SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

..all right..you linux dudes..i have decided to move gently in to linux side of things, so, having said that, can you point at linux version which will make win user transition to be as simple and as painless as possible ? What is the version that is as close as possible to windows, in terms of hardware drivers support, while doesnt require installation procedure which involves hunting drivers werewolves, somewhere, far away, in cyberspace..just simple, plain installation that works well, so transition to make things run is smooth, from where further exploring can be done by myself, but initial setup should be friendly as it can get...so..what am I looking for?

I think the site distrowatch will help, and install to a USB stick that can be set to boot in the Bios, so no need to install and you can keep windows, I booted of a hardrive , its fun trying all the distros like steamOS or cromeOS .

its fun.

go with the "mainline" OS distributions:
- Ubuntu and derivates (which remove Ubuntu-"favored" things like "snap" - which is like a "all you need to run this xyz application"-package, for which others prefer ".appimage" instead)
- most famous derivate surely is "Linux Mint" (running this for many years now)
- a "windows like" appearance/behaviour offers "Zorin OS" which is also an Ubuntu based distribution
- "Debian" is something to consider if you want some more "stable" OS (also means you should run it only with "not the newest" hardware - as the support of them requires newer kernels).
- If you want to run bleeding edge hardware you will have to dip into some arch-based distribution like Manjaro ... but I would not recommend arch-stufft for linux beginners (on arch things are "build on your system" instead of installing precompiled stuff ... better performance but surely more hassles)

For many distributions "flavours" exist. Flavours in the sense of the "DE/desktop environment". Linux is just the "DOS" so to say, and the "Windows" consists of stuff like "X11" (basic framework) and visual Tools (composer, task panels, window decorators, window managers, ...). So for example in Linux Mint you have "cinnamon", "mate" and "xfce" as flavours. They come with different tools and different "hardware requirements" (you know ... visual appearance like shadows etc can be demanding for computer gpus of 2005).
I am running Linux Mint XFCE and surely sacrifice some conveniences "cinnamon" (or "mate") offers - but have more free RAM for other stuff (today you might neglect it a bit, having 32gb RAM or more ).

As mainsworthy wrote you can simply put these distros on a thumb stick and try them "live". External "tools" (Blender, Godot, browsers, ...) work on all the "flavours" ... it is more about the basic tools you get installed by default (so the base provided file explorer, picture viewer, mail client, ...) and the basic looks (the "theme" is individual to the distribution - but can of course be changed, and the gui-widget-library can differ - GTK or QT based in the main distributions).

The newer a distribution is, the more likely they use a more current linux kernel. And the kernels contain drivers for a lot of hardware already. For GPUs you most likely install a proprietary driver (so written by nvidia, amd, ...) to have all features at hand. The way to install is today no longer that "command line" as it was ... you simply open up a driver-tool and then select the driver to install with your mouse...).


bye
Ron

Before you embark on your Linux journey. Check that the hardware is fully supported. You don't want to have a laptop that only has wifi, and then find out it's not supported. Or better yet, supported but you have to download the drives. For some drivers, installation usually requires some medium to advanced knowledge.

New ASUS ROG gaming laptops are a bit of a pain to setup.

Ubuntu 2024.04 will have most of the new stable drives in the kernel, and I think that some old drivers have been removed. But if you want one for the derivatives, then you have to wait a while till the catch up. Linux Mint's latest offer based on Ubuntu 2024.04 should be out some time between July-August.

An alternative to the Debian download is Linux Mint DE 6.

..regarding initial trials, related to booting linux from USB..once linux is up and running from USB, what happen with existing windows installation and data on C, D or whatever  drives ? Is it safe? I have just created USB boot Mint, by following official tutorial (https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) , but i havent booted it yet as i needed to confirm, how existing windows installation hard drive data are handled by booted linux..is there anything to be careful about, etc.. 

Linux is great  for rejuvinating out of date older PCs. your windows is safe but you can load the windows drive but i think its read only untill you setup, anyway its obvious what files your looking at.

