No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Arch has the arch wiki which is perhaps the best source of information on Linux, if you don't mind reading. On a Debian or Debian based distro like Ubuntu or mint, you won't always be able to follow the arch wiki, and might have to rely on a forum where less knowledgeable users are answering questions. Arch also has forums if that is desired.
There are distros bassed on arch that makes installation easier like EndeavorOS, if you don't mind reading or using the terminal a bit I would recommend that.
You can also set up a multiboot usb with multiple live images ISOs using something like Ventoy. You can put a bunch of Linux ISOs on it and boot into them to test them without installing.
Ultimately, I recommend sticking with any distro for a bit until you notice a major "can not use the computer anymore" type of issue. Then instead of distro hopping, actually fix it. Once you fix a major issue like that, you will understand how useful the community and docs actually are.
And if you never encounter a major issue like that, then you win, you found the best distro. Do not try something else.
EndeavourOS has been great for me.
Re: the EndeavourOS, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed also has a nice installer, no?
EndeavourOS is Arch based, OpenSUSE is not. Although OpenSUSE is great too, the philosophy and approach is very different.
Would it work for general usage too?
Within Linux I see 'beginner', 'intermediate' and 'advanced' users mentioned, but I'm not sure where I'd fall, or what those would roughly denote.
Like I'm familiar with what a terminal is and how it can be used for commands, I'm not like an old grandma not knowing what the big red X button does, I know not to delete system32 or to avoid sudo rm rf, but I'm not familiar with a shell, setting up an IP of your own, that stuff. I think this would label me as an average user for whom intermediate distros would be possible, but I'm not sure.
I don't personally believe in those categories. I think it should be broken down to
I think if you are ok with reading, researching, learning, and willing to make mistakes, your computer actually becomes easier to use from the terminal.
Now, your use case is important, so is your workflow. There is no correct solution and you should try to take the time to discover the right solution for yourself.
I'd say, start with a distro with a live image and test. You can reinstall a computer as often as you want with different distros.
I use endeavourOS for gaming, web browsing, hosting, development, video editing, meme creating, and many other things. So I'd say it's really general purpose.
Live image and test?
do you mean I'd download a distro, put it on a USB, and then extract/open it in there, and test it out?
(and ofc, saving my data on my own desktop on an external hard disk, before committing to switch)?
A live image is an ISO that you can boot directly to without installing on to your drive. You can place it on a USB stick with Ventoy, and then during post you chose to boot from the USB instead of your installed drive.
The EndeavorOS ISOs are live images too.