I’m looking for a distro to contribute to finally make 'year of Linux desktop, to happen. For me, I see that as full UI/UX behaviour that behaves almost identical to Windows/Mac (is no middle click to paste).
Which distro comes closest to it?
Would suggest Linux Mint
I suggest LMDE not regular mint. Normal mint updates often and ocassionally with bugs while rare and mostly I see for gaming they do happen. Stability and reliability are king. So LMDE aka Linux mint debian edition. Its entirely the same as normal mint made by the same people but it’s rock solid unlike Ubuntu version.
Sincerely I’ve used both to game and daily pc usage even work. LMDE no questions.
Regular Mint is much closer to what the OP is asking for. It removes the crappy Ubuntu stuff but gets to benefit from the good stuff like better hardware support, GUIs for drivers/updates and PPA support which is especially important if you have an AMD GPU as it’s how you’ll get up-to-date Mesa.
Mint, (?)ubuntu, and Pop!_OS are what I suggest because 1) most software install guides target these distros. Anything that uses a package manager other than apt means extra googling and pain for those who just want an OS that works and could care less about the miniscule advantages of one over another 2) stable releases and driver support and 3) similar UI to whatever they’re coming over from. Someone else ITT mentioned KDE for Windows and Gnome(or Cosmic once it’s stable) for Mac folk and I think that tracks well
Getting hung up on feature parity with Windows and Mac is both a waste of time and literally impossible given the major differences between those two UIs. KDE already does most of that legwork anyway, and you can disable middle click paste easily.
IMO your time would be best spent making GUI tooling that doesn’t already exist. Identify a pain point for you that forces you to the terminal and start there.
Really great advice, was thinking of that myself recently. I’m considering making some GUI apps to address my terminal journeys. While I enjoy terminal, not everyone should.
The distro shouldn’t matter too much, but the desktop environment will.
I recommend using KDE if you want something similar to Windows, and GNOME if you want something similar to macOS.
Using a GUI also isn’t really dependent on the DE either for most programs. It’s dependent on whether or not a GUI for it exists in the first place.
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Is MacOs “absolutely no cli”? It wasn’t when I was using it (admittedly, some 10yrs ago), except for the basic things (which any mainstream linux distro also provides).
What about Windows? Back in the day I would have paid to have a semi-decent CLI instead of being forced to use regedit (I hear regedit is still going strong, but I’ve not touched windows for an even longer period than MacOs)
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has a GUI for almost everything. It has a nice GUI for basic system config, and uses YaST2 for deeper settings, and it uses Discover for Flatpaks as well as system library updates.
Although, I have seen a couple people say Discover shouldn’t be used for doing system updates because it can fail, and to only use it for Flatpak updates and installs. I dunno. But it’s not like typing
sudo zypper dupto do a distro upgrade is hard, so I just do that out of an abundance of caution.OpenSUSE has some other cool features too, like having Snapper installed by default for system snapshots. It’s pretty easy to roll back if an upgrade goes sideways. There’s a boot entry that lets you open a previous snapshot as read-only and then you can make that snapshot permanent by creating a new top-level snapshot from it. So then you can at least use your computer while you try to figure out why the upgrade you did failed.
You’ll probably want to use KDE as your desktop environment. It’ll be somewhat familiar if you’re use to Windows, and it has a lot of features that make it comfortable to use.
There are lots of good YouTube videos on why OpenSUSE is pretty cool. Check some out.
Bazzite is the correct answer. Or steam OS. Anything immutable. Mint is not the right answer.
There is no right answer. While I love immutables, they bring their own set of problems to the table.
Sure but they answer the question correctly, whereas alternatives don’t.
It’s not about what you prefer, it’s about what meets the answer to their question most appropriately.
They are asking for a 100% gui/ui experience with not having to access the terminal.
The right answer to send someone to in that case with the ecosystem we have, is immutables. That what they are for.
They said GUI everything AND “just works”. I was more so referring to the latter.
My point is that nothing “just works”. With immutables, your system is less likely to break after updates, but introduce other headaches.
For example, immutable distros usually primarily use flatpaks. But not all apps are available as flatpaks, may have issues running under flatpak (ie IDEs), or have permission issues that you need some know-how to workaround. There may be an offiical package from the developers, but most immutable distros will discourage using such a package if it was an rpm. Even then, if you wanted to use the rpm, Universal Blue is moving in the direction of removing layering (natively bootc, replacing Fedora base). And also the fact that if you do want to overlay, you need to use the terminal.
My experience with ZorinOS has been quite smooth. Though i have opened the terminal for advanced customization and problems with my hardware (nvidia gpu and weird disks configuration), i think there’s good chances you don’t need it. Although im not very tech savy and i’ve heard people say that it’s not a very good option because they’re based on stable but quite old versions of Linux, so i’m just putting the option out here, not saying it’s the best
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Dude, OP is looking for a distro to CONTRIBUTE to because he wants to make year of linux desktop a reality. I think he can use CLI just fine. Looking at how stupid people are these days, his prediction is likely also correct.
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’m probably the same as you. I like computers, I like technical stuff, a command line is intimidating but not scary, I don’t hate troubleshooting and fixing my own computer when I inevitably break something (well, I hate troubleshooting less than I hate trusting anyone else with my computer), and I got into Linux for political reasons (one, freedom and community are important to me as a communist, two, I don’t feel comfortable using products from US companies, if I can avoid it, at this time) and went with something based on Debian.
The difference is that I’d never used Linux before when I found out it existed and was already thinking that it’d be nice if I could ditch Windows because I really don’t want to rely on US corpos anymore.
Yeah. If you don’t want to treat your computer like a project car, you want it to be like a reliable mom van, you want Debian based stability, not the cool bleeding edge stuff.
Though, I will say, a spare computer to tinker with and bleeding edge stuff does cost less than most mechanical projects. (My dad has multiple project cars. My mum yells at him about it in front of the rest of the family. At least he does tend to sell them for a small profit when he gets them running smoothly, he likes doing the project and making money off it more than he actually likes any of the busted up cars he buys as projects. My mum mostly just doesn’t like all the space they take up.)
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I like the reliable mom van example. You can paint the rims all nice, put some stickers on it, hang up your fuzzy dice. But it’s still getting the kids home from soccer practice.
Even on Windows and macOS you will have to use the command line for some tasks sooner or later.
no you wont
I have had to on multiple occasions, maybe we just use it differently
People do use it differently. I never use the CLI on Windows or Linux. I’m not in IT. I just do everyday user things. Many of which don’t even have a CLI command.
Many of which don’t even have a CLI command.
Anything that can’t yet be done in a terminal, someone will eventually figure out how to do with a CLI or at most a TUI. Because terminal junkies are weird and because Linux lets you do that kind of thing more than any other OS does.
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The terminal is not a good way to interact with visual tasks such as drawing, 3D modelling, and working on complex schematics or where things don’t have names. Especially where the typical type of user is a visual, not a text thinker. Its not efficient to leave your working environment to go to the terminal and back either. And text thinkers are often not good at those visual tasks. So I’m not expecting terminal commands to appear in areas where I spend much of my time. I, like many, are not in IT.
Yes, that does track. I do not like terminals regardless of the task, I’m very much a visual type with anything Computer. I’m just saying, terminal junkies will do stupidly inconvenient things just to have done the thing in a terminal.
