So ive use windows pretty much for everything and ive kinda had a enough of windows. i was thinking of trying linux on an old laptop that i just upgraded to 8gb of ram and im not sure wha tos to put on it. i was thinking something lightweight maybe ubuntu mate? i need somethign like windows that will allow me to game and do other things liek gaming maybe even streaming or reading? idk. also what are some neede dsoftware, browser so rthigs needed for linux. i com efrom a family who has never trie dlinux and hates it because its “the smar advanced coders os” somethign liek that.
anyways im a noob so go easy on me please als i may have ben linux distro hopping but i still feel lost.
Manjaro KDE is the closest I can get to Windows functionality without actually using windows. I love it.
I wouldn’t recommend Manjaro - or Arch/Arch derivatives - to beginners. Installing them usually goes fine (especially nowadays thanks to
archinstall) but Arch comes with a lot of quirks and ongoing maintenance burdens that newbies won’t be aware of until a few months down the line when their system blows up in their face.Such as?
Anything involving DKMS (so Nvidia, many WiFi adapters…) is the most common culprit in my anecdotal experience. New users don’t know to watch the forums or their
pacmanoutput for potential problems and find out the hard way when they lose internet or their DM doesn’t start.Manjaro has its own utility to install graphics drivers. I have issues with my own wifi adapter, but it’s not specific to Arch or Manjaro. It’s because, for whatever reason, the kernel doesn’t support it out of the box. I need to load a kernel module whenever I update the kernel. Thankfully, someone put what I need on Github and I didn’t have any issues beyond that.
This is a problem that would be present on all Linux distros, unless there’s one that uses a kernel that includes support for my wifi adapter.