side note i like the use of calvin over that other guy

Not a hot take at all. Asking someone to go from a GUI heavy operating system to a command line heavy one and be just as productive is lunacy. Like all major changes it is important to ween off the old thing.

My biggest hurdle with the switch has been permission related issues, and you can’t deal with those cleanly with a UI, and every help thread under the sun throws out a bunch of command line commands giving a solution without explaining why those changes are needed. It may seem like Unix 101 to experienced Linux users, but it is really cryptic to newcomers coming from operating systems that are…cough more lenient with their permissions.

There is also a mentality that UIs are much more idiot proof than command line. UIs are written by people who actually know the OS so we can’t accidentally delete our home folder because of a typo. It is a very legitimate concern.

New Linux Users don’t even know the difference.

i love K⭐D⭐E

Great take. But you know the real sneaky one that trips you up? File system.

I wouldn’t call myself a beginner, but every time I install a Linux system seriously I see those filesystem choices and have to dig through volumes of turbo-nerd debates on super fine intricacies between them, usually debating their merits in super high-risk critical contexts.

I still don’t come away with knowing which one will be best for me long-term in a practical sense.

As well as tons of “It ruined my whole system” or “Wrote my SSD to death” FUD that is usually outdated but nevertheless persists.

Honestly nowadays I just happily throw BTRFS on there because it’s included on the install and allows snapshots and rollbacks. EZPZ.

For everything else, EXT4, and for OS-shared storage, NTFS.

But it took AGES to arrive to this conclusion. Beginners will have their heads spun at this choice, guaranteed. It’s frustrating.

I use i3wm btw

I’ve picked xfce on basically every distro I’ve used and I’ve hopped through like 30 distro’s.

It’s like learning how to interact with Lemmy, and then deciding which app you want to use to interact with it.

The most important thing for most new Linux users would be a pathway to getting support. Because of this the distro you use matters much more than the DE because each of the major distro’s have different pipelines that the funnel users in to getting support. The package manager lock in is distro dependent and depending on the philosophy that they subscribe to can be the difference between how many steps a new user has to take to get a working system up and running. Thankfully, with the rise of flatpak, appimage and snap being more popular than ever package availability is much more streamlined but that is another layer on top of an already overwhelming package system for new users. The defaults for all of this depends on your distro which can be different. Heck we haven’t even gotten to support cycles which depending on user needs can be different. Because not every user has or wants what comes with for example maintaining an rolling release distribution. Did they setup their system to have snapshots so they can roll everything back when the new kernel update breaks something system critical and they have a presentation at 2:00? None of these things are really DE dependent but are baked in to the defaults you subscribe to when you choose a disto. The good part is that if you don’t like how something is configured you can change everything easily depending on how well documented it is. This is why it’s more important to choose a distro with good documentation or at least a active enough community so when you run into hangups you can get some sort of resolution.

I 100% agree! Am a pretty new user of Nobara as a daily driver, switched like a month ago (I did have extensive CLI experience with Linux servers, along with Kali VM for work), and I’ve only realized what DE actually is only a week ago, because no one mentioned how important choice it is - it was usually just a note, that wasn’t given enough importance.

So please, if you’re ever recommending any linux distro to somenone who’s asking, please include a short paragraph about what DE is and how importnant choice it actually is, and that they should not ignore it. I hated Gnome, and KDE feels so much better (only found about it when reinstalling broken first Fedora install to Nobara), but I didn’t know I can switch or that there was that choice in the first place - I though KDE vs Gome is a back-end thing, similar to X11 vs Wayland. It’s not, but people don’t usually explain it when recommending distributions.

I don’t use a DE, BTW.

• guess right which distro I use and win a pet!

I started with Ubuntu and slowly tried getting used to Gnome over the course of a few months (mainly using windows, every now and then hopping into Ubuntu when not gaming). I learned of KDE, tried it in Kubuntu, and it all instantly clicked for me. I switched over in about a week and haven’t had much reason to boot Windows since.

It turned out that front-facing experience was incredibly important to me.

Just installed Mint to try it out because it looks similar to Windows. Don’t judge me.

And for new users choosing a distro with big user base (thus having a better support system) should be a top priority. Instead newbies are often advised to use an obscure distro that in theory might be a good fit, but isn’t. Probably those who do the recommendations are Linux testers (using VZ) rather than Linux users and mostly evaluate a distro based on install process and out of the box usage.

Configuring a big distro to your needs is much better than choosing a nishe distro.

I do not fear OpenBSD, but FVWM… it scares me.