Being lightweight or not doesn’t depend on the distro but the desktop manager (the graphic interface). Unlike Windows, the graphic in Linux is separated from the system so you can use different desktop managers on the same distros.
The lightest DE is LXQT but it’s pretty barebone, XFCE has more features while still being very light, avoid GNOME and KDE.
That being said, I suggest you try Linux MX XFCE or Mint XFCE first, if that’s not light enough for your liking, try Lubuntu, that’s Ubuntu with LXQT as default DE.
For me, it was much like iPhone vs Android. I’ve twice been back to owning an iPhone and have kept leaving because of the more closed ecosystem. The freedom to explore, take apart, modify, hack, learn, etc. I don’t do a lot of that, but it is nice to try things out. So in summary for me its the philosophy behind it.
I’d been tinkering with Linux for years and never using it properly when I saw how Windows Vista performed on my new fairly high end PC and formatted and installed Ubuntu and never looked back. Of course it wasn’t an entirely smooth experience, setting up X properly was fun in those days but the performance was so much better.
You can make your computer your own. You bought it, you deserve control for it, you do not need a corporation to decide things for you.
The benefits of Linux is that you can simply multitask much better, and do things more efficiently. It’s honestly not the same and the two are just not comparable, but not everyone can appreciate or take advantage of that.
For an inexperienced person to set it up, of course it’s not that simple. Those that are comfortable with Windows find all of these benefits trivial over the perceived amount of effort to transition.
For an experienced person like me, Windows is much more of a nuisance to set up. I really like my setups clean, I just can’t stand how dirty Windows gets. To clean your system effectively, you’d have to reformat it. There are things like Scoop, MSYS, Docker, etc. I had to use Windows on my laptop for school. The way I use Windows is like how I use Linux, except Powershell commands are just non-intuitive. It just feels really awkward over Bash.
The things I was using my computer to do were becoming increasingly technical - I work in science, and I’m also a massive nerd outside of that. Many of the programs I was using were on both Windows and Linux, but often I was unable to find troubleshooting help for the Windows versions. I knew enough of Linux that I could jiggle things around and make the Linux advice fit into my Windows situation, but it was awkward and added another layer of uncertainty to the stressful troubleshooting.
At a certain point, it felt like a case of “you can’t find Windows specific advice because who in their right mind would actually be using Windows to do this stuff?”
Who indeed
(That last part is hyperbolic, but it sort of does feel like I was trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver sometimes. Combine that with Windows being annoying and stressful in the personal use context too and I wasn’t having a good time. Things got very messy.
Why did I switch to Linux ? I pushed Windows XP as far as it could go (skipped Vista altogether), and after that I became so frustrated with Windows 7 being so bad that I switched to Linux and never looked back since.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s usefull for others. Write it for yourself and learn from it. I myself wrote copying script for terminal and I am sure no one else going to use it just me and thats fine.
Appimages are like MacOS .app programs. You download a random executable from a random website, that contains everything it needs to run. It’s the antithesis of the Linux way. Great for portability, awful for everything else. There are no automatic updates unless the developer explicitly bothers to implement them.
Snaps are like docker containers. Each snap also contains everything it needs to run, but at least there is a centralized update system.
Flatpaks are like another package manager layered over your OS. It manages its own dependency system isolated from your main dependency management. It updates its stuff pretty much like apt/dnf/pacman.
Native are managed through your distro’s package manager, obviously.
From a feature/version point of view:
If you have a bleeding edge or quickly moving distro, native packages are fine if you want/need up to date software. Arch users shouldn’t need Flatpaks for example. The downside is that those packages are made by the distro’s maintainers so can be anywhere from untested pre-release software (happened in Manjaro) to extremely outdated (like in Debian oldstable).
Flatpaks/Snaps/Appimages are more and more maintained and packaged by their developers. It’s great for them as you only need to package once, all bug reports are on versions you control, and you don’t need to depend on a distro’s maintainer time and will to push updates to users. For stable distros users, this is theoretically the best of both worlds: a stable, tested OS with up to date user facing applications.
From a philosophical point of view:
Appimages and Flatpaks are fully FOSS. Flathub is the dominant ways of distributing Flatpaks but anyone can create a competitor.
Snaps are distributed through Canonical’s Snap Store, which is not FOSS and is vulnerable to Canonical’s corporate meddling.
My personal preference:
Flatpaks for GUI apps, native for CLI tools
Appimages as a last resort if it’s the only way to get a specific app.
When I was 5/6 years old, I loved computers, but I wasn’t necessarily a hobbyist. I learned almost everything on my own. I used to heavily modify my Windows desktop back then with skins and Stardock programs to make my desktop look like Mac OS X. I was a big fan of Apple’s user interface (iOS/iPad as well, both the skeuomorphism and, well, the flat design a little bit).
So when I was 9, I saw Linux. I decided to use wubi and Ubuntu, tried this brand new OS.
It was awesome. I could modify it as I wanted to. I slept on my primary school classes. Ricing at the time felt great, you had so much control over your own desktop.
I have no idea why I stopped at that point. I think Windows 8 looked cool enough to me, but now I think it’s one of the worst OS I’ve ever used. But games just worked there, honestly. Linux felt more like a toy, while Windows was my comfort zone.
Eventually a few years away from a decade later, I did use Debian 7 for hosting stuff like my bots in GCP. Having used Linux to customize the DE and the exposure to the terminal really helped a lot in making things more familiar to me.
Then I thought why don’t I just use Linux desktop again. I started distro hopping. I finally found home in KDE Arch Linux, Proton-GE, the AUR, and Arch Wiki. I rarely do ricing if at all, only because I finally found the setup I’d rather be comfortable with than changing it frequently for no good reason.
I still use W11 to this day on my laptop but only because of school requiring me to use Visual Studio among other things. That’s where Docker, WSL2, scoop, MSYS2, and several open source projects to improve QOL comes in. I can be comfortable with Windows and continue to use Linux without any annoying differences in my workflow. I also just use Vim on everything, and the CLI when I want to do productive work.
I’ve rarely held my mouse on the computer and neither did I work hard to memorize anything. You’d start getting intuitive with everything the moment you start to try understanding the rationale of how stuff is designed to be.
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