It’s a lightweight, independent distro for power users. It’s also currently one of the very few distros still offering an official 32 bit version out of the box.

I use it on my oldest and lowest power machines. It’s snappy and stable. Plus, the name is badass, for whatever that’s worth lol.

Been using it for two years on my side business laptop, works awesome. Plug and play functionality with most the apps I need, and rock stable.

Slow and steady, with occasional spikes when a government or mega-corp does something particularly terrible.

I’ve been loving Incus containers for this very use case. Unlike Docker, Incus containers are by default persistent, and are full system containers, not just applications. So when you launch an Incus Debian 13 container for instance, you get a full Debian 13 installation, but at a fraction of the size of even a small traditional VM.

It’s a great happy medium between Ultra-minimal Docker containers designed for single applications, and old-school heavy VMs.

Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

Personal laptop - Linux Mint

Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

Junk/Test laptops - Void

Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)

Waterfox on Mobile has been working well for me so far.

Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓

Start with Linux Mint. It’s similar in vibe to older Windows, (think Windows 7/10)

You can use the GUI for everything, even major version upgrades, driver installations, and Kernel changes.

It comes with everything you need to get started, and their software portal is easy to use and get stuff from, including gaming staples like Steam, OBS Studio, etc.

Thanks for the response. I’m doing great now. Got a new job as a sysadmin making about 35% more than my old job, and I get to work on Linux a bunch, and my team is really solid.

Still sucks that I lost all that work, but I was able to get some of the old hardware back for free, so my old servers can live again in my home lab.

Lol this is somebody’s hackerman fantasy post, the chain smoking, the terminology, I can practically hear the early 2000’s drum n’ bass/nightcore in the background.

Sorry, typo, I fixed it now. Pseudo-VM is what I meant.

It’s alright now, does what it needs to do. It’s kind of a pain because of the weirdness of running as a pseudo-VM, but better than no Linux at all.

Sorry for your loss :( Same thing happened to me about a year ago.

I was the sole IT admin for a small company. Used Debian with KDE on a snappy little Thinkpad. No issues managing all the infra with it, even though most of it was MS trash. I used Reminnia for RDP into the Windows servers, and the Browser for all O365/Entra administration. A Windows 11 VM for the rare times I needed to test Windows-only apps or configs.

Worked like a dream, but then we got bought out by a huge competitor. Their IT team took everything over. I had to decommission my on-prem Linux servers, Ansible automations, Open Project tracking and FOSS ticketing system. Finally, I had to give up my Sweet little Linux Thinkpad and use their standard-issue HP Windows 11 garbage laptop. They were slow, clunky, buggy, and ugly, it was awful.

I quit a few months later after securing the job I have now. It pays about 35% more, has twice as much PTO, and about 50% of my workload is Linux stuff. It’s so much better.

My advice, if it’s truly non negotiable, install WSL first thing. It’s not nearly as good as having actual Linux, because it’s running inside of Microslop’s horrid OS, but it’s better than nothing. Try to be an advocate for FOSS at the company, see if you can convince leadership to let you implement Linux-based solutions wherever they might fit, make yourself the de facto expert on them so you at least get to work on Linux and FOSS infra.

Aside from that, start job hunting. Try to find a job that will let you be more Linuxy.

Linux Mint. Everything including full system version upgrades and GPU driver installations can be done via GUI.

The default look and feel is Windows-y, and the Mint team does a great job of pre-loading their distro with all the basic apps most people need, including a good printer app, scanner app, PDF viewer, media player, etc.

Yeah, it’s a neat little tool. I used it recently at my work. We had a big list of endpoints that we needed to make sure were powered down each night for a week during a patching window.

A sysadmin on my team wrote a script that pinged all of the endpoints in the list and returned only the ones that still were getting a response, that way we could see how many were still powered on after a certain time. But he was just manually running the script every few minutes in his terminal.

I suggested using the watch command to execute the script, and then piping the output into the sort command so the endpoints were nicely alphabetical. Worked like a charm!

The watch command is very useful, for those who don’t know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not “real time” because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.

Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.

My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren’t mature enough to have their own repo)