Ask HN: What Linux distro do you daily drive? I'm a long-time macOS user and I just want a change. Curious what people here actually use every day and what made you stick with it. Curious if you also switched from a Mac too. I'd like to get out of the "walled garden" ecosystem. |
For completeness: I use Windows too because I use some commercial software and can buy used Thinkpads for about $100 any time I want another laptop.
https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy
It was working quite perfectly with 22.04 but there are some caveats with the recent Pop OS "Cosmos" version, I can't find the shortcut to cycle between instances of the same application (cmd + `) and in general the OS is a little buggy and functionality can be quite sparse in some applications like you can't rearrange tabs in their terminal yet and it didn't even have "open new tab to the same folder I'm in" until recently. However the trajectory they're on is a Mac-like system-wide consistency and thoughtfulness, it's just early-stage.
Everything seems to be tied to a subscription now on the Windows/Mac side in some way, its been very off putting for me.
I run Zorin on an old Mac and I am pleased with it.
I’d just get one of the mainstream ones which will have the most community support available, and go with it. Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora most likely. I’ve had good luck with OpenSuse in the past, but not too many people use Suse outside of the enterprise, which can be an issue if you’re just starting out.
Curious what you’re doing for hardware. That’s always the biggest hurdle for me when looking to do anything outside of macOS.
But on other machines, I just run Mint. It is just a nice and comfortable thing. The base Cinnamon desktop is basically just Windows 7 locked in place with a few quality of life improvements. Not too ambitious but that ends up keeping things simple and mostly just works. For those that want more power and tweaking it isn't the best choice.
Now I’m Debian for servers and whatever comfortable Debian based user experience is popular for a laptop. I played with zorin recently. It was fun.
I would still recommend trying it out as your mileage may vary.
One thing that Linux just gets right compared to macos and windows is the package managers. Brew is nice and all, but it's nothing compared to pacman/apt. I also miss it for the window managers. Coming from i3, navigating a mac felt so slow and inefficient.
Linux can be intimidating, but I'd suggest just starting off and try it. Preferably in something more beginner friendly. I've heard good things about Debian. If you want the full on "I (kinda) use arch btw", I'd also check out Manjaro which runs arch in the background.
GL!