[bee_rider]

It is unfortunate that people recommended Ubuntu as a starting distro for so long.

It does too much. It will update things for you, or give you a pop-up to tell you to update. Updates happen all at once, rather than a little at a time, so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions. Maybe the repos will be gone if you don’t update in time. Maybe your favorite packages have moved from apt to snap. Good luck!

A rolling release distro like Arch would be a better first experience for most people I think.

Linux is not where Windows was years ago. Software gently rolls in at a nice steady rate. Some distros choose to take that nice steady flow, chop it up, and for some reason emulate the Windows catastrophic update experience. It is… an odd decision.

[BizarroLand]

I've not had a good experience with Ubuntu or Pop OS. They've always felt sluggish on any hardware I've put them on.

Debian may take a touch more wrenching to get running but it has been good for me, although I haven't tried 12 yet. Fedora was good but Red Hat shenanigans seems to have messed with it.

I may try Mint next time. I've heard good things about it.

I said all of that to say, isn't Linux great?

If you have a quibble with it, you can kick it to the curb and try something else in an hour and everything just works. There's so many options to choose from, and you don't have weirdo corporations tracking your every application launch or building a psychological profile off of you from how you tab through a spreadsheet or cloud mapping your speaking patterns based off of how you type.

[joshspankit]

Since you want responsive, try XFCE (xubuntu)

[footlose_3815]

>so you get these big dramatic updates with combinatorial bug explosions.

Yes. My Ubuntu installations always have bugs when I do big updates. A

And while I'm here, snapd can suck it. Me and my homies hate Snap.

[f1shy]

The worst is when they tried to call home, like Windows

[ASalazarMX]

Please use Ubuntu LTS, you can live with 2-year old versions at its worst, specially when snaps can deliver up-to-date applications.

I'm not happy with some of Canonical's decisions, but I can't deny that using LTS as a daily driver is boring because most things just work without fiddling. I don't have as much time to fiddle with the OS nowadays.

[bee_rider]

I’ve used LTS on a shared system, but I don’t love it. 2 years is shorter than you’d expect, and now if we want to update we’ll need to deal with 2 years worth of work, configuration, and cluges if we want to update.

[hef19898]

My first fall back was to downgrade from 22.04 to 20.04 again. Steam worked fine, wifi worked. I was happy. Until, that is, I tried reinstall Darktable, in version 4.x as that was the one that used for basically all my photo edits in the last year. Turned out Ubuntu 20.04 only supports darktable 3.x, and darktable 4.x edits are not backwards compatible (kind of logic, so the loss of around 100 edits is totally and absolutely on me and only me). For now, I use the Linux installation as my daily (as soon as I re-imported my passwords to Firefox, as of course I lost those as well during reinstall number 3...) and Windows as my gaming "console". Until, that is, the official Steam installer works under 22.04 again. The Steam client from Canonical sucks IMHO.

[hedora]

Ubuntu LTS breaks my stuff more often than Manjaro (~= Arch).

I don't understand why Canonical decides to backport breaking changes to LTS releases, but they do it on a regular basis, and I don't trust them for anything important. (I'm not suggesting using manjaro for stuff that needs to be stable over a long time period -- it's not meant for that, which is precisely my point!)

[boppo1]

I've been using xubuntu for about 6 years now and I barely understand how linux works. So far so good, I've had one major issue which was related to my storage getting too full.

Admittedly I'm reasonably comfortable in CLI, but I don't know a whole lot about bash, just cd, mv, cp, ls -a, etc.

Is xubuntu better than ubuntu just because it removes a lot of cruft?

[fuomag9]

Xubuntu or *buntu distros are mostly Ubuntu distros with a different default desktop environment (KDE, xfce, etc)

[red-iron-pine]

> A rolling release distro like Arch would be a better first experience for most people I think.

Nah. Most people can't grok partitions or do the command line installs by hand. "Most people" aren't very technical, and even white collar office types will struggle.

Likewise they don't grok rolling updates and snap, they just get their updates and they restart once a month, just like on their windows box. That's enough, and once they get comfortable with the rest of the Ubanto env they can start thinkin about their Gentoo build from scratch.

[bee_rider]

I think most people barely are able to administrate their Windows laptops either, usually they just use them until they break and then buy a new one, and never really configure or fix anything.

Phones, with their app stores, are sort of like rolling release with automatic updates, right?

[hef19898]

The issue described above was the only update problem I had with Ubunutu so far. The reason I picked it was the basically guaranteed compatability with my Lenovo laptop, I guessed better not take any risks. popOS was on the list as well so!

Positive side effect of above tepuble shooting, I got pretty fast installing Linux now.

[caeril]

Agreed, Arch is likely the best introductory option, especially now that archinstall comes with the iso. Dead simple to install, and the documentation is fantastic for setting up the rest of your environment.

[bee_rider]

Arch is a good into to Linux, for people that want Linux.

It might not be the best for people who want a web browser/computing appliance, but I’m not sure what is, there just might not be a good one yet.