Are there any good resources for helping someone getting into Linux? One of my friends I never thought would get into Linux is asking me for help. He specifically is an advanced Windows power user. I also had someone who was a complete noob, even to Windows.
For the noob, I suggested LMDE and Kubuntu and they’ve been having some issues installing LMDE.
For the power user, I suggested the easy distros such as lmde, kubuntu, nobara but also told them if they wanted to jump into the deep end, arch is cool.
However, my suggestions don’t even cover DEs, WMs or what they even are. I just wish there was a good guide out there. I think that’s the biggest hurdle, so many options and not knowing what to pick.
This isn’t a guide but Linux Mint is a good stepping stone.
Agree, pop os is also good for beginners
Yep, when in doubt, Mint. You don’t even need to understand linux at all to use Mint. Any problems you can look up. The answer is always “Just install Mint.” The good thing about Pop is Nvidia drivers are built in, that would be a reason to try Pop first, but Mint makes everything so easy.
Just for choosing: https://distrochooser.de/ - or put some distros with a tool like Ventoy on a USB stick and do a live install to test it on the actual system. The many options are a great thing, but of course not easy to get into at first. So I’d try not to overthink it, distrohopping is a hobby for some of us :D
For trying out how it looks and feels: https://distrosea.com/
For understanding more about Linux: https://linuxjourney.com/
I can highly recommend linux journey!
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I spent my first year of Linux installing a new distro, or same distro with a different DE probably every other week, sometimes more than once in a week. The Linux ecosystem rewards self starters with curiosity and the ability to search for answers.
LearnLinuxTV is an amazing YouTube channel, high quality distro tours and reviews, as well as tutorials at various levels of mastery. ItsFOSS and Phoronix are great sources for Linux news that help you build some awareness and vocabulary. The official forums of almost every distro are extremely helpful places to find solutions to problems. You just kinda have to be motivated to seek out the answers you need as they arise.
Ooo I just started my Linux journey and I’m definitely checking out that YouTube channel.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Opensuse, Debian. Everything else are just derivatives.
This is the smart answer for people who understand things conceptually. But it’s so much easier to just tell anyone who wants to try Linux to “just install Mint” and then they can distro hop later. You can’t go wrong with Mint.
Unless gaming and using multiple monitors. That was my experience after a couple of months. Fedora, a few weeks in, has made things lot smoother. Otherwise though, Mint was great and with further Wayland I could see me use it again.
I found the arch wiki to be helpful.
The best guide is learning the skills needed to solve problems. Both people already have those, the power user probably knows how to get windows to do what they want and the other person probably figured out how to get the results they need without finagling as much with the computer.
It’s never too late to learn something new and the “man” and “info” commands are a huge help!
I’m a noob so I don’t have a guide, but I went with EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma, and it’s been going mostly fine. It’s an Arch distro, so far seems fairly lightweight & no frills or hiccups. It also comes with an Nvidia install option for people with Nvidia GPUs.
+1 for Linux Mint for the power user. They will fell familiar and can start their journey from there. The most important concept I would explain would be package managers and flat pack, as in vanilla Windows there is no such thing.
The second one would be regular updates and that you have to do a little maintenance from time to time
Mint would be my recommendation for the noob as well. It is a clean distro and does not require a lot of maintenance except regular updates.
I just went through and tried out a lot of stuff in VMs and live USBs, and switched to an actual install when I got confident enough/was tired of USB boot speeds
maybe it’s just me but I find just doing things myself much more fun and useful than reading guides
i just started out with whatever distro looked the best in promotional pics, which was kde neon in my case (kde neon <3)
imo it’s more important to go with the interesting option (things like kde neon) than the easy option like Mint, at least it’s what gave me the motivation to try things out and learn Linux
The answer to both is Mint.
they should just install it in a VM and check it out. it might help to point out what man pages and the texinfo manual are and that there’s some docs in /usr/share/doc/
Are there any good resources for helping someone getting into Linux?
Do we feel the need to provide resources when one makes the switch from Android to iOS or vice versa? Or how about Windows to macOS or vice versa? Exactly, we don’t. Don’t get me wrong; I’m with you on the fact that those platforms (by virtue of their deals with vendors) are able to provide more streamlined experiences. However, I’d argue we’ve finally reached a critical level of ‘polish’ that should enable your average Joe to engage with Linux without hell breaking loose. The only questions that remain are; Which distro to recommend? AND What further advice do we give them?
