I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
I think that a Marxist society should allow for 0 proprietary software, and instead support for everything in free and open source decentralized technology.
Depending on your level of tech knowledge, my rec is Arch or Linux Mint. Linux Mint is practically good to go OOtB. Pop!_OS is another one that has gained popularity over the last few years. NixOS I think is the new distro that is getting a lot of buzz right now but I’m gonna wait to see where it goes and how it matures before looking at it. I’ve settled on Mint and have been using it for about 5 years as my daily driver now.
Segueing off your arch recommendation, RebornOS is a really good beginner friendly Arch based repo.
Is there a strong reason why someone would move away from a ‘beginner-friendly’ distro? Is it mainly wanderlust?
I’m in debian because it uses less ram.
I’ve played with alpine linux for the wonderlust of seeing if I can work with all of the alternative smaller code bases for the theoretical stability it provides.
Why use bash when you can use ash?
Why use the unauthorized escalation bugs of sudo, when you can use doas?
Why use all of the gnu tools of stallman when you can use the smaller version of those tools with busybox?
Why use the garganuan sprawling systemd when openrc has a much smaller codebase and fewer vulnerabilities?
I have to say I’m a fan of light (lite?) software.
I can’t tell you how pissed off I was when browsers switched to infinite ram. One day they were capped at using ~4gb ram and the next, I need a new machine.
In general, I just prefer the idea of only using enough resources to do what I need a program to do. Options are great, but e.g. with a word processor all I need is stability, footnotes, a few tags, grammar/spell check, and track changes. A few other features are nice to have but almost all the rest is unnecessary bloat and bugs, for me.
I was able to run LMDE (linux mint deiban edition) on a 3 gb Imac with libreoffice installed by default, I don’t know if I’d still reccomend that but it would freeze if I had too many tabs open
I think my old laptop has 8gb ram. This is all assuming it turns on after five or six years!
right now I have a 32 GB ram tower computer playing a small game, a crazy looking terminal emulator, a spreadsheet program and a browser and it’s still using less than 2 GB of ram. Debian cinnamon is good for me.
Impressive. Do you need a lot of ram nowadays to play games? Or do you have so much so you can play games at the same time as having other programs open?
I’m hearing lots of support for mint. Does it get updated still? I remember looking into one distro and then learned that it was no longer being maintained – one of the reasons why I didn’t look back into it till now.
My tech knowledge is fair, I’d say. I’m not too scared of breaking things, using terminal commands, or looking through the settings. It’s just that I’ve not needed to do much for a long time other than open word and a browser.
Mint is very much still being maintanied. And it’s a great distro, especially for beginners. You get the benefits of Debian (one of the oldest still maintained, very used, many programs are packaged for it), Ubuntu (one of the most used on the desktop/laptop, large company behind it, most (proprietary) software is written with it in mind), with great tools out of the box for a lot of stuff that makes it more beginner friendly and actually somewhat better on the desktop.
Ah, so some distros, like Ubuntu, are big enough that software companies, like Adobe but not necessarily Adobe, make compatible software? Any chance this includes Word, or is LibreOffice the go to word processor for Linux?
I think Mint has LibreOffice included already.
If not, you have the Software Center app on Ubuntu and Mint. It’s like the Windows Microsoft Store: a GUI to browse for installable software.
3rd option is to install it from the command line
No, it’s just than when/if some company makes software for “Linux”, some of the time Ubuntu is actually the only one they support.
Last I checked, still no Word (except in the browser), so LibreOffice is still the go to.