I did not do the modern live setups, I actualy just installed in full on a USB, you partition it etc... but Live is easy just has less options on install, you need to go into your PC bios by maybe pressing DEL on startup.

and there is some issues installing linux on a stick, make sure you get the right tools to install , a lot of tuts online.

you can even dual boot on your windows pc but its a pain to delete after, so USB sticks are great, plus you can try every distro you want,

also make sure you know basics on what linux shows drives cant remember its like HD0 HD1 or something

a really instersting OS was temple OS, its a religous OS made by one person, its 32bit so use an old PC.

with linux you get some great tools like partitioning

another good use of linux is for astronomy, debian gas a large install or it used to , and you get tons of stuff

snd emulators are plenty, so get your roms

you reallu need to be a programer to get anything proper done in linux lucky us, get used to dos type windows

Quote from: Naughty Alien on June 06, 2024, 12:18:41what happen with existing windows installation and data on C, D or whatever  drives ?

Before you go making any changes. Make sure that you have backed up any data and have a working system recovery disk if anything goes wrong.

Secure boot would need to be disabled, Window Fast boot will need to be turned off.
The WinNT drives will be detected, but not mounted. You can mount them from the file explorer, but there maybe file access restrictions.
You can get around those by making changes to the file /etc/fstab to permanently mount them with the correct permissions.
You usually find mounted drive in /media or /mnt.
 
Linux Mint's installer will give you a number of options on installing to a hard drive, from using the entire Windows partition, to dual booting.

Look for YouTube videos on Secure boot, Windows fast boot, the EFI, making changes to fstab, and dual booting and how to use the distributions installer iso to recover a non booting system.

you have to make the USB stick bootable aswell, so use the tool to install linux live and make the stick bootable, it took me ages to figure out the stick was not bootable, its the right tool you need

One important thing.
Desktop Linux distributions generally do not have the firewall enabled by default, so checking that there is a GUI interface installed and then activating should be one of the first things to do.

Quote from: dawlane on June 06, 2024, 20:19:58One important thing.
Desktop Linux distributions generally do not have the firewall enabled by default, so checking that there is a GUI interface installed and then activating should be one of the first things to do.

Firewalls are most often only needed when not using any router (so direct connect to the internet).

For local network hackers ... there is not much open on ports by default. Would be more worried about using public Wifi hotspots with your smartphone

fstab etc: Do not worry much about these things now. If you live boot from a thumb drive you simply click on the partition/"drive" in the file explorer and can read from there (so useful for simple "backup/repair" stuff). For write-access you would need to do a bit like what dawlane wrote. But yeah, for testing out the linux distribution it surely feels more safe to use your existing drives "readonly" .
Current live-bootable distros often use a persistence-partition on the thumb drive. So an area where it stores your "documents" or whatever you create during running the live session.

So: when trying out the popular distros your existing Windows installation (and the data there) will not get altered / tampered.

When once decided to install such a distro from within the live booted environment the installer will detect your Windows installation and ask what to do (install next to it, install on some free partition, ... or less popular: delete the existing installation .

(U)Efi, Fastboot, ... all this stuff might be disabled on your computer if it is a bit older or you set it up on your own and are an old fart (like we all are) and kept it simply "as it was before" (so acting like a bios, no secure boot no fastboot no ...). If you did it this way then installation will not have any issues. But if you use a more modern setup then you need at least check for some videos (as dawlane suggested). 

But ... check the distros first. Get a feel of whether you could "come along" with it.
I bet you will find a lot of "annoyancies" ("in windows this works this way!!!") but simply think of what you use in Windows ... and how to do these things in Linux. In 90% of the cases it is surfing the web with a browser ... and for us devs it is running developer tools. So maybe visual studio code. And VS Code works way easier here on my Linux box than on the Windows laptop. These programmes will run the same across the OSes (not exactly, but almost ). Means at the end your user experience will not differ much between Linux and Windows. 

Exception are drivers and "development stuff" (developer libs) and of course a more hardened "acl" (compared to older Windowses ... newer Windows are more multiuser-targeted already).


bye
Ron