I have no experience with Linux, but I’d like to give it a try. I’m looking at the System76 Meerkat and Thelio with the Pop!_OS option.
I don’t see myself gaming on it because I have a Windows machine for just that. I’d mostly be using it for learning Linux and doing basic things like web surfing and word processing (Libreoffice perhaps).
Any recommendations or advice? Thanks!
Pop is a great starting point. Others have mentioned Mate, Cinnamon, or Ubuntu, and those are likewise pretty easy to start with. Pop is the one that I install on my kids’ and parents’ computers, because it’s that easy, and it’s also the one that I use daily because it has some key features (I’ll say below).
Hopefully by now you’ve already read or watched some videos about differences between using Windows and various Linux distributions. If not, here’s one channel on TilVids (a fediverse version of youtube) that I think has some useful stuff: https://tilvids.com/c/thelinuxexperiment_channel/videos
This video from System76 also gives a short and straightforward intro to the pop desktop environment:
[Edit: actually, I should link to the pop os info page because the explanations there are more up to date.]
Here are my key features, in order of how I think a new user might care about them:
Remember that on linux you can change most things, including installing a different software manager GUI such as gnome software, e.g.
sudo apt install gnome-software
.I just do updates from the terminal, but I still use pop shop for finding and installing software.
Disclaimer: I haven’t used gnome software, and there are others available.
Pop’s implementation of tiling is worth mentioning again. It’s incredibly intuitive, so if you fool with it for a few minutes you will get the hang of it, and you will almost definitely miss it if you turn it off, but you can turn it off so easily that even if you hate tiling it’s not a problem. The virtual desktop implementation is similarly polished and intuitive.
I agree the pop shop is slow, but it’s also the most usable GUI app store i’ve seen in 25 years of using linux. I find myself frequently opting to use it instead of the CLI, and coming from me that’s high praise.
Oh yeah, ease of switching between tiling and floating is another good point. And the “floating window exceptions” for the handful of applications I don’t want to tile (like the steam library) are easy to set up and work really well now.