whats a good version of linux to start with?

ricoq18

I'm done with windows have virtualbox installed and want to try Linux what's best to start with?

arochester

LXLE >>> http://www.lxle.net/

rgand

I'm also new to Linux. That makes me a noob, not an expert so take my advice with a grain of salt.

That said, I cruised a few threads here and chose Linux Lite. It's working good and I'm picking up what to do at a comfortable rate. The forum members here have been very helpful when I need direction.

Helge

Try Zorin-os.I also worked with it and I mean its the best for Linux-Beginners because
it looks like Windows.

Thinking_Monkey

Hi ricoq18,

Asking what distro of Linux to use is an extremely hard question to answer. After you've tried several, you'll see what I mean. It's hard to pick a favorite.

I used Linux way back in the day and have recently started up again and there have been wonderful changes.

Back then (and there are plenty still around) the hard core Linux users despised any kind of graphical desktop. To use anything but the terminal (command line, console, it has many names) was pure blasphemy and an outrage to the natural order of things.

Now the fact is, and I hope I don't get flamed too badly or kicked off the forums altogether, all the most popular and widely used distributions have graphical desktops. Many, many choices of WHICH graphical desktop, too.

I'm going to go out on a limb (unwisely, I'm sure) and say that the terminal-only operating systems are going by the wayside. Why issue long, complex, hard to remember commands at the command line when you can click 2 buttons to do the same thing?

"The terminal is much much, much, more powerful than any graphical interface!!", they'll say.

Well, that may be true in a way but it's only because someone has been too lazy to build an interface around the commands.

Have you ever done any programming? Let me tell you how it goes, simplified. Decide what it is you want to do. Gather together all the commands required to do that. Say it's to display a red, blue, and green box, 3 of them, in an interface. It asks you to click on a button that is labeled "Red". When you do that the program should display a message that says "That's right".

When you're designing what you want your graphical interface to look like, the buttons do nothing yet. In the background is all your programming, the directions/actions/commands to make the boxes 128x128 pixels square, place the blue box in the middle, which is 200 pixels from the left edge and 200 pixels down from the top edge, say, and direct the button labeled "Red", when clicked with the mouse, to execute the command "IF Clicked="Yes" THEN ShowText="That's right" ELSE ShowText="Try again".

Simple as that. So to say a command line is more "powerful" than a graphical interface is not strictly true. There are many things to be done in the terminal that don't REQUIRE a graphical interface, I'll admit.

Back to the Linux distributions, in the top 20 (measured by downloads per day) distros on DistroWatch.com, ALL have several choices for desktops (called 'desktop environments', actually).

Among them are the distros which have been suggested to you here, namely LXLE, Linux Lite (just called 'Lite'), and Zorin. I would like to add my own 2 cents and recommend Linux Mint (with the 'Cinnamon' desktop).

An example of the huge multitude of graphical desktop environments available, for the current Debian distro, the available desktops are: AfterStep, Awesome, Blackbox, Cinnamon, Fluxbox, flwm, FVWM, GNOME, i3, IceWM, ion, JWM, KDE, LXDE, MATE, Openbox, pekwm, Ratpoison, Razor-qt, WMaker, XBMC, and Xfce.

Some of those are extremely popular (GNOME and MATE) and some are not. The point is that they are there for YOU to use whether they are popular with other users or not.

So to end my too-long novel here, my advice is to go with one of those suggested by others here. I know it may go against the grain when one is wanting to move away from Windows to something new and to have a Linux distribution that looks and acts a lot like Windows but if you dive off into a distro/desktop combination that is much different from Windows, you'll spend a lot of time being aggravated that things are not where they're supposed to be.

It's in mostly everybody's 'muscle memory' without even thinking, that when you want to close a window, you point to the upper right and click the red X. In some desktops, however, to close the window, the buttons are not on the upper right and it's not red and it's not an X.

That's why people here are suggesting you go with something Windows-like. When you get used to that, simply try out another distro. Heck, they're free, try out dozens if you want!

I hope that's at least a little helpful to you.

Cheers and to all a good day!


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grpeterpanos

Why don't you check ubuntu! :-)

bootneck02

I like many have got fed up with Microsoft their data mining and expensive software, so two weeks ago I installed Linux Mint as my only OS on my PC. As a retired home user and only having any real experience of any other operating system I found the transfer to Mint very easy bearing in mind that when I was at work I did not use a computer at work ether so am a complete novice. I at one time did dual boot with Zorin but could not get on with it because I would always go back to Windows if I had a problem. With Mint I found it very easy to use and it comes with enough apps to do anything I wished to do out of the box. I personally would recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon 64 bit for a novice wishing to get away from Microsoft.

Drowy

Linux mint is definately a good choice but if you wanna learn linux you gotta have problems to solve on it(atleast thats how i learned linux)

So dont switch to another distro if anything goes wrong try to fix it with some help from google and if everything works you just learn it from the web i guess