I used Ubuntu once a few years ago but had compatability issues so I went back to windows. Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn. I’m not looking to do much gaming beyond DOOM2 and factorio. Mostly looking for privacy and a way to get back into programming (I have this pipe dream of learning Assembly). I’m not to particular on UI, I can use whatever.
Edit: https://distrochooser.de for anyone who stumbles upon this post with the same question
Additional to the Mint suggestions: Mint tones down the “Ubuntu-ness” of their default distribution, but it’s still Ubuntu under the hood. LMDE is the version of Mint based on straight Debian skipping the Ubuntu “middle-man” if that sounds more appealing.
Can’t speak to compatibility one way or another, though.
My computer is old and made of parts from well-known manufacturers. Everything in it is pretty well-known to the open-source community at this point, so that might well be giving me a huge advantage with regard to drivers and such. (Case in point, I have an NVIDIA graphics card and Intel i7 from the tail end of the era where people wouldn’t advise you against getting either, and in fact might have outright recommended them over AMD. Yes, that old. Legacy proprietary drivers work fine for me.)
does LMDE have KDE flavours yet? Ive always thought cinnamon was pretty ugly
Official support of KDE was dropped by the Mint team a while back, and I’m pretty sure LMDE has only ever been Cinnamon too.
Despite this, it is possible to install and use a different desktop manager.
KDE and all the usual KDE packages remain available from the Software Manager, and a different DM can be selected at the GUI login screen (once installed, of course).
If you don’t even want to touch Cinnamon once, I suspect you could jump to a text-only terminal, enter
apt install kde-standardetc. and then jump back to the GUI login to see if it knows about KDE. A reboot (or similar) might be needed? That should be all though. (Very reminiscent of deliberately using command lineftpor a Windows port ofwgetto get Firefox back in the day when people didn’t want to touch Internet Explorer, but Cinnamon isn’t that bad, surely? ;) )(FWIW I don’t mind it. I switched from Win7 back in the day and Cinnamon was similar enough that I felt at home. One day maybe I’ll switch to something else. KDE probably won’t be it, but you never know.)
thanks for the info, I won’t hold my breath haha. I’ll probably just stick with Kubuntu for now, it’s not so bad after removing snapd