So like it says in the title. I’m looking to make a change. The only coding I ever did was like, some very light HTML on stuff like LiveJournal 20 years ago (because I’m ancient in internet years, haha) and even that I barely remember.

I’ve seen people talk about LinuxMint in other comment sections and how that one might be closest to something like Windows (in that a layman like myself can use it out of the box like buying a new laptop from Best Buy or whatever store). Is that actually a good one or is there something better for somebody like me?

I’ve seen enough people go ‘NO UBUNTU!!!’ to steer me away from that one, but otherwise I have no clue what would actually be good for somebody in my shoes.

I have a laptop that still technically runs Windows 8 that I just use for downloads so I’d be trying it on there so that if something goes wonky I’m not fucked. After looking at the LinuxMint website, the specs on that laptop meet the requirements for it.

Thanks so much!

ETA: Because it’s come up a few times and after the first time I didn’t want to reply the same thing a over and over, I associate Linux with coding because everybody I’ve personally known that uses Linux is a programmer by trade, by hobby, or at least has a CompSci degree and understands this stuff on a level a million times higher than I do (even if they didn’t end up in the field). Clearly I misunderstood something about what they were doing with Linux somewhere along the way. It looked like coding to a layperson at any rate so that’s what stuck in my mind.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    7·
    4 days ago

    Mint is a great distro for beginners. Coding is not required, but coders prefer Linux because it makes our lives easier in some ways.

    I would like to take the opportunity to give you two advices that I think everyone who wants to use Linux should hear:

    Install from package manager

    In windows the way to install something is to look it up on a browser, open a sketchy website, downloading a binary and executing it on your machine. That is definitely NOT the way to do stuff on Linux. Think on Linux the same way you do Android (which is actually a Linux distro), if you want to install something you look it up on the play store, and only if it’s not there you consider alternatives like downloading a random .APK from the internet. Linux should be the same, except there are several alternatives before downloading a binary from the internet, like adding a PPA in debian based distros (Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, so this applies to you) which essentially gives extra packages to the package manager or using flatpak/snaps (two different technologies that try to do the same, i.e. a new way of packaging software for Linux)

    Keep /home in a different partition

    In Linux any folder can be in any hard-drive/partition. So it’s possible when you’re installing your system to have what you would normally think as C:\ (which is called / in Linux) in one partition and /home (i.e. the folder home inside /) in another. This is great because it allows you to reinstall or change your Linux distro without losing your personal data.

    • Penny7@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Ok, wait…I thought a partition meant that it was in effect a wall between different OSs if you had multiples on one computer, not like separate folders like in Windows Explorer (which is what I’m getting from this comment, if I’m wrong please let me know).

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 day ago

        A partition is a dedicated space on a disk. In windows there’s not much use to partition a disk, but it can be done, and you would have a C: and D: drives with only one physical disk. I used to do that back in the day to have a partition for backups.

        If you only have one disk and want to have multiple OS, you need to partition the disk, so that each OS can write their data without interfering with one another. Essentially what you’re doing is, like you said, putting a wall between areas in the disk, but you can do that regardless of having different OS in each side.

        In Linux things are a bit different, the representation of your disks is a file inside /dev, for example the first disk (non-nvme) Linux finds will be /dev/sda, the next one will be /dev/sdb so on and so forth, but since disks can be partitioned the first partition in your first disk is /dev/sda1, then /dev/sda2, etc. Then there’s a file called /etc/fstab that has lines like /dev/sdb3 /home, this means that the 3d partition in the second disk will be accessible in the folder /home. You don’t really need to worry about this file in general, during the installation there will be a nice GUI to let you say which partition goes where.

        How is that useful? Well, if you have the system in /dev/sda2 and your /home folder in /dev/sda3 you can format /dev/sda2 and reinstall the system or change the distro entirely without losing your data stored in /home.

        PS: I’m simplifying some stuff, but for reference :

        • you might see partitions jump from 2 to 6 in older systems, this is due to limitation in partitioning schemes for old disks
        • if you have a really old computer you will see /dev/hda1, this is because the s in sda refers to SATA, which essentially all disks are nowadays
        • nvme drives are /dev/nvme0n1
        • /etc/fstab has other parameters to tell it certain flags like mount read-only. Also it rarely used /dev/sda1 style naming because that might change if you swap the cables in your computer, instead it uses a unique identifier that’s points to the correct partition regardless of order.
        • Partitions are not really a wall, instead the first bytes of a disk contain a table saying stuff like byte 0-61648716832 partition 1, bytes 61648716833-9274816418393 partition 2, etc. Old drives had limited space in that table so you had to create one partition for the rest of stuff and repartition that again, which is why partition numbers jumped from 2 to 6.

        but all that’s besides the point.