I have no experience with Linux, but I’d like to give it a try. I’m looking at the System76 Meerkat and Thelio with the Pop!_OS option.
I don’t see myself gaming on it because I have a Windows machine for just that. I’d mostly be using it for learning Linux and doing basic things like web surfing and word processing (Libreoffice perhaps).
Any recommendations or advice? Thanks!
Pop!_OS is the distro that I usually recommend to my family members, and it’s the one I personally use.
You can’t really go wrong with any of the popular Linux flavors though. Pop!_OS is the best, in my experience, for minimal fuss and configuration.
If you want to experiment and really dig into the system and make changes to things, you may prefer something less configured, like Fedora or Arch. Pop!_OS is fantastic as is, and I try not to mutate it too much.
I put Pop!_OS on a laptop for my (elderly) mum and she used it for years, never had any issues, every now and then I’d tell it to update to the new version and everything was just fine. In the same time period I would have had to fix a windows install several times.
Yeah, just do it, it’s the best place to get a full experience from vendor support to a polished OS with help videos on YouTube to teach you how to do things like tiling. Nobody else comes close.
Thank you everyone for their input! I’m impressed by how thoughtful you all are here on Lemmy. I will read up on the links some of you provided and I’ll give a shot at trying Pop!_OS on a VM on my windows machine. If all goes well, I’m still leaning on either a Meerkat or Thelio since I know they will work out of the box. Again, thanks everyone!
You don’t need to buy a new computer just to learn Linux. You can create a bootable flash drive and install it on an external SSD and boot from the SSD when you need to use Linux. If you don’t want an external SSD, you can dual-boot and keep Linux on a separate partition on your machine.
In terms of distros, I’d recommend Ubuntu or Pop!_OS to get started with. Other distros like Elementary OS, Linux Mint, or Debian can be suitable as well.
