@philip_cardella I am an imperfect guide, but I have helped several people begin using Linux. Feel free to ask, and I will help as best I can.
FWIW, my family are shifting from Windows to Linux with each new device we purchase. Windows 11 has managed to achieve what 18 years of watching me work happily in Linux did not.
@philip_cardella And then there are desktops--which are the graphical user interfaces. Different distros can run the same desktop. I'm still figuring it out myself. But it's such a feeling of freedom.
@philip_cardella
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In addition to the kernel and distros, there are desktops--which are the graphical user interfaces. Different distros can run the same desktop. I'm still figuring it out myself. But it's such a feeling of freedom to know there are so many cool options beyond Windows and Mac.
@philip_cardella
A lot of the evangelizing for new Linux recruits is soaked in bad assumptions.
My experience with Windows for a very long time has been allowing the setup program that runs when you power up a new laptop to go on until update runs and checks for BIOS and firmware updates.
And, if I can do it directly from the BIOS setup, I don't bother with the Windows setup program.
Then, I install Linux.
So, if I was thrust headlong into Windows, I'd have no idea what was going,
@philip_cardella distrosea.com lets you test out Linux distros (varieties) online without needing to install them. Zorin OS and Linux Mint Cinnamon are user-friendly alternatives to Windows.
@philip_cardella I'm a noob myself, but FWIW I think of a 'distro' as a curated, combination of software components, bundled together and (hopefully) supported by a particular group or company. Seems like the biggest forks in the curation road are desktop environments, which is what draws windows, menus etc. and package managers, which controls how you install software.
For my part, I set up a dual-boot between win10 and ubuntu. I'm in ubuntu like 95% of the time...
@philip_cardella
So strictly speaking, ‘Linux’ just refers to the kernel (the program that actually runs the hardware, in simple terms)—everything you actually do on the computer is handled by other software that has to be packaged and integrated to make a usable OS.
One of the big things a distro does is manage installing packages—so I can run a simple command and install new free software that’s ready to go, rather than having to build from source code.
@philip_cardella
What can make it tricky if you come from Mac or Windows is that the desktop environment/window manager is just a bundle of software, not integral to the OS—but that dramatically affects how you perceive things when you first boot up & log in. Underlyingly it’s all the same, but stuff like how menus and GUI elements are arranged can vary dramatically.
@philip_cardella
While I don’t care for Ubuntu personally (I’ve been happily using Debian for more than 20 years), it’s likely to be the easiest onramp since it’s designed to be beginner-friendly and it’s so widely used that you’ll likely find people with experience more easily than some of the more obscure distros.
Don’t worry too much about your first distro. I went through a couple in my first few years before I found the one I was fully happy with.
@philip_cardella
I don’t know much about DTP, but GIMP is the gold standard for raster graphics. I just got back into photography after a few years away, and I found Darktable to be very good for raw conversion and doing color/exposure/etc. manipulation prior to converting to 24bit.
I don’t do much with video, but when I was teaching on line I used OpenShot to put together video lectures (you can composite various layers of audio, video, still images, etc.) and it worked quite well.
@philip_cardella Think of Linux distros (short for distributions) as different version of Windows (Windows Server, Windows Standard Edition, Windows Pro, etc.) except that all distros of Linux have access to the same type and amount of software/apps. Start with Ubuntu Desktop. Then you can try other versions (distros) when you're more comfortable.