The question of which distro is very, very important; first impression and all that*. I’d argue that a whole bunch of distros simply are not suited. (Almost) all of the independent (upstream) distros (so that would be Arch, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE) know who their audiences are and see (understandably so) absolutely no reason to change their respective installations to be a lot more cumbersome for the sake of improving the experiences of a couple of lost newbies. And I haven’t even mentioned how some of them outright can’t even deal with some particular issues that involve proprietary blobs/drivers and what not due to fear of court. Furthermore, our desired distro has to be ridiculously popular, function very reminiscent to other popular operating systems and be very predictable. Hence, it’s unsurprising that we find in this spot our standard distros for newbs: Linux Mint, Pop!_OS and Zorin OS. Between these, ultimately, I believe the impact of their respective desktop environment and/or UX on the (new) user should be the deciding factor. Beyond those, the (opinionated) images provided by Universal Blue are excellent. The exclusion of Ubuntu (or any of its flavors) is due to its conundrum/dilemma with Snaps and how they’ve been dealing with the issues that users are having. Don’t get me wrong; I’m aware that some users don’t experience any issues. However, often enough, they tend to make life a lot more difficult.
As for the advice we give them; they should regard it as more similar to their phones. They don’t install random stuff found on the internet on their phones, right? So, they should not do so on Linux either. Furthermore, the included Software Store is their refuge whenever they need software that’s not already readily available on their systems. Finally, in case they can’t find something in there, they should refer to https://alternativeto.net/.
We don’t see many starter guides for Android to iOS or other OS conversions, but we absolutely should. Vast swathes of user interfaces are non-intuitive to the point of new users not knowing that options exist. Look at one in the Linux group - Ctrl + Alt + F* to get to a console isn’t intuitive in the slightest when you’re coming from WIN + type “CMD” + Enter.
Vast swathes of user interfaces are non-intuitive to the point of new users not knowing that options exist.
Yeah, because they simply don’t care (enough) (yet). Operating systems are mostly just portals/platforms for internet/mail/games/office or what have you. As long as the desired app/program/software works as needed, you won’t see anyone budge about it.
I would love it if people cared more, but they simply don’t (understandably so). Unfortunately, the easiest (or simply least cumbersome) way always thrives. Fear of learning something new or change even terrorizes the Linux space; e.g. systemd, Wayland, atomic/composable/immutable etc.
Heck, most of us don’t read instruction manuals etc. Is it bad behavior? Sure, I guess. But should this prevent us from approaching this problem more pragmatically?
All guides are different. There are tons of parallel efforts.
I would in general avoid
- opinionated upstream (Ubuntu)
- too outdated packages (everything Debian, when not using Flatpaks)
- pretty unstable (Arch, Fedora Rawhide, Debian unstable/testing)
I tried a lot of distros, wanted to use KDE which was pretty bad until Plasma 6 to be honest. So always hopped and stayed with the distro where “just KDE breaks”. Fedora Kinoite.
The distro upgrades are automatic and either fail or are not applied (atomic). The distro is premade and does not need changes, the base is as minimal as reasonably possible (even core apps are Flatpaks, to separate them from the base system).
But you can install some RPM packages, the exact same that you could install on other Fedora, external repos, COPR etc. The moment you install a single one, updates will take longer. I layer Librewolf, virt-manager and more without issues, and updates are in the background.
As the system is so modular, uBlue came to life. They ship base images but also highly opinionated ones. I always used kinoite-main, which is just the Fedora base with minimal changes and especially included restricted codecs. Currently trying Aurora, which has more fancy stuff. Bazzite is the one you can use for possibly the best Gaming experience on Linux, Chris Titus made a video about that.
Bazzite is pretty similar to Nobara I think, with the difference that they dont disable SELinux (lol) and use the way more stable rpm-ostree, so they will simply not break.
You also always have an entire snapshot when updating, not just a kernel. So you can always reset to the past version.
You can make a manual snapshot of a specific version, also before a version upgrade etc. These stay there forever until you remove them again.
The interface is easy but there is no GUI yet. Wouldnt be that hard to do, I think that would be a cool Qt/Kirigami project.
And if you still have strange bugs, you can reset, this means all the custom changes (installs, uninstalls, …) will be removed and you get the current Fedora base install without modifications.
This is simply unique, as this is otherwise only possible with a reinstall. The moment you start modifying a “traditional” distros base, you are pretty irreversibly different from upstream.
Its pretty scary, and with Atomic Fedora I basically dont plan on reinstalling ever again.
