My first foray into Linux was something like twenty years ago, I ran Linux Mint briefly and happily, but I screwed something up trying to get flash videos to have sound and kind of gave up and went back to windows.

Flash forward, I got my desktop and my husband’s laptop set up with Mint now, and I can’t believe how easy it was. Everything has been working excellently, and the laptop is getting more attention than its had in years. The software manager is amazing, I got set up with steam and my daw (reaper) in no time. So far I haven’t run into anything I’ve tried to do that I couldn’t do with minimal elbow grease.

Thanks for being so passionate about Linux gang, I don’t know that I would have converted nearly so quickly if I wasn’t exposed to it here. Y’all are cool as hell.

    • Vik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      I’d have thought cinnamon was a key draw for mint and lmde given it’s overall familiarity with windows / user friendliness? Would kubuntu or the fedora KDE spin work here?

      • Godort@lemmy.caEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        Regarding Kubuntu, I don’t like snaps and don’t want to have to worry about disabling them after every major update

        Regarding Fedora, I really like aptitude and don’t want to give it up

        • Vik@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 day ago

          Totally understandable. For whatever it’s worth, you can permanently disable and remove snap and snapd from an Ubuntu system (I had to do this recently with a raspberry pi 5). The amount of work to do this, however, may be practically equivalent to installing plasma on mint / lmde, but the guides on this are thankfully straightforward in case you’re ever interested.

          https://www.baeldung.com/linux/snap-remove-disable

          This works well in practice, and upgrades still work as intended. I may need to follow this guide again very soon, as nextcloud pi unexpectedly died on me. I’m thinking of flashing either Ubuntu or trying their Debian fork out again.

          • passenger@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            Stop using sd cards and your raspberry pi wont die on you again. Flash on a usb3 external ssd.

            • Vik@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              4 hours ago

              The SD card didn’t abruptly die or anything like that, NCP kind of ground to a halt following automatic maintenance. I couldn’t get it to cooperate, so I just decided to take it offline.

              didn’t have anything important on there, was just using it as a test.

              That said, I have heard of particularly problematic SD card models that are known to fail with the pi5.

              • passenger@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                1·
                4 hours ago

                Try with an ssd next time, and thank me later. There are so many ways the sd card can fail on you. After I switched to an SSD, no more random weird problems. Just unstable

                • Vik@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  3 hours ago

                  i haven’t really had stability issues with kodi/jellyfin, rasbian/Ubuntu, retropi etc. I appreciate where you’re coming from but it’s kind of a knockabout device to help me learn more about apps I would like to host on a proper server later on.

                  generally am not happy with my pi5 as a hw offering, even as far as cheap arm based SBCs go.