[oldsj]

So I got all excited and bought a Dell xps 13. I originally just wanted a laptop that would work great with linux but of course it turned out to be more work than it was worth so I switched to win10. I joined the windows insider program and messed with bash on Windows for a few hours but found that it's definitely not ready yet. It's a great idea and I'm glad they are working on it but simple thing like hitting ctrl+x to exit nano would crash the whole terminal. Anyways I switched to the git sdk with pacman and that actually was a very decent substitute. Unfortunately, the bottom half of my xps's screen went out after owning it for 3 months, and Dell support has had the thing in the shop for almost a month now. I vividly remember now why I left the windows scene and recently got a retina MacBook pro. I know I'm a little off topic but put bettertouchtool on it with Windows style window snapping and it's a far superior experience in my opinion.

[gravypod]

If you are still looking for a way to get into Linux I'd strongly recommend trying Manjaro [0] XFCE (Not any of the other versions).

I've yet to have a computer that was made in the past 5 years that I haven't been able to get it running on. It's amazing.

If you start it with the non-free (as in libre) installer, you'll definitely get near perfect hardware support. You'll need to install two packages if you want good battery life (TLP and thermald).

After that, it's ready for production use on almost every system I've tried.

If you like it/try it I'd like to see how it works out for you so try and contact me and tell me how it went. I might try starting to recommend this for some family I know who get viruses but don't do much else but Youtube and Facebook.

[0] - https://manjaro.github.io/

[oldsj]

I appreciate it but I'm not all that new to linux. I'm not a huge fan of Manjaro because they are downstream of Arch, and therefore any security updates are in the hads of the few maintainers. I ran arch for about a year and that was probably the best experience I've had with linux on the desktop. I just feel like in 2016 the desktop should be a solved problem but I just keep getting disappointed haha. I'll probably change my mind again next week but oh well

[michaelmrose]

I really wish people would stop pushing manjaro quite so hard for newbies to linux I honestly don't think its an optimal choice.

[gravypod]

It really does just work. I'm fairly stupid, and I've not had any problems with it.

I have a rule of thumb: I try to NEVER touch the console for my non-development OS. Manjaro allows me to accomplish that and it also works on most hardware I've tested it on.

[michaelmrose]

Why would never touching console be a goal I use the console for basic tasks and find it effective and useful.

[gravypod]

You and I will have a very easy time navigating the world of a command prompt, the average user will not.

There is a reason GUIs won out over terminals, and that is because no one in the main stream wants to touch one.

A good OS should allow you to do every necessary task via a GUI. If there is a Linux DE/WM that can provide an experience like that, I feel like GNU/Linux will have its break through in the consumer market.

I use my "I never need to do something in the terminal" as a basic user acceptance test.

[chair-law]

Shoot me some sort of message if you are trying to sell the xps 13.

[oldsj]

I am actually, no email address in your profile tho

[chair-law]

HN is a bit intuitive how they control emails. I added my email to the box marked 'email' and expected it to show up. Looks like you have to explicitly add it to your 'about' box. Should be there now.

[oldsj]

Yea I just realized that when I checked my own profile haha

[chair-law]

Thought I just added it?