So ive use windows pretty much for everything and ive kinda had a enough of windows. i was thinking of trying linux on an old laptop that i just upgraded to 8gb of ram and im not sure wha tos to put on it. i was thinking something lightweight maybe ubuntu mate? i need somethign like windows that will allow me to game and do other things liek gaming maybe even streaming or reading? idk. also what are some neede dsoftware, browser so rthigs needed for linux. i com efrom a family who has never trie dlinux and hates it because its “the smar advanced coders os” somethign liek that.
anyways im a noob so go easy on me please als i may have ben linux distro hopping but i still feel lost.
I highly recommend trying Manjaro. I haven’t moved past Windows 7, so I can’t compare directly to Win 10/11, but it’s the only Linux distro I’ve found that was Close Enough™ to Windows to make it possible for me to switch.
Like any Linux, things aren’t going to Just Work™ as often as in Windows, but this is the closest I’ve gotten.
Lol, that’s not a Linux thing, it’s a manjaro thing.
I’ve been using Manjaro for a couple of years now on my desktop (with an Nvidia GPU). Their package situation is not great. Updating the Linux kernel and Nvidia drivers is a process separate from pamac that you have to just know to do, or one day X will break and now you have to figure out how to fix it.
On top of that, because they delay the release of non-aur repo packages for stability testing, but don’t delay aur, some aur packages will just break occasionally. I now manually install discord from their tar ball because of this.
Because of these little unnecessary quirks that you just have to know how to work around, I can’t recommend it for new Linux users, and honestly don’t recommend it to seasoned users either. I’m trying out endeavor OS on my laptop now and I think that is what I would recommend; but possibly only for more seasoned users because it’s arch. Might be more stable if you install the linux-lts package and remove linux.