Ex-technologist, now an artist. My art: (https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli)
The biggest problem of ubuntu is snaps.
However, if you’re into audio, you can install linux mint, which is ubuntu-based, and then install the ubuntu-studio-pipewire-something (sorry, can’t remember how the package is actually called), which FIXES pipewire to work properly with high end audio apps. For example, on my vanilla Linux Mint, Bitwig Studio would not make a peep! After installing that package, it produces sound. With that fixed, you can do everything on Mint.
Just install XFce (no need to reinstall the OS). XFce is very themeable.
You know, putting up a black theme on your desktop environment is not difficult, you can probably find some online for your DE. The problem is the screen of your laptop/PC. Unless your laptop/monitor is a very expensive one, or a Mac, chances are you’re using a cheaper panel. And slapping a 100% black theme there won’t make it as black as you imagine it to be (as in your phone, for example, which usually use good quality screens).
Everyone says Godot, but I disagree. Godot is too high level and it won’t teach you much about how it all works. Godot is good if you have already mastered languages and common gaming algorithms (e.g. collisions), and you just want to get going. But as a first foray, I’d say, go with SDL. After you done something simple in SDL and learned some hands on knowledge on how things work under the hood, go with Godot or Love. That knowledge will help you troubleshoot godot better then.
It works but be careful with wifi. The other user said that it works out of the box with endeavourOS, and I know you can install it later with Linux Mint too, but the problem is that this wifi driver for the older chips (from 2011 to 2013 at least) is buggy. In my 2011 macbook air it would crash the whole OS on heavy downloads, and on my 2012 one it won’t come up from sleep. So I bought a super tiny supported usb wifi dongle to deal with the problem. Now my two macbook airs work 100% with Linux.
My 2015 macbook air works great with the linux wifi driver, but it has no web cam support, and the driver on github is buggy and not updated for newer kernels anymore.
I installed OpenSuSE Slowroll yesterday. I felt underwhelmed by their bad documentation. Their nvidia installation driver wiki was wrong, and resulted in the drivers not working (not all packages were pulled through via dependencies). I opened a bug report and they did a few changes to the wiki very fast (thanks to a nice suse engineer), but the overall wiki page remains utterly convoluted. And I’m mentioning this because even if you might not have to deal with nvidia, the rest of the system receives the same care. YaST is an eye sore with the worst UIX ever designed by man. And after installing the drivers and updating the system, now systemd takes 1.30 minutes to journald it – out of nowhere. It’s just a weird distro, with no attention to detail for end users, imho.
Regarding Bazzite, is a gaming distro. If you only play 1 kind of game that works with Mint, stay with Mint (or Debian-stable).
Wine will never work properly for apps. Sure, it manages to load a few apps, but they are crashy. Reimplementing the Windows API is a massive task that won’t finish for decades. So I suggest you use Linux-native apps instead. I moved from Photoshop to gimp3 too, even if I had the last non-subscription version on CD and it kinda worked with wine (but not really). Same with Affinity Photo, that many people suggest to run on wine, it’s super crashy on wine. So, avoid windows apps via wine. Games do work because they use very little of the windows api.
In other words, stay with what you know works without headaches (Mint), and move to native Linux apps, and Steam for games. I’ve been using Linux since 1998 and I’m comfortable with the terminal too, but I don’t enjoy having troubling installations. I’m at age now that I want things to just work.
Burn a usb with memtest and try that. Only after you have removed suspicion of your RAM being bad, go to the next thing to investigate.
Linux Mint is the answer for every newbie coming from Windows. You install the faenza-icon-theme from the repo which is not flat, you turn off the autohiding of the scrollbars (they have a gui for it), you turn off tap-n-drag which can wreck havoc (via dconf), do a few other quality of life changes (like the new cinnamon theme), and she should be happy with it. Just make sure you install a newer kernel (from the update app, there’s a menu item for it), so this newer laptop is better supported.
