My objective is to ditch windows & utilize my triple monitor desktop as a cockpit style dashboard for my homeserver & lan devices along with always open widgets like music, calculator, etc.
There was another post yesterday about this and the community recommended Mint & Pop OS the most. However, I am not looking for windows-like. I want a new & fresh experience like using a smartphone for the first time or switching from ios to android.
Distrochooser.de recommended kubuntu to me.
So I have some questions:
-
What are the building blocks of a distro? Things that separate distros from each other. Like I know 2 - Desktop Env & Package Managers. Are there others, what are they or where do I find a list? I would like to compare these blocks and make it a shopping experience and then pick the distro that matches my list. Is this approach even valid?
-
How do I find and compare whats missing from which distro? For eg. if I install mint, what would I be potentially missing out that may be a feature on another distro? How do I go about finding these things?
-
What are some programs/ widgets/ others that are must haves for you? For eg. some particular task manager
-
What are the first steps after installing linux? For eg. In Windows, its drivers, then debloat and then install programs like vlc, rar, etc.
-
I read on some post, a user was saying that they want to avoid installing qt libraries. Why would someone potentially want that? I have never thought of my computer in such terms. I have always installed whatever whenever. The comment stuck with me. Is this something I should be concerned about?
-
Should I not worry about all of the above and just pick from mint, pop and kubuntu?
One of the things to consider is stability. For instance, if you want something that is always pushing out the latest versions of everything, choose something built from Ubuntu, but just keep in mind that the latest builds don't have a lot of testing and can have problems show up. On the other hand, if you want something that will be rock-solid all the time, pick Debian -- the releases are going to be much older, but they have been very well tested. However Ubuntu and Debian also have different levels of "newness" to choose from, so like in Debian you can choose 'stable' (the default), 'testing' (released for awhile but still might have issues), or 'sid' (brand new, not tested at all). Ubuntu I believe starts out somewhere between debian's testing and sid releases as its base, and gets newer from there, but as you can see even within one distribution you can have a lot of choices.
Now how does that relate in the real world? Well all distributions will have security releases, so if there is an new exploit out, you will see patches for that right away. Otherwise, for a server you are going to want something that doesn't blow up, but for a desktop you might want to see the latest updates and gadgets to play with.
Keep in mind that you can play around with various releases before installing them. Most will have a "Live CD" version you can download and boot from a memory stick, so you can see what their desktop looks like. You also have the option of installing them in a virtual machine -- under Windows a good option is VirtualBox, and under Linux a good option is KVM (this might require you to use the command line but it is extremely lightweight on your CPU). Also keep in mind that most distributions allow you to install multiple desktops that you can choose from when you log in, so you could install Gnome, Mate, and others at the same time and then go back later and uninstall the ones you didn't like. This is one of the most noticeable differences between distributions -- how they preconfigure each desktop environment to look by default, but you can always find info to change the view of each one so you can copy the exact features that you like from other distributions. This is one of the great things about Linux, you aren't completely stuck with one particular setup.