I’d go for Pop if you’re new. It’s not perfect and System 76 are busy developing their window manager so the distro hasn’t seen any major changes since their tiling extension, but it’s fairly stable.
I recently had a guest and we wanted to play games. I pulled a 2018 laptop with an NVidia 2060, installed the latest Pop, Steam and we were playing less than an hour later. It works fine.
I use pop to develop in Rust and Kotlin/Android.
I’m not a fan of Gnome but the tiling in pop is good and that’s what I still use it.
You can always try more distros in a VM and see if/what you like from others.
Mainly C++ with a sprinkling of Python and Rust for fun.
Used to code KDevelop, now VSCode. Build in a regular terminal (I prefer Meson over Cmake, both end up producing Ninja files.) Debug with valgrind, gdb and ddd. Push to Gitlab for my personal projects.
I use Docker for my test environments as it’s easy to bring them up and restore them to mint condition, and it ensures that the longer running tests with side effects don’t interfere with one another.
They take Ubuntu LTS and add their software on top of it. Ubuntu is the base. It’s stable because it’s unchanging, you only get security and bug fixes, no new versions except the Neon additions. It’s implemented like it is because starting with a complete and freely available distro like Ubuntu is a lot less work than building from scratch.
I think it qualifies as a distro by any current definition, but maybe not one they expect to be in general use. It seems to be quite popular despite that. I’ve never used it though so I can’t comment on how it is.
They are both based on Ubuntu so they mostly offer the same software. Neon has a more up to date KDE stack but you can get something similar by adding the backports ppa to Kubuntu although it may not always have the latest version.
Also, KDE Neon only has versions built on the latest Ubuntu LTS, which (I think) only gets a distro upgrade every 2 years. So you’re missing out on all of the interim releases.
Don’t forget that Kubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor while KDE Neon is not. Being an official flavor means that they have to follow certain rules for their design.
Yep. I’m running Neon instead of Kubuntu for this reason. I didn’t want the hassle of dealing with snap, and I wanted the latest KDE stuff, so it’s perfect for me and I’m enjoying the experience. May not be for everyone, though.
I think the meaning behind this is that the largest amount of work doesn’t go into the distro itself and mostly into the KDE software. The Ubuntu base is not developed or maintained by the KDE team, they basically just “borrow” it as a platform for their KDE suite.
PS: they say “most other software is not supported”. Have you ever had any problem installing other programs? As examples, I’d prefer using Firefox to Konqueror, and other programs to KDE connect.
I think they refer to other desktop environments. I’ve never had any issues installing other software on my system, it works just like any other Linux distro.
For that part, they’re just saying that other desktop environments are unsupported. Back when I used KDE Neon I had no problems using it as a daily OS, it is technically less stable (in terms of the system changing with updates, not in terms of crashing) since all the KDE software is updated regularly, but the rest of the software is the same as regular Ubuntu LTS.
I’d say the best way to think of KDE Neon is “Ubuntu LTS, with the latest KDE software directly from them, with less guarantee of stability” imo.
Edit: They also say they’re not “quite” a distro, it is by full definition a distro, but their goal is different. The only intent of KDE Neon is to have a stable base with up to date KDE stuff, while a “distro” as they are saying will have a goal of being a fully fledged OS (or similar). Neon can be used as a full distro, but that’s just a side effect rather than the intent.
I use Debian now. And for kde neon they add their software via debs as regular packages, but you can add either snap or flatpak to it if you want (or both), can’t remember if they preinstall flatpak or not.
Cheers! I’ve heard that one can install Debian and simply choose KDE there. I’m weighing my options… Undecided among Debian+KDE, Kubuntu, and KDE Neon. Although it also depends on how each deals with my machine. Will have to try some live disks…
Also, I’d say of the three, if you want the one that will “just work” the most, I would go with Kubuntu, mainly because you’ll be able to search for stuff and problem fixes easier since there’s a lot of info online for it, because it’s the most commonly used of the three I believe. The other two are still perfectly fine options though, but I think Kubuntu would be the smoothest experience, as you said you were still a bit new to Linux in your post.
Both Flatpak and Snap are preinstalled but it defaults to debs/apt. Though through the command line they strongly recommend the pkcon command over apt itself.
Sometimes install scripts don't work as expected, since things check if you're on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever specifically and "Neon" doesn't match their regex. It's usually not a big deal and fairly trivial to solve.
