Frameworks have all AMD options too, just a heads up. I have one and it runs great!

Running a framework 16 with FedoraKDE and before that a 4gb ram 2015 toshiba satellite (in 2024) running Fedora (regular Gnome) and haven’t had one of these issues. Most issues I have had were caused by me, every now and again I run into a regular old bug in something and half the time that gets fixed pretty quick.

I wish I could help, but we just have opposite experiences unfortunately. That said, because of this I don’t think it’s “linux,” or I’d likely have at least similar experiences.

OH for a while I did have a bug where VLC would stutter playing video and nobody had a fix, so I uninstalled/reinstalled VLC and it works now. Idk, I’ve had shit like that happen on windows too though, it’s basically the software version of power cycling hardware when it acts up.

Well good to hear the Polish are stable.

Go for a popular/“beginner” distro (basically mint or fedora or fedoraKDE, or Bazzite for gaming) so you can search up anything you need, and before you install anything test it all out with the live boot disk you created; keep backups and don’t be afraid to fuck up, at worst you reinstall and you can script much of the set up process; and do not be afraid of the terminal, learn its secrets, watch a “bash beginner” and “linux terminal beginner” video or a few on youtube and follow along like it’s a class, you’ll be fine.

That’s it, you’ll have specific questions later, but for now that’s all you need.

Tempted to put this through let me google that for you just to be smug, but here’s the direct link instead since I’m sure I’d also need to click the results for you. Do I need to read this to you too?

https://windowsreport.com/disable-keylogger-windows-11/

Not even my claim, yet I googled it for you. Guess the burden is on a third party who happened to know this common knowledge already.

And for linux step 3 usually doesn’t works because your local techy is probably someone who just knows how to google and paste into cmd the terminal.

This was sorta my fault, but I’m counting it. I have been flashing meshtastic devices recently and flashed two just fine from fedora (just had to DL ungoogled chromium because fuck chrome but librewolf can’t access serial ports so…), tried to flash a third from my friend’s windows PC and it just would not recognize it in the serial monitor, tried for like an hour being dumb, then I remembered drivers exist, downloaded one set of drivers, couldn’t install lord knows why, downloaded a second set that finally worked on a reboot and got it flashed.

I understand that sometimes you still have to install drivers on Linux too, but can we stop pretending you don’t have to on windows? What’s more while I was in there and edge wasn’t using my serial port my friend said to install a chrome based anyway to try, and I had to find the damn download pages instead of using a package manager, philistines.

Ah damn, well sorry I couldn’t be more help!

My brother laser printer/scanner needed brscan in addition to (iirc) brlaser. Didn’t see you mention it, so it may be worth a look if you missed it on the brother linux drivers page for your printer.

Also RIP Neofetch, maintainer became a farmer. Fastfetch iirc is the new one.

Just a heads up,

Most of my tools won’t run, (you can likely find alternatives for most, barring adobe)

most of my self made tools won’t run, (well you can fix that, now can’t ya? You made em once you can make em again)

most of my games won’t run, (Destiny player? Seems most single players run these days, but yeah the kernel level anticheat “required” by many online games renders them unplayable, because even if they do run like destiny you just get acct banned for playing on linux. This is the fault of the companies though, not on linux or its community for hating the kernel level spyware, of course.)

most 4 decades of internalization of shortcuts won’t cut it short anymore. (Actually you may be surprised, many windows shortcuts still work on KDE, and you can configure them however you want if there’s something missing. Plus you’d learn any “new” ones quicker than you may think.)

But yeah that said it isn’t for everybody. Just gotta weigh the cost/benefit, is it worth it to you to learn a little about a new UI to escape microsoft’s actively hostile anti-consumer practices, or would you rather just grin and bear it for “ease” (though it could be argued that “learning the new thing and being done with it” is actually easier than dealing with windows, just that learning the new thing frontloads the “hard” while dealing with microsoft is a constant annoyance. But I digress.)

FedoraKDE, or Mint.

Either way you’ll probably be able to search and find answers to your problems (and answers for ubuntu may work), and with mint you know your friend can possibly help if need be, and they work well.

I’ve had that happen with one of those exact same cards and it was a bad card, could be your issue too.

Tbf, that’s by iDesign. They want you to stay in their iEcosystem and spend more money on their products, if they allowed interoperability you might say go with Linux instead of Mac, or something. So take out a loan and buy another iProduct, good iConsumer!

Word to the wise brother laser printers work great with linux, but I’ve heard some mention about the newer ones not taking 3rd party toner cartridges. At least toner goes further and doesn’t dry up with disuse like ink!

What the shit happened to that tree’s shadow?

As of audacity 3.0.3 (or was it 3.1.3? Shit it’s been a while…) it includes telemetry from the russian company that bought it. It was forked to oblivion and Tenacity is the best replacement fork.

Just to add for new users, find this info easily by typing “what to do after installing Fedora” into your search engine of choice, there’s many articles about it (and all of them have the same information for the most part).

Honestly the thing that helped me most with that sort of stuff was just subbing to r/linux (now would be c/linux but this was like 4y ago now I guess…fucking hell time flies huh?) and reading up on stuff/asking questions for a few months before I switched. There’s also linux4noobs (both c/ and r/) for asking specific questions, it’s slower on lemmy but still can offer help and honestly I should probably make a post here about it again to drum up awarwness. Finally I’d like to add that many times communities related to specific distros will be more help than general communities, if you have a question about Fedora for example it can be helpful to ask in c/fedora over c/linux sometimes.

Now as to your questions here, just to kinda boil it down, the main difference between distros is the prepackaged stuff that comes with it, and the package manager. Package Managers are basically your “app store,” this is where you’ll get most of the stuff you need, for the rest, Flatpak is a package manager available for all linux distros, and some things will have .deb or .rpm files on their website. The ones you listed are indeed distros, Lubuntu is too however.

DEs are basically your UI. If you ever changed the launcher on an android phone back when that was a thing, it’s basically the same concept. Fedora and FedoraKDE are the same distro with much of the same stuff under the hood, but Fedora (Gnome) is more maclike and FedoraKDE is more windowslike in terms of user interface. For this reason Ubuntu (Gnome) and Fedora (Gnome) almost feel more similar than Fedora (Gnome) and FedoraKDE. You can install any DE on any distro for the most part, but in the beginning I recommend picking a distro by considering the DE first and the package manager second, and everything else (long time stable vs bleeding edge updates for instance) third. You can always switch later for free, the only investment is time and maybe an external hdd/ssd for backups.

Someone will 100% come correct me and argue this lol, but I’m just trying to kinda explain it in “doesn’t already know about linux” terms (so hopefully I effectively did that at least lol). If you have any more specific questions feel free to ask here or on linux4noobs, and of course you can always try these distros out for yourself before installing them! You can use a USB drive and a program like Balena Etcher, Fedora Media Writer (iirc available on windows), or Rufus to create a live boot disk, boot into it instead of your OS, and play around. There’s typically no persistent memory so everything you do will be reverted when you shut down (and all saved files will be lost), but it’s just for trying it out before you “buy” it so to speak (just don’t click install unless you want to install, of course). There are plenty of guides for that out there, it’s actually a step in the installation process for most distros.

Holy shit that’s a blast from the past lmao.

Fwiw, I’d say put him on FedoraKDE or Mint. Mint is the classic beginner distro now that Ubuntu has lost favor, and I just have a thing for Fedora, but it’s a popular distro with plenty of help available and KDE feels pretty windows-y (or windows stole from KDE but who’s counting.)