Hello!
I’m interested in moving my personal computer to running Linux but I’m not sure where to even begin. As background, I am a casual user and have a desktop with hardware from around 2014 running Windows. I am hoping to setup a NAS drive as a media server in the next year or so, offloading all of the files currently on the Windows desktop and have been interested in open source software such as Jellyfin. I also mostly game on an Xbox and Nintendo Switch, but have used the desktop in the past for gaming such as with an Oculus Rift Headset and some Steam games so not huge on getting games working on the computer. But, I do sometimes torrent using the computer so don’t want to lose that capability (especially with upkeep for the media server).
With all of that said, I didn’t know how to get started with choosing what Linux OS to use, setting it up, backing up my files to make sure I can use them with the new OS, etc. Making the switch seems to have great options for customization and “choosing a distro that works for you”, but I don’t know what would work for me or what will be user friendly for a beginner.
Any tips or pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Linux mint is in my opinion the best distro for a new user, but you may personally not be fond of the UI.
I don’t know how to write a guide for you, but if you have more specific questions feel free to ask them, best of luck!
I like Mint a lot, and have it running on one of my computers, even though it’s not my daily driver.
However, I recently tried Zorin just to see what the fuss is about and honestly I can’t see many reasons to recommend Mint above Zorin to new users. Both are based on Ubuntu LTS and have a bunch of tools to allow purely graphical management and Zorin has several windows-like layouts (both 10 and 7) that are more polished in my view, but Zorin also has the benefit of a more modern compositor and DE base with Wayland support, being based on gnome and mutter.
I’d be interested in your perspective, as from my end the only reason now to recommend mint (until muffin gets sufficiently modernised) would be if you knew a user would prefer cinnamon’s slightly more traditional feel (almost XP), or if in the future LMDE became more of an important feature.
Zorin only updates every two years, which makes it fairly outdated on many fronts.
Is that not the same as Mint? Both are based on Ubuntu LTS.
No, Mint updates twice a year.
Thanks, that’s interesting. Do they only update the cinnamon parts, or is there something else more substantial that is updated?
LMDE is great.
Thank you for the suggestion!
Why do you suggest it for a new user? Is it just more user friendly?
Distros based on Ubuntu, such as Ubuntu itself, Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin, etc. are targeted toward new and casual users. They automate a lot of things that other distros assume their users want to do on their own.
Mint is a popular choice because it’s non-corporate and has a very Windows-like default UI. But you’d be fine on any of the ones I listed.
Yes non-corporate is pretty important to me as the reason to move away from Windows in the first place! Thanks for the suggestions!
It should be noted that linux corporate is a bit different than other corporate. Ubuntu is still open source and doesn’t track you, and Canonical (their owner) knows if they piss off users too much, they’ll just switch distros.
But they do sometimes make top-level decisions that annoy the community (a lot of people hate their proprietary snap packages,) and have a different feel from community-based distros.