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Since Windows 10 is reaching its End of Life, what's the best Linux distro to use? I was thinking of Linux Mint possibly but I want to see if any Hikarins had any better suggestions
>>1742 The point is being able to pick and choose options at compile time instead of being forced to use a binary that has a bunch of crap you don't need bundled in or options you do need not bundled in. By compiling from source you can avoid tons of dependencies or access things people claim are "deprecated". For example, many applications still support building with gtk2 just fine which allows you to avoid all the stuff wrong with modern gtk/gnome. By excluding a lot of things you can have a much faster, secure and easier to maintain system. Things like Arch Linux aren't really minimal. They're just as bloated as something like modern Ubuntu. With Gentoo in particular now there is no reason to avoid it. The vast majority of ebuilds only take a few seconds or maybe 1-2 minutes to build from source. Portage now supports binaries as well if you want them. But you don't need portage to build from source of course. Learning how to use make is very useful no matter what OS you're using. It means you can grab source code as soon as it is released and run it. Or you can grab old stuff people no longer offer builds for and run it. Building from source offers you true freedom. When you use binaries you're a consumer and forced to use whatever you're given. Most people offering binaries do not have your best interests in mind. I'll give you a good example; Lately everyone has been pushing things like wayland and pipewire hard. Both consume a ton of resources. They say you need pipewire for the pulseaudio support because a lot of things like Firefox dropped support for pure ALSA. If you build from source you get the option to build for sndio instead. A much better and stable sound server that consumes almost no resources at idle. Even when it's using resources it doesn't use hardly any. It can run on any hardware from the 1980s and newer. It has much better mixing options than Pulseaudio/pipewire. It is actually documented. It lets you do anything you want like route sound to multiple devices, over a network or do stuff like let application A use the left speaker and application B have the right speaker. It's the best sound server going. Everything has support for it but it's usually not built into binaries on most distros. So you have to build from source to get it enabled. Unless you use OpenBSD. Even FreeBSD requires building ports from source most of the time to use it. Even though Firefox supports it out of the box and it would be much better than what they're doing now (forcing user to install pulseaudio running on top of OSS their native sound server). Maintaining a system on something like Gentoo with tons of things disabled by default like dbus, polkit, pipewire, systemd etc. is not hard. Once you've configured everything it continues to just work forever. You can avoid 99% of the issues with modern Linux by changing some USE flags. Of course this is possible on any distro provided you're willing to manually set compile time options for everything. But it's easier to just use portage or a BSD+ports tree. Even with all that stuff disabled every modern application and games work. In fact, they usually work better. Which proves that this crap being a requirement is a huge lie.
>>1745 Also concerning Gentoo: It becomes much easier to maintain multiple systems after you've initially configured USE flags. There is nothing requiring you to build from source on a really old slow machine or use someone else's binaries. Most people using Gentoo end up setting up a local build server. Usually their fast PC or home server. Your local build server compiles packages for all your machines. Then those machines (your laptop, your TV set-top device, your old 1998 600Mhz Intel CPU PC, your little ARM system on a chip) can all fetch packages from your local server. Keeping them up to date usually much faster than they would using some mainstream distro that relies on someone else building the packages. You can even build generic packages that work everywhere or have them optimized for each and every system based on their CPU flags. You're building your own distro in other words. Which is why Gentoo is called a "meta distro" by some people. Now the Gentoo project isn't perfect. It has been taken over like most everything else. But thanks to Portage's USE flags you don't have to follow what mainstream Gentoo repos ship by default. Gentoo has a user repo called GURU which is basically like Arch's AUR. Except the packages are much higher quality and better tested. There are tons of pre-made overlays there if you want to do something like replace OpenRC+systemd shims/systemd with something like s6 or runit. There are overlays for doing things like pro-audio/video editing and most everything else you can think of. With Gentoo it's still possible to run a full blown desktop environment using nothing but gtk2+qt applications which are built from modern application source code. You will find that ability no where else. Any distro shipping pre-built binaries and even Gentoo's default config will force you on to gtk3/gtk4 tool kits. With Gentoo you don't even have to run something like udev. You can still run a static /dev without losing the ability to use your hardware and storage devices. The only difference from a udev system is you have to build in support for your input devices manually and manually mount things like usb thumb drives and external HDDs. Which isn't a big deal it's just running "mount". This is also much more secure than the default in every other distro. Since no one can plug-in something like a usb thumb drive into your computer and access it automatically. They can't plug-in devices like key loggers either because they will not work. The system will not mount or use anything automatically. You can also replace udev with something else like mdev if you really want that type of functionality. Impossible to get root through an exploit through systemd+polkit+PAM as well if it isn't on the system. Impossible to get it through sudo too if you don't have it installed. You can use doas instead if you really want that ability or simply use su+switching tty when root is needed. By having a unique system built from source code you avoid 99% of exploits automatically even if you don't understand the underlying code. Your configuration is so unique that no one will write an exploit for it. They'd have to manually access the system somehow then spend a lot of time crafting an exploit for it. Chicken and egg problem for them. Also there is an actual tangible gain in speed on most systems if you build for your CPU's abilities instead of using generic binary. Sometimes it isn't just speed either it's use of resources like RAM. Since if you've excluded half of the crap it claims it needs but really doesn't you don't have that shit in RAM. Nor do you have it spawning daemons and such.
gentoo is cramping my ubuntu-designated workflow. never seen anything seamlessly substitute ubuntu-based distros for the devving they're used for
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You can always upgrade to a newer version of Windows.
The only distro I recommend to beginners and will always recommend to beginners is Linux Mint, for a few reasons: 1. It's similar enough to Windows, at least the Cinnamon edition (XFCE edition I would say is closer to XP) 2. It's based on Ubuntu, which is by far the most famous distro out there. Ubuntu itself is also based on Debian, which is another very ubiquitous distro. That means that it will be very easy to find solutions for any kind of problem you might have, even if they aren't provided with Mint in mind. That's the beauty of Linux. 3. It comes with most things you will ever need out of the box, and getting new programs installed isn't difficult, because again, it's based on Ubuntu and Debian. The other thing I want every Linux beginner to understand is that Linux is not Windows, and trying to use Linux as if it were Windows is a losing bet. Linux will never be Windows. What it can be is approachable to beginners (Linux Mint fits that criteria). Just to give an example of what I mean, you will eventually have to learn how to use the terminal, which is actually a first-class citizen here, unlike on Windows. Learning how to use the Linux terminal is probably the single best thing you will ever learn when using this system, because it can be used anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. The terminal looks intimidating, but you can go through it step by step, learning a little bit each day when you can. Linux also rewards people who know the ins and outs of their system well, and learning the terminal is part of that. It's not something that is common on Windows, at least to my knowledge, but it is here. Of course you can try and use Linux without ever touching the terminal, and that might work just fine for you. But I still think it's important to learn, if you can set aside some time to look into it. A lot of times the easiest way, sometimes even the only way to fix a problem or get something done is through the terminal.
Now I just vibe code, because that's better than nothing and gets me to learn what I would have not encountered otherwise, especially if I force the LLM bot to explain wtf did he do. 
The only experience I had with building a compooter was watching a friend of mine build my last one, which didn't go so smoothly, so I want to just do it myself. I'll take any advice given to me, especially since I will want to use Linux (It's mainly for privacy concerns, and my building hatred for Microsoft, but I would also like to use it for gaming and probably video editing in the future). These are the components I found through PC part picker that were recommended to me from the monitor I chose. I mainly picked AMD components as people say that AMD is more compatible with Linux, also AMD parts are cheaper, and it helps fit my budget of around £1500 - £2000...
Also, have fun!