Captain Aggravated

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

It doesn’t sound like a medication’s marketing name, it sounds like the name of an open source project: a complete garbage fire.

LibreOffice runs on Windows and I think MacOS, I would install it there to try it out especially before jumping OSes.

LibreOffice, unto itself, is fine. There’s an alternate universe where we’re standardized around it instead of MS Office. The main issues you’re going to run into is working with people who use MS Office. LO’s compatibility with Microsoft’s formats is imperfect. If you’re collaborating on, say, a powerpoint presentation with classmates, expect LibreOffice Impress to mangle it.

I’ve been out of school for awhile now, and as an adult running a household it’s all the productivity suite I’ll ever need.

I’ll be honest here: Wanting to try out ElementaryOS “because it’s pretty” and having no experience with Linux…I foresee this ending badly and shortly. Something isn’t going to work exactly the way it does in Windows and a hissy fit will ensue. I recommend taking an image backup of her machine before installing Linux.

Fake news.

I bought a Dell Inspiron circa 2014 intending to run Windows on it. I was dabbling in Linux playing with Raspberry Pis, but didn’t really have designs to run Linux on my main computers. I found Windows 8.1 so unlivable that I tried out Linux Mint.

That laptop just kept dying.

I went around and around with Dell support for a semester about that damn laptop. I was going back to school, I bought a laptop for school, I didn’t get that fucking laptop. I did an entire semester of coursework with a Kindle Fire and two Raspberry Pis (a 1B and a 2). They finally replaced the damn thing with a different model, that was missing a lot of features I had ordered. Dell is at the top of my goddamn blacklist.

Anyway, the first x86 machine I ran Linux on, Linux compatibility wasn’t a factor, and then I really didn’t get a choice anyway because I didn’t get the machine I ordered. But I’ve had dental surgeries that I enjoyed more than Windows 8.1.

In the early days, Linux Mint needed a kernel update to support the trackpad. I’m still not convinced the dedicated GPU ever worked. I had an external docking station that was very meh. It did the job though, I actually still have it in service. It won’t run Windows 11 I don’t think but modern Linux runs just fine.

I’ve since built two desktops with Linux compatibility in mind which have worked very well, and a little Lenovo thing to use as a shop tablet which…could be a lot better.

See? That’s great branding.

Europe isn’t a region, it’s a brand.

I think the appeal is to have some kind of paper printer that isn’t under the thumb of fucking megacorps.

Some of the OLD HP Thinkjet printers were pretty rudimentary; the original Thinkjet cartridges are still widely manufactured for certain industrial applications. Tell me we couldn’t reprap that shit.

It’s a bit behind the times for gaming though it’ll probably still play a decent round of Counter Strike.

I used a system even older than that (A core i7 with a three-digit part number, circa 2010) a couple years ago to rip DVDs and run MakeMKV/Handbrake, it did the job fine. Decade old computers aren’t the problem, Windows is.

The real thing that Flatpak offers is one place to publish for Linux. You put your app in the App Store for Apple, you put it in the Play Store for Android, you put it in Flathub for Linux.

To further the analogy, most distros are pre-packaged salads. Somebody figured up a salad recipe they like and they put it in to go bowls. You know what’s in it so you can grab it and go. Some distros like Arch hand you a empty bowl and invite you to fill it yourself, so each copy of Arch is at least somewhat unique. Gentoo expects you to slice your own veggies.

A lot of the choices basically don’t matter to you at this point; like the process manager. There are people who are irritated with Systemd, the de facto standard one, and prefer some other. They’ll all work fine for desktop use, you’ll probably never notice let alone form an opinion. The main things you will experience as meaningful differences between distros are the Desktop Environments and Package Managers. The GUI and the app store.

I just make sure that the word “Intel” is used somewhere in the bullet point about the Wi-Fi. If it’s built into the motherboard or on a separate card.

Once you get into the ecosystem it probably will, yeah.

If you think of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, it’s like a big salad bar. There’s a bunch of stuff to choose from, several kinds of each thing. An individual distro is a salad made from that salad bar, you might have romaine lettuce, tomato slices, onion, green pepper and thousand island dressing and that’s Fedora KDE, change the thousand island to ranch and that’s Fedora GNOME. Switch out the romaine lettuce for spinach, switch the onion for cucumber and go with raspberry vinaigrette dressing and you’ve got Mint Cinnamon.

1. The various versions or flavors of Linux are called “distributions” or “distros.” There are several that are intended to be ready to go out of the box. Linux Mint is a pretty good one for general desktop use though they’re kinda behind the times with Wayland and such. I see a lot of folks recommend Bazzite but I personally know nothing about it. I’m using Fedora KDE, Fedora is meh, KDE is pretty good.

2. If you’re building a gaming desktop specifically for Linux, I recommend going with AMD GPU and an Intel wi-fi adapter. There are some Wi-Fi adapters that don’t play nice with Linux but Intel’s drivers are pretty good. AMD releases their drivers right into the kernel, there’s nothing you need to do at all to get AMD GPUs working on Linux, Nvidia is a bit more of a pain. Also, with desktop peripherals, avoid anything that needs one of those configuration utilities, they tend not to be available for Linux. I use a Coolermaster MasterKeys Pro M keyboard which all configuration happens on the board, they don’t offer any software for it. Highly recommended.

Oh also: Asrock’s RGB lighting weird and non-standard. If you want to use open source stuff to control your RGB lighting and that’s important to you, I recommend against Asrock. Just so happens my build’s RGB is controlled via a controller built into my case.

A whole bunch of software goes into making a distro a distro, and the desktop environment is a major component.

If you were to compare, say, Kubuntu to Fedora KDE edition, they would look fairly similar because both are using the KDE Plasma desktop environment. On Kubuntu you’d have the APT package manager, on Fedora you have the DNF package manager.

In a lot of cases, a distro will have their underlying tech, “We use this package manager and this feature and that feature, and we publish versions with the Gnome desktop, KDE desktop, xfce desktop and i3 window manager.” Or some combination thereof. Linux Mint for example offers their own Cinnamon desktop, MATE, and xfce.

If you’ve ever used an Android phone and swapped out the launcher, it’s kinda that.

Welcome to the club, here’s your penguin 🐧

Cinnamon is a long time favorite of mine; it has a certain practical mindedness that I like. Gnome irritates the absolute shit out of me and Cinnamon inherits just a little too much from Gnome. I’m using KDE on my main computer at the moment, which I still think is my second choice. Doesn’t really help that my move to KDE also came with a move to Wayland, which killed a few tools I still miss.

I’ve been using Fedora GNOME on a tablet I take into the shop with me, and it’s…not wonderful.

Red Hat and Ubuntu.