• 1 Post
  • 37 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • Mint or Pop_OS are likely the most widely recommended distros I know of for beginners. I haven’t tried either of them myself, but from what I hear about them I’m inclined to agree. Personally I would NOT recommend a rolling release distro to beginners. Too much potential to break things way too easily and way too often, which would likely require digging into the terminal to fix. Terminal-averse beginners wouldn’t be served well by that at all.




  • Grangle1@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux suggestion
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    I don’t remember if I went with the official or the pure KDE version. Either one should work. You can always try both out in a live USB before installing. The gaming focus refers to some modifications made to some drivers/software for the purpose of improving gaming performance. When you update your software you have to use Nobara’s update program in order to ensure that those mods are applied and preserved.


  • Grangle1@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux suggestion
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    That’s a thing with Neon. It’s the “testing ground” for new KDE releases so they won’t guarantee stability. It literally is just Ubuntu LTS with a KDE repo thrown on top, and the Neon devs themselves only maintain that repo, with just a short delay after the new Ubuntu LTS release comes out. In Neon, the users are the quality control for KDE releases. I was using it for a little over a year until the rebase to Ubintu 24.04 broke my install. I went to Nobara, a gaming focused distro based on Fedora that uses a custom version of KDE as the default. I just upgraded to the newest version not realizing it wasn’t official yet, and it must have been the smoothest major version upgrade I’ve ever had in a non-rolling distro. It’s maintained by GloriousEggroll, who also builds/maintains the customized GE versions of Proton on Steam. I’m finding it’s not just a good gaming distro but a solid and stable distro overall. GloriousEggroll puts a lot of work into ensuring that on top of the Proton work he does. If you don’t want the gaming performance customizations he makes, try Fedora KDE spin, it’s likely to be pretty similar and I rarely ever hear someone have a problem with Fedora.

    On your other question, next time you reinstall you can create a separate Home partition on your drive that should allow you to do what you’re looking for. So you have your boot and swap partitions and the one you install your distro to, and then your home partition, so you just install the new distro over the old distro and it should leave your home partition alone.


  • Combination of software availability and the perception that Linux is only for developers/servers and you have to be a computer genius to use it. Even if you can convince someone that just running Linux isn’t rocket science, there’s still commonly used software like the Adobe suite and MS Office that just don’t have feature-parity level alternatives, even if those alternatives are almost there. I can do most of the stuff I used to do at work on LibreOffice compared to MS Office, but not everything. And while compatibility with the MS Office file types has really improved leaps and bounds over time, there’s still some noticeable issues when opening those documents with one program after making changes with the other. People mention Photoshop a lot as a deal-breaker, but especially with GIMP 3.0 coming, GIMP will be a lot closer to Photoshop than most Linux PDF editors are to Acrobat. The only one I can find that has even close to Acrobat’s features is Master PDF Editor, a piece of paid software (if you want all those features without an annoying watermark) that I don’t think the free version of is in many repos. People say to use LibreOffice Draw, but that’s drawing software meant for entirely different file types and is really not good for any PDF with any type of formatting in it because Draw isn’t designed to handle it. I don’t need those features on my own home PC, so I’ve been running Linux on my personal machines since 2009, but for those who do need those things, it might be a hard sell.


  • I’ve used GNOME in the past but currently use KDE Plasma. Both are good, but as for recommendations most Linux people I know of say for new users that if you’re coming from Windows start with Plasma and if you’re coming from Mac OS start with GNOME since those are the closer desktops to what you used before and will make things a bit easier. Depending on the distro you choose you may also have access to other desktops like Cinnamon, which I haven’t used but have heard is even easier than Plasma for new users coming from Windows. It’s not ready for daily use yet, but the upcoming Cosmic desktop may also be quite good for that.










  • I found that all I needed to do to add a library was close the app and reopen after the first time opening the version built from source. Built myself a layout similar to the Obsidian preset. Really nice customizable player! I have two recommendations: have some way for the Library Filter widget to show individual tracks so you can add them to a playlist, and have some way to actually view and edit the Playback Queue. Other than that, this is a great player!