I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn’t want to mess with it to try out different distros.
But today, my company’s IT department announced that they have some spare old Laptops to give away (technically because they didn’t meet the specs for Windows 11, didn’t stop the IT department from giving them out with Windows 11 pre installed though)
So now I got a few devices to play around with!! They’re a Precision 7530 and a Latitude 7390 2-in-1!
I already got ZorinOS running on the little guy because apparently Zorin is nice for Touchscreen support. For the big guy I was initially thinking that I could try Bazzite, but the installer was like “Intel UHD Graphics aren’t really recommended” so I might try something else first. Any recommendations? I mainly just want to try as many different flavors of Linux as I can haha
You should try Fedora. It’s the one used by Linus.
Void linux xfce. Just uses so little ram I love it.
Very reasonable in this economy!
Did you try CachyOS ? https://cachyos.org/ I’m impressed by how snappy it is on older computers.
dont forget your programming socks
Man I wish I could participate in the programmer socks joke, but I feel like it just doesn’t really hit the same when an afab person does it :(
“Intel UHD Graphics aren’t really recommended”
Because Bazzite is gaming oriented and Intel UHD is barely good enough to render a display?
Well, it works for MC, older games, even stray runs somewhat (from my experience). It’s decent for a 300€ laptop with a quad core like the ones in the post.
I actually have tried it on the bigger laptop by now and somehow Bazzite runs Sekiro more smoothly than my “Gaming” Lenovo Legion Y530 that has an actual GPU and is from around the same time ever did. 🫣 It was completely unplayable on my other Laptop… which makes me think that maybe I misconfigured it to not actually use the GPU back in the day??? I’ll have to experiment with that a bit more haha
Ah, the newer UHD?
I have a Dell with UHD+Nvidia, took me a while to get Prime working to switch video cards. Even on UHD, it could do basic Steam games and Minecraft if you didn’t have high expectations.
Try out Debian. Stable, base of many other distros, loads of documentation, huge helpful community, just runs and barely ever breaks (I can’t even remember the last time I had issues).
debian’s netinstaller is great
For desktop I run debian sid (unstable), despite the name it very rarely breaks. And once in a blue moon when it does it gets fixed in a few hours/a day. Usually it is just some package that doesn’t play nicely with something else, so not like it is unusable during that time.
The unstable part is that they do not guarantee that it will work, it is still more stable than most other distros and you get new packages.
Why doesn’t anybody ever recommend Debian testing? It has stricter quality criteria than unstable while being almost as up-to-date.
I agree that Debian Stable is not a great fit for desktop as the packages get very old between releases.
And end with Vanilla Arch, for me atleast I distro hop every week when I got into Linux for the first time and I thought I’m going to use Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, EndeavourOS as my main but ended up using Arch Linux permanently instead. For me it’s the “just work” distro easy to use and troubleshoot
If you wanna have fun, i woild recommend bedrock linux, haven’t tried it, but it sounds cool and interesting. Also nixos might be fun to try in my opinion.
Nix might be a bit overwhelming when his first installation of linux was only a few months ago, I guess :D
It might be overwhelming but still fun to explore new things, right?
Ooh, Nix looks interesting, I’d be down for the challenge!
Nix is such a cool project. If I had more time I’d definitely give it a go.
I use NixOS myself and I love it, i’ll never use another distro again. plus with distrobox I don’t even need to use another distro, I already have all the major ones on my NixOS System.
If you do decide to go the Nix route keep in mind there’s really no right nor wrong way to have your system set up. it’s all personal preference. Some people will say flakes are the way to go, some people will say the opposite. Some people like having their system in modules, some don’t. Some like using the home-manager, some don’t. It’s all up to you. All I will suggest though is if you do try Nix set up a Git repo somewhere like on codeberg for it. Just makes things easier.
There’s GuixSD too.
Basically the same as NixOS, but purely Free Software only, and, instead of being configured by a bespoke configuration language unique to it, GuixSD is configured in Guile, so you’d be learning a transferable skill at least. I hear NixOS’s package repository’s unbeaten though.
Listen, I use guix so I’m not against you, but claiming that Guile, or even any scheme / lisp, is a transferable skill is a stretch 😛
As a software developer for 20 years, configuring guix is the only time I’ve encountered guile. And the only time I’ve used any kind of lisp is when I forced myself to during a coding challenge or advent of code thing, just for interest’s sake.
So again, I know what you’re saying, but for me, deep in the industry, guile might as well be a bespoke language for configuring guix 😅
But, that you did not transfer those skills to any of the things, or write your own from scratch, nor make use of that superpower seems to be just on you, and while that may be true for you, that it might as well be just a bespoke language only for configuring guix, the skills still remain transferable, if not yet transferred. ;)
(And, I do get what you’re saying… I have similar for haskell, the effectively bespoke configuration language just for xmonad (~ plus a chatbot)).
I don’t understand… It wasn’t even an Arch-based distro!
so I might try something else first. Any recommendations?
try 'em all.
Edit: PS: distrowatch’s search is handy: e.g. https://distrowatch.com/search.php?defaultinit=Not+systemd [Edit: PS: maybe try {in approximate increasing ambitiousness] antix, devuan (or other respins of devuan, like expiron, peppermint, vendefoul, shebang, gnuinos), pclinuxos, salix, slackel, slackware, calculatelinux, artix, obarun, voidlinux, decibellinux, gentoo, crux (or kwort), sidelinux(?), milis(?),bedrock, guixSD, LFS. Or whatever… :) Have fun exploring.
GL! Hope you have a great time.
Check out https://www.wesnoth.org/ and https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page :D
Yes.
Have fun.
Check out https://pioneerspacesim.net/ and https://flarerpg.org/ and https://www.luanti.org/en/ :D
(If on a distro with apt, easy to
apt searchfor these, andapt installthem. Probably.)
You can, if you have far to much time in your hands, install arch, gentoo, vor any other distro with a non graphical installer. I believe its a great experience, especially because you learn a bit more about the internels, and a few cool bash commands.
Bazzite is the more gaming oriented flavour of Universal Blue’s distros, but take a look at Bluefin if you wanna try something similar (but not focused on gaming, although gaming also works fine on it). I’ve used it for about a year or so myself, and I love it. It’s immutable so it “just works”, but I can still play around and tinker with distroboxes or VMs.
Umm… With 2 free computers and nothing on them.
Run down the list and install all the different distros. Test them out for a few weeks then onto the next. Pretty soon you’ll one that you prefer.
Advanced distro hopping form, distro rotation.
This is the way.
The only way to find the right distro is to try them out, on the end device, with the end user.
I just got a new laptop for my work (which I also use for personal stuff, it’s a family business).
It came with Windows 11 but I’d got a bigger SSD which I’d installed before I’d even turned it on so Windows never even got a chance to boot.
I installed one of the Fedora atomic distros and it seems to be pretty good, though I’m trying to figure out how to tune battery life. I’ve setup TLP but haven’t noticed any improvement, though, it’s still much better than when I first tried Linux on a laptop.
I’d never used Fedora before, but the first distro I ever used was Ubuntu Dapper Drake and I’ve dipped my toes occasionally since then, but never fully committed until now