I personally also install Cinnamenu instead of the default menu, and configure it to be super simple like this: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/391/944/352/704/129/original/7e2ced150dbc8932.png It’s so much more usable than the default cinnamon menu that has small icons.
I suggest Q4OS (with Trinity DE). It loads itself at 340 MB of RAM, so it leaves you with a lot of free RAM (especially since the heaviest apps now are browsers – youtube needs 1 GB for itself). Arch Linux with XFCE can be made to boot at 470 MB. Debian starts at 650 MB. Ubuntu/Fedora start at over 1.5 GB so avoid.
Then of course there are the damnsmalllinux, antix etc, but the user experience on these is bad. Q4OS feels like a modern OS with GUI panels for everything, while not taking lots of ram.
My husband I stopped buying Coca-Cola. We now buy Vikos Cola, which is a local brand in Epirus, Greece.
Linux Mint is actually fast, and uses half the RAM of Fedora (see shots: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/653/604/229/121/661/original/6d60399683784c13.png and https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/761/028/826/681/916/original/32f1c276089be277.png ). With a bit of tweaking, and using the Cinnamenu menu instead of the default one, it feels really good. On Fedora KDE I got updates every couple of days to the excess of 1 GB. I’m on 50mbps internet, and that was too much for me.
I hope they support the Orange Pi RV2. It’s the best middle of the road, affordable, consumer-based risc-v sbc right now.
There is nothing like CapCut for Linux. There’s Resolve, LightWorks, Shotcut, Kdenlive and the less evolved, Openshot. That’s it, all the other editors found online or suggested here are nowhere near completion. Also, none of them have the feel of Capcut with its AI and advanced automatic features. If you want to go open source, I’d suggest you learn to use kdenlive. It’s good enough with manual workarounds, as long as you don’t shoot in 10bit or in RAW or need complex color grading. If you really require automatic AI stuff like in Capcut, stay with Windows/Mac or a tablet. That’s the reality.
I run mint on 4 gb ram without issues. Sure, I’m careful to not open too many apps or too many tabs, but they all work fine. Only 4k video editing is undoable on such a machine. I also have a 4 gb swap partition, but I’m careful to lay off programs when I see it get hit.
My mom uses xfce on a 2 gb laptop. For her is enough, because she only knows how to open a single tab on a browser (mostly fb or yt).
I think this already bites people, it has started, it’s not in September but now?: https://x.com/rogerioperdiz/status/1946873449537798582
Another one I found is: https://github.com/markyb86/Mac-OS-9-Classic-XFCEfixes?tab=readme-ov-file
And here’s the one suggested from others, but most links were dead, here’s all the files together: https://github.com/grassmunk/Platinum9
Have you tried OnlyOffice? It has better compatibility with MS formats than LibreOffice.
This is a good laptop, still plenty fast for Linux. However, given the choice, use the Intel graphics card for your 2D desktop rendering, not the nvidia one. The nvidia drivers don’t support it anymore, and the nouveau driver is too slow imho (visibly slow when moving windows etc). You can use old nvidia drivers for it, but these might be crashy with the new kernels. The Intel drivers will be fresh though.
There are security updates on testing. Maybe not as fast as they’re on Sid, but they are.
Navidrome does that. You have to setup a PC, or a raspberry Pi with navidrome, and then use a client like Symfonium (costs $5, not open source, but it’s the best subsonic client out there), and tell it to automatically downconvert music when played via the phone. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B+, with just 1 GB of RAM, running navidrome. DietPi + navidrome (which is installable directly via dietpi’s software selection), together they take just 80-120 MB of RAM!
I had Jellyfin before that, and Emby, and they were dogs. 1 GB of RAM was not enough for them, they’d swap with an additional 200-300 MB of RAM. And they were slow with large music libraries too. Navidrome/Subsonic don’t have such issues. Big music libraries are handled fast with their db/engine.
If you prefer to not use a server, there are encoding shell scripts that do batch-encoding: https://github.com/caleis/flac2mp3/blob/master/flac2mp3.sh