easy at all (and even more difficult with color-scheme).
Elders [Alex Krokus] (lemmy.world)
x.com/alexkrokus?lang=en
Tips on distro for gaming Swedish
Hi! I’m getting a new laptop any day now and I plan on going back to Linux after maybe a decade on Windows. What works best for gaming nowadays? Is manjaro good for that? I prefer a distro with a nice name but of course that’s not the central thing. I’ll also do some book keeping, writing et cetera but I don’t think...
How the heck am I supposed to get into Linux?
It seems like the more interested I get in Linux, the less appealing it becomes. The community seems to have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, because everyone is just constantly talking over each other and contradicting themselves! I have spent so much time reading about Linux and distros and such to prepare for my...
Below is just a small sample of plots that were created with #lLabPlot. (cdn.masto.host)
cross-posted from: floss.social/users/LabPlot/…/112484470459165421...
A criticism of the linux foundation expenses and why you shouldn't support them (www.youtube.com)
I'm sorry I tried....
I’m disabled and no way to get anything from what I have now, which is a omen laptop from 2016 and no matter what ditro, and whatever fixes I try, I can’t get Linux to work with my games through steam without a lot of problems....
KDE6 on OpenBSD (rsadowski.de)
KDE launched version 6 of its Plasma desktop environment on February 28, 2024, bringing numerous updates and features as well as the major switch to Qt6. I am immensely proud that the OpenBSD team has managed to prepare for this major update so swiftly. All necessary components have been committed to our CVS tree, and the...
Launcher with integrated clock and tray?
After years of my desktop environment (kde) being configured the same way, I tried enabling auto-hiding in my panel and I quite like the extra screen estate....
Can You Use Linux Without the Terminal? (How to Geek article) (www.howtogeek.com)
Bazzite ? maybe not for V-rising.
I’ve been seeing a lot of bazzite recommendations recently, and it sure sounds great. An atomic fedora, gaming optimisations out of the box. It just works....
KDE Applications and Icons – Current state and how to improve outside of Plasma (cullmann.io)
KDE applications have some issues with their icons outside of Plasma. This post shows the current state and what can be done to improve it.