Have you looked at Krita and Blender?

I use BTRFS simply because I run a rolling distro of Linux. For the average user, I don’t think it is quite as necessary but the snapshots are nice. Of course, you could use timeshift to make snapshots as well.

6 months now and they love it.

I like Nemo as well!

LOL! Not necessarily. I got three of my friends converted to Linux. They’re running Linux Mint

This frustrates the removed out of me but I have a feeling it has everything to do with mindshare. Windows just has the majority of the mindshare and a lot of decisions about information technology are not necessarily made by technically savvy people. Even technically savvy people make poor choices. I had a director once tell me that he prefers proprietary software to open source because it gives him somebody to sue if the software fails. Obviously he is neither a lawyer nor much of a reader because the terms of use and conditions basically indemnify the software company.

Linux and BSD are superior in almost every way. You could literally run an entire organization on Linux Mint as the desktop. Even before Linux Mint was a thing, I had a contract job supporting a rollout of CentOS to the desktop at a small publishing company and this was back in 2005. This company did absolutely everything systems related on CentOS. If this company could do it 18 years ago on CentOS, I can only imagine it is going to be even easier today.

Sweet! That is good news. Given the power efficiency of ARM CPUs when compared to Intel and AMD, well, there just really is no comparison.

I love this! I just cannot wait for the day that I can build a RISC or ARM64 desktop in the same way we would an Intel or AMD one. I realize though that this is still a ways out.

I hope they stick with it and not go back to Microsoft. No doubt that there will be a learning curve and some growing pains but this is ultimately for the best. I wish them all of the success!

Here’s my take: If you’re going to learn Linux, go about it the right way and not the laziest way possible. You would be incorrect about simply learning the basics of the package manager. What happens if the package you’ve installed breaks something and uninstalling the package does not work?

I recommend people become power users with the command line before progressing because, in my opinion only, they’re necessary. This is my opinion only and is in no way meant to discount your abilities. I was a Linux system admin who learned awk, sed, grep, and regex after the fact and I wished I’d learned it earlier. This is what formed my opinion.

There are literally tons of good sites with lots of good information. First off, I would recommend a distro like Linux Mint Debian Edition. This is good for new and intermediate users alike. Manjaro is more for an intermediate to advanced user. What I would l do is install Linux Mint Debian Edition and then using your favorite search engine use the keywords “introduction Linux command line bash” You could also use YouTube. There is going to be a lot to learn and it may seem overwhelming.

The reason I am steering you to Google to find an intro course is not to be a jerk or elitist but to help you out. The best Linux system admins/engineers are masters at research. You only get better at research through practice. Seek out a good intro to the command line based on Linux Mint. Complete it, let me know what you learned, what you struggled with, etc. From there, I’ll help you chart a course. You’ll learn to love the command line. I do 90% of my work in a command line. Know the command line, Become an expert.

Instead of trying another distro, take the time to learn all aspects of the command line, up to and including shell scripting. Learn how tools like awk, sed, grep, vi, and regex work. That would be a better use of your time than distro hopping.

Just out of curiosity, do you know of a good resource for learning awk, sed, and grep?

Huh! That’s pretty cool. I’ve bookmarked the site to check it out later. Thanks!

SSDs are really the way to go unless you need massive amounts of storage. I have 4x4 TB spinning disks in a RAID z1. I built it out of refurb WD enterprise grade hardware on the cheap. Going on almost a year of trouble free use. I got each drive for 30 bucks. There’s no way I am going to get that kind of space on an SSD for 120 bucks.

That’s the one! I learned vi with that website. Turned me into a big fan.

I think that’s the one.

There used to be an awesome vi tutorial page at the University of Hawaii but it’s no longer there. You might find it archived on the internet archive way back though.

If you want to divorce yourself from Ubuntu (and I think that’s a good idea myself) you can always run Linux Mint Debian Edition. Since you’re so new to Linux, I would stick with Linux Mint as your daily driver and take the time to really learn the command line, shell scripting, process control, and everything Unix-like. Get good with tools like awk, sed, grep, find, and learn about regex. Distro hopping won’t help to really learn the ins and outs.

Also take time to learn tools like iptables/nftables, ip route, IP forwarding. There’s so much you can learn without distro hopping. Once you become well versed in all things command line, then you can start searching for use case specific distro. I use Arch myself but it’s not for the beginning user.