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TL; DR: From personal experience as a Raspberry Pi tinkerer and Windows evacuee, I recommend Linux Mint.
Raspberry Pi OS is essentially Debian compiled for ARM with the LXDE desktop. They used to use LXDE, and it is my understanding they forked LXDE to make their “Pixel” desktop. Being Debian, it uses the APT package manager with .deb packages.
Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, which itself is a fork of Debian. It uses the APT package manager and .deb packages. The exact same commands to install, say, LibreOffice on a Raspberry Pi can be used to install it on Linux Mint.
Cinnamon is the flagship desktop, and I think is a reasonable answer to “What if Microsoft had kept developing the Windows 7 desktop instead of trying to make a tablet OS?” I chose Cinnamon pretty immediately because it felt more like the Windows I had grown up with than Windows 8.1 did.
There is: Linux Mint Debian Edition. There are a few things you’re missing in LMDE than in the standard Ubuntu-based version though, such as the driver manager and support for PPAs. The latter of which has declined in usefulness with the rise of Flatpaks, I haven’t installed from a PPA in years now.
No. It’s way too complicated to circumvent Canonical’s attempts at vendor lock-in. One might just as well pick a more open distribution from the beginning.
Not too hard, especially if you plan on running the same software on your new distro. Basically, all of the settings are in your home directory (/home/[username]/), so you could just copy everything from your home directory and that’s that.
Not only that, but you could also set up your home dir to be on another partition or drive. Basically, you don’t have to copy anything if you set up your distro like this. You just point the new distro to your former home directory, this is home now, and it’ll just use all of the settings from there. Sure, some settings and files are distro specific, but you can manually delete those if you want to free up a few MB of space.
newbie or somewhat experienced user?
I would say I know the basics of Linux due to owning a Pi and messing around with it time-to-time but no where near experienced.
TL; DR: From personal experience as a Raspberry Pi tinkerer and Windows evacuee, I recommend Linux Mint.
Raspberry Pi OS is essentially Debian compiled for ARM with the LXDE desktop. They used to use LXDE, and it is my understanding they forked LXDE to make their “Pixel” desktop. Being Debian, it uses the APT package manager with .deb packages.
Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, which itself is a fork of Debian. It uses the APT package manager and .deb packages. The exact same commands to install, say, LibreOffice on a Raspberry Pi can be used to install it on Linux Mint.
Cinnamon is the flagship desktop, and I think is a reasonable answer to “What if Microsoft had kept developing the Windows 7 desktop instead of trying to make a tablet OS?” I chose Cinnamon pretty immediately because it felt more like the Windows I had grown up with than Windows 8.1 did.
Isn’t there a Debian version of Mint too?
There is: Linux Mint Debian Edition. There are a few things you’re missing in LMDE than in the standard Ubuntu-based version though, such as the driver manager and support for PPAs. The latter of which has declined in usefulness with the rise of Flatpaks, I haven’t installed from a PPA in years now.
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Up to date… on Debian… lol 🤣
/s (somewhat)
I think Fedora and Ubuntu are easy recommendations!
No. It’s way too complicated to circumvent Canonical’s attempts at vendor lock-in. One might just as well pick a more open distribution from the beginning.
most users simply do not care. if it works, it works
That’s a good justification for them to stick with Windows.
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Fedora is nice. You might also like PopOS or Majaro.
How easy is it to move user data and software to another distro if I decide to change it up?
Not too hard, especially if you plan on running the same software on your new distro. Basically, all of the settings are in your home directory (/home/[username]/), so you could just copy everything from your home directory and that’s that.
Not only that, but you could also set up your home dir to be on another partition or drive. Basically, you don’t have to copy anything if you set up your distro like this. You just point the new distro to your former home directory, this is home now, and it’ll just use all of the settings from there. Sure, some settings and files are distro specific, but you can manually delete those if you want to free up a few MB of space.