Glad to see it’s going well :3

I’ve been on linux for years at this point, and it’s such an astronomical upgrade over windows, that sometimes when I don’t think while talking about PC stuff with people I forget that most people aren’t using it, and it throws me off to hear them to refer to windows things lol

Not quite hah :3

It’s actually not one of the things I’ve tried when looking for the best DE/WM for me, though I might at some point just to see if im missing out on anything

What do you use it for?

Everything? Lol. I mean… I just run my desktop in hyprland, no matter what im doing. Which for me I guess is gaming, drawing, some coding, and writing… oh and tinkering with linux (though honestly I mostly do that in VMs)

How much does it make your experience better?

I’d say it’s an improvement over GNOME :p… though I have enough issues with the configs that I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you have issues with GNOME that majorly bother you… or unless you use one of the premade dotfile configs that people make lol…

For me being able to adjust the windows with my keyboard without needing to enter a special mode for it, and having windows forced into the tile size was worth it, as it was something that was a pet peeve of mine (and now I get to be annoyed by trying to set up my waybar vertically, tradeoffs lol)

Yeah it’s not in apt afaik, I think it is on flathub tho :3 im not sure if there are any issues using it in a sandboxed environment, as I never used it. And you can also use it as an appimage I think… that’s all the kind of stuff you’ll learn along the way tho, I mean… I remember the first time I had to install something not in my distro’s repos, and hitting my head on my keyboard for like a day, before I realized that im doing it the hard way haha

Depends on how you install it

You basically chose one of the more complicated ways to do it, short of compiling the source code lol

I’ve tried out a bunch, but at the moment I’ve mainly been playing around with hyprland, cause it’s also a dynamic tiler and im used to that layout now

The main advantage to me tbh is that certain windows don’t overflow the assigned tile space like in pop-shell (this is also fixed in cosmic), but there are other things like having all your move/resize actions on the main mod layer instead of needing to enter adjust mode (super + enter is the default keybind on pop-shell), and the fact it uses wayland instead of x11

Of course there are also things that can be downsides depending on how you see it, like the fact it’s a TWM not a desktop, which means if you want to adjust any setting you’ll need to manually adjust config files, and that it doesn’t come with things like a top bar or app launcher etc. So it can take a while to get up and running

Yeah :3… I use pop which is ubuntu based, but they replace all snaps with flatpaks, and over the 4ish years I’ve been using it it’s been the most stable experience on the desktop I had. If not for snaps ubuntu/kubuntu would probably be one of my default distro recommendations for beginners

I started with pop!_os and still use it (though now with a proper TWM on top), and I can’t go back to a non-tiling desktop honestly lol. I can’t wait for COSMIC to come out as even in alpha that’s my favourite tiling experience

Ubuntu

Snaps

I wouldn’t say that Mint is a ‘beginner’ distro. Sure, it’s beginner friendly, but it’s equally friendly for everyone

Ye, that :3. I didn’t mean mint is for beginners only, but it’s one that’s beginner friendly and popular for people starting linux

I started with pop!_os and their pop_shell on GNOME which also has tiling, and that’s been fun :3…

At the moment pop is on the bench for me in terms of distro recommendations tho, cause of their work on COSMIC making it a bit behind, and possibly a bit unstable in the future

(Though COSMIC will be replacing TWMs for me, as it’s imo a nice fresh spin on tiling with the window groups, which to me makes it the smoothest tiling experience even in the current alpha)

but ideally I’d like a distro that’s a bit more Linux-y.

Im not sure how you’d even quantify that? I mean… there’s a lot of variation in linux, so there’s not a “standard” linux experience… DEs like KDE or cinnamon are more Windows-y, and ones like GNOME or Pantheon are more MacOS-y. There’s TWMs which to me is what makes the linux experience, but those aren’t for beginners and I wouldn’t recommend you start with that

Really it doesn’t matter what enviroment you use, so honestly im gonna agree with the other comment and just say use one of the big begginer distros like mint cinnamon lol

I have it on grid view :3… just cause it can fit a lot more files into the same screen space

In list view I have to scroll to see all the files in my home folder, and in grid view it only takes like half of the available space, if I have the app maximized

Ye :3… honestly as someone who doesn’t use that many extensions other than the pop-shell ones, im not too worried about the extensions, since basically all of that is coming as a base part of COSMIC’s interface… I think the only extension that im hoping gets a COSMIC applet soon after release is KDEconnect lol

Why my distro (pop!_os) is the best? Well it’s probably not, but here’s why I went with it:

• ubuntu based, so lots of applicable tech support online
• looks nice out of the box (imo)
• comes with nvidia drivers. Not a major point cause they aren’t hard to get, but it was one of the things I considered when I unintentionally ended up with with nvidia
• tiling (the big one imo)

Aand that’s kinda it :3… at the moment it’s kinda behind all the other stuff cause they’re working on the new COSMIC DE, which im hoping is gonna be an upgrade to the GNOME with extensions the current version has

Was about to comment that too

There’s a ton of linux rant channels with a following, so there is a market for them

I’ve been on pop!_os consistently for… 3 and a bit years now? some distro hopping before then

What you should expect to change… well other than the obvious like the UI and such… chances are you’ll need a decent bit of different software than on windows, im assuming you looked into alternatives for the software you use, or if it simply just runs, so im not gonna list a bunch of stuff here :3.

Tech support online is mostly gonna be through terminal commands, which actually makes it way less painless imo since you can just copy-paste stuff instead of navigating though a bunch of interfaces.

Installing apps is different since you’ll often find multiple packages for the same thing, and have to decide between .deb or flatpak etc.

All of that seems like fairly obvious stuff you’d find along the way to the process of looking into switching to linux tbh, but I can’t think of much that’d be a major shock otherwise lol

In terms of gaming, I’ve had no major issues :3… some minor ones that were easy enough to troubleshoot did occur tho. Generally just checking out protonDB to see what people are saying in terms of compatibility is good, but basically 90% of what doesn’t run now are games with kernel level anti-cheats

Hah, I did that too in my first weeks with linux x3… I think I wanted to hit alt + f4, but for some reason I also hit ctrl with it… had a mild heart attack when my screen just went to CLI, but I figured it out :3

I just chose the automatic partition thingy ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