It also gets a lot of research money. As a UW grad, I can confirm that the students are the absolute lowest priority though. If you’re not in a research-focused post grad program, you’re seen as a chore.

I’ll throw Alpine Linux into the mix. Not sure how well it supports older hardware, but it’s really small.

They obviously don’t have the features that Rufus has, but I’ve ended up using the default USB image writers that come pre-installed (found them on both Mint and Manjaro, probably available on others). If you’re just looking to write an ISO, check to see if you already have one.

People have been running GUIs on much less for decades–though if you’re trying to use something out-of-the-box, anything modern will certainly not do well. But there’s tons of RPi stuff that runs on meager specs.

I’d have expected people would use these things for similar projects as SBCs.

While I understand the author’s frustration with the developers not giving as much weight to the (non-contributing) community, the fact is that the developers get to make the final call on this, and they get to use whatever criteria they like.

And there’s no definitive answer to whether a name change would be a net positive or negative–a handful of complaints vs brand dilution is a subjective call. And for the number of users, I get the impression that it’s not as big of a deal to most people as it is to the author.

You can make most distros work like most others, with enough tweaking. The main difference at this point isn’t what you can do with them, but how they’re set up by default, which typically reflects their thing (e.g., Debian is super stable vs Arch giving access to the latest and greatest).

To be honest, I think the homogenization is a net positive. I doubt we’d have the diverse driver support that makes Linux a viable desktop OS if we didn’t have lots of similarities. And it’s a natural thing–it turns out that most people want computers to do a relatively similar variety of things, so all the major distros end up moving a similar direction. And with open source, when one distro implements a really nice feature, it makes sense everyone else would port it as well.

Welcome! I was actually in the same boat a year or two ago–every time I tried before that, there was a lot of finagling to get everything working. When I upgraded to Win11, and was having a rough time getting drivers going, I ended up trying Mint. Everything worked out of the box and I haven’t looked back.

1. I find it helpful to have a separate data partition (though I don’t actually use it for /home because I find that gets messy quickly). Separate data is nice in case you’re concerned about something getting messed up, or if you like to try another distros (I ended up switching to Manjaro a while ago). Not necessary, but whatever you do, I recommend keeping it relatively simple.

2. Can’t comment, haven’t tried.

3. Last I checked, there was no client for Google Drive or Proton Drive. Not sure about Dropbox. I’ve heard of rclone but haven’t tried it.

4. I usually try apt first, then check the GUI for a flatpak if needed. I personally prefer native apps/deb packages, but that’s a subjective thing.

5. I use the default terminal and Firefox install. I ended up moving my actual personal data out of /home and it’s been easier to keep it all tidy (there’s even a way to point the file manager shortcuts to an alternate location). Tip: if you happen to have an Nvidia card, there’s a GUI utility to switch to a non-free driver, which improved things for me. My other tip: especially if you have a separate data partition, give yourself permission to not get everything perfect, and that you might want a clean install somewhere down the road. Mint isn’t quite as easy to reinstall as something like SilverBlue, but it’s not that hard I’ve found.

Have fun!

Try Linux Mint. You set it up on a USB drive, and you can try using it before you install it. So load it up, and try doing a few things you’d normally do (check email, etc.). This way, you can get your feet wet without committing fully. If you find you like it, you can do an installation (and it doesn’t require any fancy terminal stuff).

Dual boot is definitely more tricky to get going. I just set up a Windows partition again to play a game that uses Easy Anti Cheat, and it took some time to have everything working happily.

I’ve used both Linux Mint and Manjaro, and my Nvidia card has done fine in both. I switched to Mint from Windows because it was easier and faster to set up under Mint (Windows was missing a bunch of drivers and the OEM’s site didn’t have updated ones). The only configuration I had to do was select the proprietary driver (and Mint has a nice little GUI for that). If you’re on the fence, I highly recommend trying Mint.

That’s honestly its biggest advantage over Ubuntu + Cinnamon.

Hmm… it’s almost like if you train a model on biased data you get biased results…

I just got this one a few weeks ago. Only used it for 15 or 20 hours, but it seems good so far.