TL:DR, Kubuntu or Fedora with KDE

Everyone will have their own opinions on this. Just speaking for overall desktop environments, KDE is my top pick. Pretty easy to pick up and change. Works well, feels like Windows but actually good and very customizable. And extensible.

As for the distro behind it, pick your poison. I think either Fedora or Ubuntu. KDE spin would be Kubuntu which is what I currently use. Both are pretty popular and supported well.

Some people dont really care for Ubuntu but coming from Fedora with KDE, its been a much smoother experience personally. Yes, I’m not a fan of snaps, but they can be turned off. In all, I’m using Linux, I’m much better off on Ubuntu than Windows privacy and security wise which are the main things I care about aside from being able to change whatever I god damn please.

I struggle less with shit not working on kubuntu. Fedora for the most part was very solid but there were more than a few times Steam for whatever reason gave me issues on Fedora. I’d consider steam a pretty easy thing to install and use but I had lots of issues with it just not starting or crashing, hanging when downloading updates. Really annoying.

Could be im just better at using linux now than I was back then as Fedora with KDE was my first real jump to Linux from Windows.

Is linux ready for the education sector? Kinda depends on the tools involved.

If its a google classroom kind of workflow and or everything is done in the browser, absolutely. Theres a reason Chromebooks got popular for schools, not just cause they’re cheap, but being more locked down and basically only useful for in browser work made them a good alternative to Windows machines.

However, some stuff specific to certain courses or classes may not be compatible with linux. Something like a photo editing college course that requires adobe (ew) would be an example.

I’d personally love to see Linux in the education sector more. With immutable distros, no licensing costs, and lower hardware requirements, Linux is likely going to be really attractive to schools that are looking for alternatives.

So sick that you were able to do this. Kudos for taking the initiative and making your community better.

IMO, the more self hostable options we have for services, the better. This sounds like a good idea to me.

Good luck with your project and thank you for taking the time to contribute to the free and open source community.

For HBO, I dont think so.

And thinking about it now, i was watching Netflix with my GF the other day at my place using her account, didn’t look like 480p at least. That said, hard for me to tell since my internet rn is limited and i stream most things at 480p, sometimes 720p if its a good day.

I’m probably not the best barometer for stream quality give my situation. Atm I’m just glad it works.

I’m using firefox with drm content turned on and thats all I’ve done.

Not netflix no, after one of the price hikes a couple years back i dont subscribe to them anymore. Hulu worked fine if i remember correctly. Hbo works fine for me rn.

While not perfect, pop os does the job.

I actually made a similar post on this a while back and never quite found what i was looking for.

Ultimately, i just settled for using popos with it scaled up so i could use it easier with a remote i have. Works fine for my needs.

This is rough man, I’m really sorry to hear all that. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time for everyone even without all the gifts.

Maybe instead of gifts for your kids like physical things, plan a day with just you and them. Do something fun as a family or with each of them individually. Memories like that they can cherish for a long time after this year and gifts dont have to be material.

Given what you said, it sounds like you could use a day of fun with them.

I agree with this. I’m using a 1070ti for image gen and it would be more than capable for handling some LLM stuff. An AMD 7700xt ive found dors well with 7B models on my main rig but im sure you could get away with somthing cheaper or less powerful.

That said, the amount of text you can genrate or the context length of its answers will depend the model you use and the larger the model, the more power it takes.

If youre just messing around with it or want it to review or answer small questions, I’d say a 1070ti like I’m using would be just fine. Some folks use even more budget friendly options. If you got a gaming machine with any semi recent GPU, I’d say go for it. Worst case, you can pay for a subscription later if you really want.

Oh interesting. I may look into that. Thank you for the suggestion!

Well he’s gone now but like him and my dad, I too groan often lol.

That gave me a good laugh, my grandfather would most definitely refer to this as a “Groaner”.

Wouldn’t exactly fit my use case because this pc also doubles as my game in bed pc and is what I’m currently using for ai image generation. If i could get big picture mode but still run applications that arent games or for streaming, that’d be ideal. From the recommendations, seems like kodi is a fan favorite but not exactly a DE either. Might work but I’d rather it be a DE than an app i have to run but beggers cant be choosers.

That said, I have 2 chunky servers that my buddy gave me recently and I’m planning on self hosting a lot of things with them which likely include jellyfin.

I will say that im slowly getting the internet to a decent spot at least for streaming, generally as long as my connection is fast enough between starlink and my lte connection (using failover with pfsense) i can usually stream ok. Though with one tower in my area and trees surrounding my place, its never gonna be great.

My desktop pc runs Fedora with Wayland currently and it works really well. I like wayland a lot and was trying to use it on my media pc as well but it wasnt playing well with Firefox for video playback. Not sure if this was fixed yet or if it was even a bug but it was not good when i tried it on kubuntu. Haven’t tried it om popos yet but it might just be an issue with gnome. Ive never been a fan of gnome ever since i started messing around with linux.

Love kde plasma though, its def the best DE ive found so far. Coming from Windows and all the customization it has, its so nice.

I mostly use this pc as a streaming box for online content like youtube or crunchyroll so not really sure kodi would fit that anyways. Will probably have jellyfin up again at some point so might use kodi for that? Idk, mot something im doing anytime soon.

Rn im using the default for PopOS and like you, scaled the ui. Its fine, but not quite right yknow? Ui scaling in Linux hasnt ever felt quite right to me especially when I’m using a tv.

I also use this pc to do other things so its not just a media PC all the time which is another reason why i was looking for a desktop environment rather than a whole new os.

Is mate pretty good for scaling well? I havent used it before but a small gripe is that the default for pop doesnt scale well when the taskbar always shows. Applications get cut off at the bottom. Pretty annoying.

Ah good to know. I thought they looked interesting and very customizable which is why i though it was a legit recommendation lol.

For this pc, wayland support isn’t much of a concern atm but also good to know. Appreciate the info :)

Both of those look interesting. Thank you!

I have looked at kodi briefly, not sure if its exactly what I’m looking for but could be a viable option. Have heard a lot of good things about it of course. Appreciate the suggestion!

I was recently looking for something like this and couldn’t find what i was looking for, so thanks!

Well it sounds delicious, and definitely not guilty of piracy

I am not familiar with that, I’m guessing potato supreme is a username or something?