You said no ubuntu so here’s some debian distros ;) MX linux, Sparkylinux, LMDE, Q4OS

No seriously though, all of those have their fans and in my opinion deserve a look. MX linux has one of the better xfce setups out of the box imo, sparky has lots of cool DE packages, LMDE is mint but better-nt, and Q4OS is one of the few distros that includes an out of the box trinity setup.

You won’t get what you’re asking for, because what you want is windows to not suck, not for Linux to have GUI. Me too tbf.

I started playing around with linux back in the Ubuntu 11.04 days. I was a tween with computers as a hobby and linux repeatedly humbled me and left me troubleshooting for hours. I had fun playing with it but I stayed with Windows on my main PC.

When I finally could not take it anymore in 2021, I started using fedora, which I grew to hate then moved to opensuse, which I grew to hate so I moved to Debian, and I’ve more or less stayed struggling in the Debian sphere since.

I’m a regular person, I don’t code. I can’t even hello world in python without help. I just need my laptop to be able to serve me the slop that I crave. If you’re that person too, you’re just gonna have to suck it up and learn how linux works. Suffer through it. You’ve been using windows probably since you were eating boogers, don’t expect to just pickup linux over night. I moved to linux for political reasons, and I suspect you’re doing so for similar reasons. It doesn’t get easier, you just get better at using Linux.

If you want my suggestion, pick something based on an LTS distro. I like Debian, but I’m sure there is good stuff based on RHEL, SUSE, whatever. People will sit here and tell you how “out of date” Debian is. You’re coming from windows, you probably regularly use software that nobody has maintained since 2009, you don’t care if bonzibuddy.exe got an AI update, you just want to turn computer on, watch youtube, play vidya game. Don’t let user johnthunderfuck69 in r/linux tell you his arch install has never broken in 20 years of using it. He is built different and you are not johnthunderfuck69.

I’ve had good luck with some of the gui tools included in MX Linux, SparkyLinux, and LMDE(mint debian edition). If you look hard enough between those 3 you’ll probably find a big red button that you can click to order pizza to your house.

Choose Cinnamon, XFCE, or KDE as a desktop environment.

I think I’m about ready to switch to something QT based. Whether that is LXQT, KDE, or Trinity is still to be determined.

I’m a long time xfce user and my battle with CSD has ended with me losing. Too much stuff just breaks. I’ve more or less been forced to use adwaita as my theme for everything.

Hell, I’m already running plenty of QT software already.

Average Redhat shill post

😱 😢

TUI stuff is so underrated. I’d gladly run them exclusively.

I so badly want to do the “old man yells at cloud” meme and be angry that Bazzite is so popular.

I want to do it, I’m resisting hnnnngg

Atomic bad because different and I don’t like things that are different. 🧓

The average day of a “computer wiz” on debian (me):

sudo apt install ./randomshitfromgithub.deb

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list pastes stuff in

“Oh no something isn’t working right!” Pastes some slop from chatgpt into the terminal

9 months later

“This shits fucked beyond repair, time for a clean install!”

Honestly? Not much different than my experience with windows. ;P

I vastly prefer/recommend stable LTS distros. There are really 2 main families of distros for this:

1. Linux Mint / Ubuntu LTS / Debian Stable (Ubuntu is based on Debian, Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS):

Basically endless amount of packages. Most people in the linux world have some familiarity with these so it shouldn’t be hard to get help if you need it.

2. Rocky linux / Almalinux / RHEL (Rocky and Alma aim to be compatible with RHEL software):

For desktop systems people usually opt for fedora, but that distro does not meet my own criteria. Biggest reason you’d use these is for professional VFX software support. For whatever reason a lot of that stuff only has official support for this family of distros. Not sure why!

Get good at 1 of these families of distros. If you aren’t vibing with one its okay to switch to the other. Both have more cutting edge options if you desire them.

Linux Mint is a community favorite and very much is built with a desktop user in mind, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to subject someone to learning any of the others even if they are more server focused. Everything I listed has atleast 5 years of support! If your fiancee isn’t super tech literate, you’ll probably be the one doing a lot of the system maintenance so keeping those major updates sparse is a very good thing. And of course, if you don’t wanna learn 2 different sets of tools, try and keep in the same family of distros.

Also, for desktop environment don’t choose anything crazy obscure. KDE & Gnome are most common, Cinnamon & XFCE are less common but IMO fine. Venture into others at your own peril.

