I recommend Linux Mint (21.2), which a based on Ubuntu (22.04) and Debian. The cinnamon desktop environment it comes with is pretty similar to windows 7, which makes it easier to use. I think 21.2 will remain supported until 2027 as LTS.

It’s not super difficult to host your own gitlab instance tbh.

Not directly related but RISC-V is also really nice to to program with. I hope it takes off because it has fewer niche instructions that may slow down a system (x86 sucks in that regard).

Lmao my university also uses centos 7 for their ancient-ass SSH server. Even the professors just told us to use a VM because they didn’t want to use an old version of clang anymore.

Yeah gcc and mingw took ages back when I learned cpp a few years ago. This was back in high school when I barely knew what Linux was, so it never occurred to me that I could do that. Eventually gave up on setting it up in VScode and used codeblocks and spent the semester dealing with that GUI.

It is kind of how it works. It slows down the absorption of alcohol.

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There’s some themes for cinnamon that make it close enough to windows 10 styling.

I like the free version of waveform 17 as my DAW, but I’m not sure if it supports Linux. Vital is a good free synth with tons of presets.

Posts like this are why Linux users have a bad rep. I like Linux but a lot of tools I use are developed for windows, not Linux. I use Nvidia gpus (because I have to for CUDA) which are known to bug out on Linux.

So I think I got it to work. Used a virtual machine to install it onto the drive, and now my laptop boots to Ubuntu when the drive is plugged in. Took a while for me to figure out which partition sizes I needed for stuff since I wanted to do manual partitioning.

Yeah there’s a ton of stuff to learn. I’ve got some experience from my college courses but I want to get ahead before I take the ones that really test my Linux knowledge.

I’m probably going to stick with something simple like Ubuntu 22.04 since some software I use is only supported on that.

I’m going to play around with it soon by installing full Linux onto an external SSD. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve seen some guides and tutorials that mention that it’s possible.

I’ve seen tutorials where people installed Linux using a virtual machine that can only see the ISO usb and the drive you are installing Linux on to do that. It’ll be a pain removing the drives from my laptop. I probably won’t be dual booting because I use nvidia GPUs + can’t switch to Linux full time because nvidia and I use CUDA for projects.

I’ll be trying out Linux outside of a virtual machine for the first time. I’ve got a SATA SSD external enclosure that I’ll be using to boot without messing with my current pc

I feel like the explanation using email as an example works pretty well. Most people understand how different emails from different providers can communicate, but their account is hosted on one platform.