Regardless, I've actually started to get away from the command line and have embraced the app store. Discover is actually pretty darn good and has lots of the things I want to install. I can choose if I want to install from Discover via Apt, Flatpak, or Snap.
I usually install Flatpak stuff. The Steam Deck has taught me that Flatpak is generally as good or better than actually installing via apt - you don't need to wait on your distro to update sources, and you aren't adding random PPAs. Sometimes you need to fudge the permissions with Flatseal, but it's a one-and-done thing.
I use Microsoft Edge as my browser (yes, really - the Chromium version is just as good as Chrome, it has nifty vertical tabs, I get news on my "new tab" page, and all my settings are saved there). I use Thunderbird for mail, plus Steam, Zoom, Discord, etc. Surprisingly few KDE apps are preinstalled, to be honest - the only KDE apps installed are the ones I want anyway.
No, I mean the version of the KDE software. Like how Windows 7, 8, and 10 are different versions, Desktop Environments also have different version numbers.
Then install Insomnia.rest, VSCodium, and finally electerm.
Basically I’ll program in nodeJS, BunJS, or python.
Then I’ll ask chatGPT via Rubberduck (link below) to generate a docker and docker compose live mount for my dependencies of my frontend and backends. Then I begin to iterate over my work.
My latest flow is basically to start with chatGPT, write a four paragraph description of what I want, have it save me about five hours of boiler plate nonsense, and then disconnect from chatGPT to do the advance stuff like handle security, data structure relationships, etc. Sometimes I go back to chatGPT for how an algorithm should be implemented for efficiency inside a short snippet, then apply it again to my code. There was some great bloom filter work it was able to help me with.
Other stuff I’ve been trying is like podman and I’m interested lately in Jenkins to do builds since I realized I have too many projects that build and work a particular way, I can’t Shepard them all by hand. With that will likely come unit testing, both hopefully assisted by AI to cut down on time. I’d like to reinvest that time on hankerrank and frontend masters to start transitioning to something like rust.
I wouldn’t use multiple partitions anymore. First of all, you would have to decide how large your home and system partitions are which can be annoying later if you either want to install large programs/games on your system or, say, download large videos into your home partition. Apart from that, SSDs life span is reduced if you partition them, because the controller then can’t distribute writes across the while disk, so the cells will not get worn out uniformly.
The SSD write distribution theory sounds plausible but do you have any sources on that?
I wouldn’t be surprised if SSD controllers distribute writes across partitions, transparently to the OS; if I was an engineer designing these things that’s how I’d do it.
Feels like good practice to have /home mounted on a separate partition if you want to install a different distro or reinstall but I’ve never had to test the theory.
This. For home use having a separate / and /home (and maybe a swap) formated as ext4 is solid and allows you to distro hop with ease. As you get more comfortable with Linux, you’ll learn about the luxury of LVM volumes and more exotic filesystems with compression and other features. What is important is to always keep fresh backups. BorgBackup is your friend, you can find a few graphical front ends for it to simplify things.
Works well for distrohopping too, I usually would rename my home to oldhome or something and then just move my files to the new one to prevent dotfiles from potentially causing issues.
Also beware Debian installer with a luks encrypted drive. Where most things will unlock a previously-encrypted drive and use it, Debian installer will (or would, it’s been a while) reformat the encryption before it confirms any potential partition layout changes and you can end up with an empty drive before you know it.
Just add a new user when you install a new distro, then you can have a fresh start. If you want to try your old one, just useradd you old user and try it out.
Also because every time you are rebuilding your system it saves every iteration so if you totally fuck up your system you can just boot an earlier build and away you go
As far as I’ve used it pretty much everything on NixOS “just works” as long as you’ve got the right config (which can be searched on search.nixos.org or just googled
I like and use NixOS, but if this is the first time OP is using Linux, I’d recommend sticking with something like Pop. When something goes wrong, there’s a pretty good chance that there will already be a SO post for Pop or Ubuntu on how to fix it.
For basic stuff is pretty easy, but once you try to go outside of what’s in option, you might find yourself in a deep rabbit hole. Definitely not a beginner distro.
I’ve yet to find anything particularly difficult to do, 99% of things have options/packages and you can still install stuff with snap/flatpak/appimage if not
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