I would stick to basic recommendations and go from easiest to more and more advanced distribution, to avoid scaring beginners :
graphical installation + easy to setup (nvidia + codec )+stable : basically Ubuntu based distribution (but not Ubuntu, some snaps, i.e. steams, are more bugged than the flatpak and the .deb . I wouldn’t recommand a distribution that force bugged app for beginners ) + others
graphical installation : user will have to install nvidia drivers, codec or other useful things manually. The distribution can have several update a week with more risk to break, but is still considered solid and has a preconfigured way to roll back (snapshot) or more lightweigth and stable depending of the choice : fedora, opensuse tumbleweed, Debian+ others…
do it yourself distributions : for advanced users or motivated people that want to learn it the hard way. Distributions are up to date and have either a risk to break or user has to manually configure about everything (or both ) : arch, void Linux, gentoo, …
“Gaming” distributions could be placed between the 2 first categories as they are a kind of out of the box distribution but more up to date than the stable distributions.
Low ram/CPU consumption could be a side option at every step (easy, mid, hard)
I didn’t tried immutable distributions in a while, so I don’t know how to place them. My experience one year ago (kinoite, silver blue, blend os), was that it was more complicated than a regular distribution to do what I needed, but it was 1 year ago, so I wouldn’t know where to place it.
I’m quite a beginner in Linux, I love to test distributions to see how far I can go without using the terminal, and without breaking the distribution. So my vision can be quite narrow comparing to more experienced users.
Budgie, XFCE, Mate, LxQt in the “old but traditional” desktops; all will switch to wayland and no longer really fit
I would also add the category
"I want a stable experience without many changes and accept old bugs that are not fixed for an eternity" (Debian stable, Almalinux, Rockylinux, Opensuse Leap, *Ubuntu LTS & derivatives)
“I want new updates with the latest and greatest but breakages” (Arch, Gentoo, Fedora rawhide, opensuse tumbleweed, Debian testing?)
“I want something in between” (Fedora, Opensuse slowroll, Ubuntu)
I was a fan of Alacritty and used it for the last 3 years, but I was frustrated by the lack of features (no scroll bar, no native tabs) and the disrespectful way the developers handled feature requests.
A few weeks ago someone on this site recommended Wezterm, so I tried it out, and it’s amazing. It’s everything I was hoping Alacritty would be or could become.
I was a fan of Alacritty and used it for the last 3 years, but I was frustrated by the lack of features
You were a fan, but didn’t realise that it’s minimal on purpose?
It’s AFAIK the only popular, minimal, GPU accelerated terminal emulator. It doesn’t have tabs, multiplexing, and other features because it’s not supposed to. Your wm/tmux handles that already, and scrollbars are waste of screen space.
Would you also complain that a flat head screwdriver is missing those cross bits to help you unscrew phillips heads?
Sleeping on it: major version upgrades. In Debian there’s no automatic way to do it as far as I know?
For people with little technical experience, this could be a substantial hurdle or even problem.
This is how you upgrade from Debian 11 to Debian 12: www.debian.org/releases/…/ch-upgrading.en.html
While this is a great and thorough guide for sys admins, people who just want their 'puter will be unable to follow.
Could be, I haven’t tested it in a while on a desktop or a laptop. Snaps are fine for new users. In fact they are a net benefit. I’m speaking from point of view of availability of software and function, not technology or ideology.
I am strictly speaking about user experience here. If something goes wrong with snaps, solutions are harder to find than traditional ways of installing software. I don’t think most users care about the underlying systems otherwise.
Ubuntu and KDE was a horrible experience for me. They theme GNOME like hell which is very controversial too. Their snaps are basically a one-company-project nobody really likes.
The default desktop experience has been pretty consistent since 18.04, 6 years ago. Controversial or not, it worked well in 2018 and it works well today. We’ve been using it on hundreds of our dev workstations since 2017. Most folks came from Windows.
You either have the ability to install it on your host directly (e.g. layering it via rpm-ostree to use the Fedora repos). This is usually not recommended, for Fedora Atomic for example, this hugely increases the update times and should only be used for drivers or if something doesn’t work otherwise.
Or you use Distrobox/ Toolbx for that. Here’s a link on a post I made recently: feddit.de/post/8018330
thank you, I think I’ll install a atomic distro as my first distro now. I like the fact that it’s hard to break but still gives the full Linux experience
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