In a word without borders, who needs Windows and Gates? Getting into Linux for the first time can be really scary. Well not really scary, about as a scary as an angry kitten. It’s not something you should spend too much time thinking about in reality. If you want to make the switch just do it. Coming from a background of knowing little to nothing about Linux means that you can’t really go wrong with whatever you choose. I see a lot of guides out there on this subject but they seem to centre around what are the benefits of each distro and weighing the pros and cons. While this kinda makes sense I think you need a little experience to really understand this fully. In my opinion what people should really do is throw caution to the wind and just pick one. Stop reading this article, it’s pointless.Good bloggers make recommendations like that right?
With that said there is a little more to it than that and you do need to narrow the choices a little. There are distributions that are certainly not for the faint hearted (looking at you Gentoo). But these are harder to find, I imagine you would need to essentially go out of your way to find a distro that would be too complex for a new user.
Stance One: F*#k Apple/Microsoft.
If you no longer want to suckle the teat of whatever OS you’re coming from I’d go with Mint with it’s simple Windows style GUI or Gmac. Both are Ubuntu based and behave as much like the big boys as you can really make it. |
| *for use in rear ports only |
Stance Two: Donating a spare machine to a parent.
I did this. Since my old man had no computer experience whatsoever, when I cobbled together one for him I thought why buy Windows? He’s basically a blank slate. I gave him everything he needed to get going, plenty of basic games and a web-browser. Done. Elementary OS worked for that, but I’ve since moved him onto Mint. Again this was to familiarise him with a Windows layout, the reverse of the previous idea. Maybe lock it down so they don’t have sudo permission.Stance Three: I do Android dev and heard it was easier on Linux.
Why are you asking me then? You should know already. But yeah anything goes in this place, just pick one. So why not Fedora?
Stance Four: I want a media centre in the living room
Here I’d pick a nice light distro like Lubuntu, or Damn Small Linux. These are super light weight and have basically nothing running. This means you can add in just media components and get the most of of meager parts. It’ll take a little work to get media apps working, perhaps DVD playback. But nothing here is strenuous.Stance Five: I’m a sadist, and I like making life harder for no real reason
Stance Six: I want to Game
Don’t bother jumping on the long departed SteamOS train. Not saying it’s bad or it won’t work but this is a specific OS with no traditional desktop mode. You can install one, but you’re adding work you don’t need to. Really as a gamer you need Windows, shame isn’t it. But you can always dual boot, this is what I do because I want to support Linux. By playing the games on my preferred platform I am flying the flag for more development and more cross-platform titles in future. I’m one of the lucky ones, around 60% of my Steam library run on Linux, so it’s not often I need to boot to Windows. But when I do, I ‘tut’ loudly as if someone just stole my place in a queue at the bank.
Bottom Line
Get it yet, how it clearly doesn’t matter? Life is pointless and there’s no hope for any of us... Whatever you pick you’ll be installing it on probably custom hardware (if it’s not a laptop) and you’ll install and remove applications willy nilly. So you’ll end up with something unique anyway, sorta making your own distro. These starting points are merely ‘what comes in the box’ for me. Pick one, get on with it. Learn, grow, then pick a better one! Or be lazy and stick with Ubuntu for like 4 years like I have.Consider installing Arch for an hour, then be like ugh, f*#k that!
Love, Life and Peace,
Noki
Comments
Post a Comment