....by a popcorn vendor, one assumes.

A nice list of distro to try/avoid/etc. Horses for courses I suppose!

My day job is a RHEL/etc sys admin and I run a Mac at home. I jumped from Windows a long time ago, and as I have no desire to mess with it the Mac "just works". Nowadays I could just about run some sort of Linux as a main desktop if I wanted, but it would remind me too much of work and there would always be the temptation to fix/tweak something.

I do run a few VMs though. I usually ran CentOS (command line only) due to familiarity with the day job. But latest Mac is ARM so for the first time in ages I've been messing with Ubuntu for a bit. Seems to be OK, a lot more user-friendly than Fedora which I installed at the same time. Also a lot more documentation/help for Ubuntu, like when I was figuring out how to build Docker containers for different arch. Back in the day my fave VM play distro was Mint, but it doesn't look like they do an ARM-friendly version right now.

Except the steaming pile of excretion just doesn't want to work with DP alt. with PD most of the time (and yet Windows and Ubuntu have worked perfectly and without complaint with the same displays). Also the OS is just plain crap for multiple display usage so it doesn't really just work there either.

Regardless of your choice (and Linux gives us that choice) of distro, we can all agree Windows is not the OS we want or need.

Microsoft's goal is for you to to pay them a monthly fee for everything. That's not my goal.

Just crap for multi display? Handles my five monitor setup just fine.

I'd like the display preferences arrangement window to be scalable, because with five monitors it ends up being ridiculously small - but that's really a fairly minor issue.

What do you find to be poor about multi monitor support?

(Absolutely with you on DisplayPort extensions... Linux on the same hardware happily supplied daisy chained monitors, but not MacOS).

My main complaint with it is that if I can't remap the shortcut then I have to use the top bar (or similarly, if you want to use the Dock for some reason) which can be a long way away when you have a lot of or high resolution screens with maybe an odd layout. It's not about that you can't have multiple screens or set them up as you like, it's about the usability there after which a daily pain for me (I didn't get to choose the hardware/OS and I have not enjoyed the experience these last few months.) I'm sure you must have experienced this having 5 screens, maybe you put up with ctrl+f2 and navigating with the keyboard though.

Interesting and not too far from what to expect when coming to Linux as a new user. I'm a Fedora user and like most distro users, you need to work out a system that suits your needs. In my case I use the latest release, skipping in-the-middle releases until I see a new feature or perhaps even a new look, that I like; I then upgrade from clean. The install is now so easy that there's no great difficulty in doing this. Once I have my apps installed, off we go again. What makes it easy is that I keep my working files synchronised on a separate disk which are then synchronised back into the new installation.

Any Linux distro can be used and upgraded at your own leisure rather than at the whim of the vendor, which is why I left the Windows world behind a long time ago.

[Author here]

There you go then.

If you're happy with that, good for you. I am not trying to tell anyone they're wrong.

Me, personally, I would not be happy *at all* if I had to reinstall my OS from scratch every year or two; I would regard that as an unacceptable cost of ownership, even of something free.

I think my oldest working Linux installation dates back 9 years and it's still fine and in frequent use, and the only reason I have nothing older is replacement of hardware and not bothering to transfer. That install is on at least its 3rd or 4th host machine now.

> Me, personally, I would not be happy *at all* if I had to reinstall my OS from scratch every year or two;

Really?

Not a criticism; each to their own. But am I the only person who habitually reinstalls their Linux, MacOS, and Windows home laptops pretty much monthly? By choice and preference?

Have to agree with Liam here. The very idea of installing from scratch - particularly when not necessary - is ridiculous. I run openSUSE - both Leap and Tumbleweed - and have to say that the rolling release has improved hugely in the five or six years since I first tried it, when every second update would bork something, require a rollback, probably some kind of manual fix, or occasionally a re-install. I haven't actually re-installed Tumbleweed from scratch on either of the two machines which currently run it, since I built them some four years ago, but I tend to put off updating until I can spare half an hour to double-check it isn't going to do something silly, which usually means once a month or so and also means doing it from the command line - not exactly newbie-friendly.

Leap, slightly different in that a version upgrade (e.g. 15.2 to 15.3) is sometimes easier from the installation media, but I quite like the fact that in between versions it's relatively stable. Haven't had any borkage for... well... ages really. Can't remember the last time.

