So like it says in the title. I’m looking to make a change. The only coding I ever did was like, some very light HTML on stuff like LiveJournal 20 years ago (because I’m ancient in internet years, haha) and even that I barely remember.
I’ve seen people talk about LinuxMint in other comment sections and how that one might be closest to something like Windows (in that a layman like myself can use it out of the box like buying a new laptop from Best Buy or whatever store). Is that actually a good one or is there something better for somebody like me?
I’ve seen enough people go ‘NO UBUNTU!!!’ to steer me away from that one, but otherwise I have no clue what would actually be good for somebody in my shoes.
I have a laptop that still technically runs Windows 8 that I just use for downloads so I’d be trying it on there so that if something goes wonky I’m not fucked. After looking at the LinuxMint website, the specs on that laptop meet the requirements for it.
Thanks so much!
The specs on the laptop meet the requirements for Mint according to their website so I assume that the hardware is compatible for it. But for stuff like my printer…somebody above mentioned that they were having issues with it working with Linux which isn’t something I thought about.
Funnily enough, I did sit and wonder about the programs I use on my main laptop before right now, just not stuff like printers. My Office Suite is LibreOffice and as far as I’m aware that’s Linux compatible since they’re both in the open source world and the writing/author program I love has Linux options I just don’t know if they’d work with Mint. (One is Debian and other comments were saying that Mint is based off Debian at it’s core, so maybe that would work?)
ANYWAYS, without getting further in the weeds, I’ll have to look into some things further in that regard. Thank you for bringing that up.
And this is probably a dumb follow-up question, but would my ISP be impacted by Linux then? Like, the router might not be compatible or something? The simple aspect of my printer being compatible didn’t come to mind at first, so maybe that could be a thing, I dunno!
It is very much compatible, haha. And usually comes pre-installed as the desktop office suite in many distros like Ubuntu and Debian that ship the Gnome desktop environment pre-installed.
It should not be impacted at all. :)
If you install any popular beginner friendly distro (like the ones I recommended) everything should work out of the box and it is very unlikely that any extra drivers need to be installed. For example on Archlinux no printing programs/services and drivers come pre-installed or enabled.
So do not worry at all, if your laptop cover the main requirements, the distro should handle the rest automagically. If you have any more questions you can talk to me directly here on Lemmy, or we can figure something out.
One thing though, Mint is based on Ubuntu which itself is based on Debian. But it doesn’t really matter.
Since you are going to check what software you need/want for your new Linux device, you can always fill the gaps with Flatpaks on Flathub, these are meant to be universal packages for every Linux distro and usually you can find there the packages that your distro does not package natively. You can even find proprietary software like Discord and such.
And again, if you have any more questions be sure reply or send me a message directly her eon Lemmy.
Thank you, that’s such a kind offer! I might take you up on that! It’ll probably be a bit 'cuz I need to take some time to look into programs and such that I didn’t think of before to make sure what I’m used to is compatible and then I’ll go from there! :)