Stam, my posts are not meant to be taken as defensive, if they are coming off that way, you have my apologies. I am most certainly not trying to start a pissing contest, in my first response you might remember I said -
bogs wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 11:44 am
...if you have something that works for you, stay on that. Lots of people get real world work done on their OS of choice...
I didn't mean anything nasty by that, I mean if OSX works for you, stick with it. In the rest of my post(s), I am merely pointing out that most of what you said simply isn't so today as far as using 'nix goes.
You tried an offbeat distro designed to be dualbooted on a chromebook (or run from inside Chrome itself). This is not what I'd consider a good test run for 'nix, and considering how limited the storage is on a chromebook, if anything, I'd scrap the chrome os completely or stick a larger drive in it.
The main problem after that point is likely to be the cpu, unless your chromebook was a higher end unit with an i3 in it, then your likely running a celeron.
The specific question of my OP was if there was a distro that you would recommend for people new to linux.
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i have looked for this answer online and commonest recommendations seem to be Ubuntu, Mint, ElementaryOS and ZorinOS.
Ubuntu comes up in these searches a lot. Mint is Ubuntu with an in house desktop (Cinnamon). Elementary is Ubuntu made to look like a mac. Zorin is based on Ubuntu. Seeing a theme here?
Ubuntu and Mint are extremely similar, the other distros are more or less similar to those. The reason Ubuntu comes up so much is that as Richard pointed out somewhere else, the installer is very easy to run (as long as you have some basic knowledge of how your own computer works), and there is a LOT of information about how to solve particular issues since there are a lot of users in the base.
Ubuntu, btw, is based on a much older distro, Debian. In the 'nix world, there are 3 main distros / packaging systems and one that is found more often in BSD.
Debian, and Debian based distros, use dpkg/apt*
Fedora, Suse, and some others use rpm/yum
BSD's and a few 'nixs use pacman
and lastly, there are a few (like Gentoo) that use Portage.
Gentoo is an unusual distro in that you build it from source. I don't think that is beginner friendly right off the bat, but certainly it does no harm to look at it.
No matter what distro you eventually look at, you are going to have to know some things about your hardware, in particular your hard drive. Installing into a VM eliminates your need to know about that, since you are installing 'nix all by itself, and all the installers of all the versions I mentioned have an automatic setting that works pretty good for a default.
When looking at various distros, your also going to see things like "light weight" describing a particular distro. Keep in mind that (usually) applies in comparison to the parent distro (usually). In other words, Xubuntu is considered light weight compared to full original Ubuntu.
Myself, I think all of the 'buntu's are bloated and heavy as heck, the only way your going to get a fast system from those are if your hardware is fast already, or if you install it as a minimal server and add the desktop components yourself, which although it isn't rocket science, it is not something again that I would recommend for a beginner.
Almost all of the rest of the 'nix experience is going to boil down to your personal taste in desktop environments, which unlike OSX and Windows come in at least 5 major flavors and, the last time I counted, was upwards of 20 or more to choose from.
Keep in mind that quite a few of the esoteric desktop environments look quite lovely, some are utilitarian, and some are just plain weird. Taste is to the beholder, but it is an attractive feature you won't find almost anywhere else.
If you wind up on a Debian / Ubuntu based distro (like the above or as I mentioned, Q4OS), you can install packages using the CLI (apt or dpkg) or you can use a GUI package manager like Synaptic. Some distros use that by default, or they have a way to install it that is fairly easy. In Q4OS for instance, you can install that, a browser, etc. from a welcome screen or just pick a full installation in the desktop profiler and you'll wind up with their default recommendations.
That way is a little heavy for my tastes, I usually go with a core system no matter the distro and choose what I want on it, but, for someone just starting it is a viable option.
I hope that reply is of more help to you than my previous ones were, good luck with it.