wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.
and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.
Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.
Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.
Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.
I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.
Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Seconding this experience with Mint 21.3, although on a laptop here. I just wanted something that works without much fucking about, and it delivers.
Yes! Linux Mint is such a great project - it made me excited to get on my desktop again.
I have a Surface Notebook 2 and for the life of me can’t get Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case) to work with it. No matter which installation style I use, either it crashes during the installation or never boots into the bootloader. Eventually I installed some custom Arch, but I hate it.
If it’s any comfort, it took me a few tries to get it to work. It was over a year ago so the details are a bit rusty. I started out trying to install Debian, and it also crashed during installation, so I went back and tried some of the bug fixes. (One was something to do with the MOK). Debian didn’t work after that but Ubuntu did. It was a strange experience, and there’s nothing that would motivate me to switch after I finally got it to work.
Perhaps you can give it another shot sometime and it’ll work. If you hate the custom arch that’s on it, and you don’t use it, you might as well try.
Yeah I’ll try eventually, but I got another Laptop running Xubuntu just fine, so I just don’t really use the Surface at all. It’s more of a last resort for the time being, and for that, any OS will do.