After convincing my employer to move away from MS office I can finally make the permanent switch away from windows.
I settled on pop_os for now since it supports hybrid Nvidia graphics out of the box and I am a noob.
Two questions:
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I used OneDrive, and especially the file on-demand (all files on server visible in explorer but only downloaded when needed) feature a lot. What cloud storage provider has the best Linux integration? I dabbled with NeXtCloUD but the Linux client is not great, especially the file on-demand implementation.
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What are best practices for managing apps? The last time I entertained the idea of switching, I ended up with applications installed from the snap store, flatpacks, some appimages, some through apt. It quickly gets confusing for me when I want a specific program but it, f.ex., is only distributed through the snap store. Is there a GUI (I know) way to see all applications, where they’re installed from, with an easy remove button? Akin to what windows offers?
Think of linux as desktop android… That’s probably the best advice I can give you. Depending on which distro you choose, they’ll have different app stores. GNOME Software for some, discover (yes, that’s the name of the program) for others, Pop!Shop for Pop!OS. As for managing apps - avoid installing snaps. Other than that, don’t worry about it.
Pretty much all cloud providers are supported on linux, most of them just don’t have bespoke apps and get added directly to your file manager. Some distros have a step during the initial setup, where you can log into accounts and what not, which should setup stuff like OneDrive automatically. And if not, i don’t think setting them up manually is too hard.
Do not install/uninstall stuff from the terminal. Most self-respecting user friendly distros have an app store which does all the things for you. Installing things from the terminal/the internet should be a last resort, only if the thing you want to install is not available anywhere else.
As for my distro recommendations… try Fedora KDE or Linux Mint.
It’s worth noting that all of these “app stores” are just front ends for your native package manager (apt or pacman for example) and flatpak, so it’s worth learning the difference between the two (native and flatpak) but it doesn’t really matter if you install packages using GUI (the “app store”) or CLI (package manager or flatpak install command) l. It comes down to preference and I doesn’t agree with @[email protected] that it should be a last resort to use CLI, but if you are a beginner, yeah, it is probably easier to use the " app store" things.