I’m to dumb for ARCH, and I find default Fedora and Ubuntu very annoying (although I haven’t tried them in a while). I did have a good experience with mint several years ago. What distros should I consider?
Mint is still basically mint from several years ago. Having tried a dizzying array of them it continues to be easy and hated on because it doesn’t involve text based configing your life away. That said, because it lags behind compared to other distros in updating the kernel, the thing that makes new hardware work, it can have a hard time with things made recently. Try the edge ISO, which has a newer kernel. The team is working on more frequent updates, Wayland (a thing you ideally never have to ever know what it is), and just delivers a comfortable desktop experience since I first screwed up my computers with Linux in 2007.
The Ubuntu version is still probably the best. You won’t have to think about graphics drivers or printers. It all sort of just… Works. They rip the awful out of Ubuntu and keep the excellent, world class, support in place. You’d be hard pressed for find a better commercial and non-commercial support. You can easily search for any problems you do run into and there will not be some esoteric DISCORD as your support. There are countless forms with literally thousands of people probably somewhat knowledgeable on how to address issues. Things like CUDA and dev work are also extremely supported. My barometer is how much time I have to crap away to get a printer and scanner work. Both of which just work with Linux Mint out of the box.
I’m to dumb for ARCH, and I find default Fedora and Ubuntu very annoying (although I haven’t tried them in a while). I did have a good experience with mint several years ago. What distros should I consider?
Mint is still basically mint from several years ago. Having tried a dizzying array of them it continues to be easy and hated on because it doesn’t involve text based configing your life away. That said, because it lags behind compared to other distros in updating the kernel, the thing that makes new hardware work, it can have a hard time with things made recently. Try the edge ISO, which has a newer kernel. The team is working on more frequent updates, Wayland (a thing you ideally never have to ever know what it is), and just delivers a comfortable desktop experience since I first screwed up my computers with Linux in 2007.
Is LMDE easy tok? Snaps scare me. (I have Nvidia 30xx btw.)
The Ubuntu version is still probably the best. You won’t have to think about graphics drivers or printers. It all sort of just… Works. They rip the awful out of Ubuntu and keep the excellent, world class, support in place. You’d be hard pressed for find a better commercial and non-commercial support. You can easily search for any problems you do run into and there will not be some esoteric DISCORD as your support. There are countless forms with literally thousands of people probably somewhat knowledgeable on how to address issues. Things like CUDA and dev work are also extremely supported. My barometer is how much time I have to crap away to get a printer and scanner work. Both of which just work with Linux Mint out of the box.
Linux Mint, Pop!_OS and ZorinOS are pretty nice for new users. If you want to get a little more advanced, maybe check out something like Fedora Atomic (e.g. Kinoite, Silverblue) or Universal Blue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin). Arch isn’t actually that hard, they have an installation script that makes everything super easy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YE1LlTxfMQ), or you could watch a video on how to install it manually (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JYIAaLrwcY, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC7NMbl4goo)