Transfer process depends on what you mean. Transferring your files will probably just take time. I’m hopelessly unorganized so for me backing stuff up takes a few days of combing through a bunch of junk and copying to a flashdrive or cloud storage. Other people might have more efficient ways of dealing with this though.

If you mean software Libreoffice is great local office software, SMplayer is imo a good media player, GIMP, Inkscape, and Krita got art stuff covered. We’re also at the point you can more or less run most windows software on linux with enough fiddling, but that obviously isn’t ideal.

Your biggest hurdle moving to linux full time will be understanding commands when you inevitably do need to change configuration of something with the terminal. If you need help there are usually forums, IRC, matrix, etc.

Happy computing!

I support the antix project for sure, but non-systemd can be a lil tough. Not that other init systems are inherently more difficult, just systemd is far more standardized/widely used and that helps with troubleshooting.

In general, following as many standards and defaults as you can is helpful when learning. Debian, Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, SUSE, and anything most things derivative of them. All get a person used to a certain set of commands and software, all have sane defaults, and all are stable.

Why not? You (usually) just click the check box during install, and you have 1 extra password when you boot up your system. Doesn’t seem too hard but I might be missing something.

It seems for the last 5 years or so, Ubuntu has done a good job of making everyone hate them.

Anyone suggesting a rolling release distro to you is setting you up for failure, especially on a 2014 laptop that will absolutely not benefit from it.

Use Linux Mint. It’s still Linux, you can still break it customize it as much as you want.

edit: Y’all are absolutely insane to downvote this when we are talking about a NEW linux user using a 11 year old laptop.

Maybe not true for phones, but the linux desktop IS usable day to day, and I’d say this has been true for atleast the last 5 years. KDE and GNOME are both fully fledged desktops, and with the popularity of snaps and flatpaks there isn’t really alot getting in the way of software installation either. Even wine/proton has come so far I don’t see the “linux bad for gaming” as an actual excuse anymore.

I started using linux exclusively on desktop in 2021 and I’m not any kind of programmer or anything, just a regular user. :)

This is gonna be a lot of work, like, a lot a lot of work.

You’re on the right track, I think antix is your best starting point. Its the closest you’ll get to a fully featured distro. Damn Small Linux would maybe be my next choice, but I’m not sure if development is ongoing.

Regardless, you want something without systemd. Im personally hopeless without it, but there are plenty of people who daily drive openrc, runit, etc so it’s possible with determination.

id probably do 3gb of swap, maybe more if you are crashing a lot. I suspect even if you keep memory usage down you will be swapping A LOT. If you had even 1gb more memory I’d be less worried, but you’re cutting it close.

If that’s still not light enough, you could try using CDE or Motif as a desktop.

On a modern system built around modern philosophies, its convenient. Doing stuff on systemd seems very intuitive to me and feels like a bit less work than the alternatives (atleast from my non-developer POV). If systemd hadn’t become the standard maybe my opinion would be different, but most of the time it “just works”.

On an older system, the alternatives are definitely lighter! If you’re in the group of people who believes every megabyte counts, you care about systemd. There are also oldschool tech nerds who believe systemd is insecure (they might be right idk anything).

Yeah this really pissed me off. People acting like this is a just a trivial purchase. Even $30 is alot for me sometimes and I live in the US, I can’t imagine how hard that must be to someone in Brazil.

What I think you should do (the smart choice): Compile the newest lts that supports the driver.

What I would do (the stupid choice): Frankenstein my debian install by adding a repo from somewhere else (probably sparkylinux) and pin it so nothing gets automatically pulled from that repo. Then install 6.6 from that repo. Its jank, its definitely not the recommended or supported way to do it, but I’m lazy and if I compile a kernel onto my system manually its 100% never getting updated ever.

Your wifi issues with mint were probably driver related. Ive found especially for newer devices Linux mints kernel is too old and doesn’t always fully support hardware. If you have access to Ethernet or USB hotspot you can likely download and install the newest kernel and fix that issue.

Mint is recommended for a reason, it’s a traditional Linux experience, it’s stable, and it looks familiar to newbies. Plus, lots of us Linux nerds use Debian/Ubuntu (what mint is based on) so it’s easier for us to help you.

TIL that some real boomers are on this site. 😛

I was born 99.