And I'm about to start my very first MacOS "reinstallation". A friend has a second-hand device which seems to have a few things on it that it shouldn't, so a factory reset is in order methinks...

Personally, I ran RiscOS as long as I possibly could (still do for some things) and then went straight to openSUSE somewhere around version 12.n (there was a Mac in the house too, not mine). Windows might have been simpler, but why make things simple when you can be different?

Did I just contradict myself?

M.

I've been with the German one since S.u.S.E 6.1, now Tumbleweed on everything, including the odd computer or four when friends have asked for advice. Once I tossed the nVidia cards having got over the belief that I needed the better graphics everything has been 99.99% fine.

Always used KDE, lived through 4, toughened me up.

It's always been more than good enough. Only recently upgraded my 10 yr old desktop because I really needed better for video processing.

Other "spins" might or might not have advantages, I neither know nor care.

"Always used KDE, lived through 4, toughened me up."

*Roaring Laughter* Yup.

One on me.

5 downvotes (at time of writing)? For an uncritical comment asking for opinions? You get better behaviour on hckrnews.

Does it matter?

Nowadays, probably you are, yep! Back in

I used to rebuild my Win 7 system (and before that XP), so often I created custom install media, that had almost everything preselected (region, keyboard, local user account, drive configuration etc etc), plus service packs, various drivers, and a few must-have applications all pre-installed, i.e. slipstreamed in etc.

All my data was on a 2nd drive and on a NAS. So wiping C: wasn't an issue.

I'd just stick the DVD in the drive (later a USB), reboot, and leave it to it. Come back 30 mins later, and a nice clean install on C:

Not every month, but I used to have to reinstall both Windows and OSX around every 12-18 months to keep them running efficiently. Certainly a PITA, but it was all part of the maintenance routine, particularly with the Macbook I was using at the time.

Which is why those of us who didn't use those are usually unbearably smug.

If your hobby is re-installing operating systems, that's fine, I'm sure there are worse hobbies to have.

If it's what you like to do, then set up a series of VMs on your PC and install into them to your heart's content. You can then install the most obscure hobbyist distros, BSD, and various other operating systems without having to keep separate hardware around for them.

I keep a variety of VMs and hardware for testing software and so have a fair bit of practice at this, even though it's not my idea of entertainment. Any of the major Linux distros installs with pretty minimal effort if you accept the defaults.

Erm my laptop couldn't be recovered from the Windows 10 dev branch and I was upset with having to reinstall after 8 years, I don't have time to reinstall monthly and yearly would be a challenge

But am I the only person who habitually reinstalls their Linux, MacOS, and Windows home laptops pretty much monthly? By choice and preference?

I think it's called getting too old for that shit. It's up to them to make sure their OSes work.

Heh. I reinstall my Kubuntu from scratch every LTS (I'm busy right now so don't have time to do the 22.04 upgrade on my laptop, next week, probably, perhaps). I work on RedHat/CentOS servers but need WiFi drivers, the printer. Rebuild takes me a few hours and /home is a separate partition (don't forget to export your home directoriy's encryption key) and simply remount it. Good to go.

My housemate is a Rock Star game dev (formerly of 343/Halo, all of them) and his machine is Win 11 (some strange beta I'm not even sure is In Chain at Microsoft) and he rebuilds twice weekly.

Frankly, I'm in awe and as a SysAsmin... if I had to do Windows again professionally, I'd be begging him (a Dev) for hints on rebuilding WinX at scale because he's got it nailed down.

I wouldn't be happy if I *had to* upgrade but I choose to upgrade when it suits me...and OK that's usually every 18-30 months for me; it's a Fedora thing :-)

Installing is quicker than upgrading these days (assuming you keep your separate /home partition intact, and have a nice little Ansible playbook to do the post-install extras). I've just done a stack of Ubuntu 22.04 systems: a fresh install takes ~15 mins, an inline upgrade maybe 30. OK, the latter theoretically leaves you less to do afterwards, but I love the freshness and speed of the former!

> you need to work out a system that suits your needs

That's true, but while everybody knows to some extent what his needs might be, the big problem with Linux distros is that as an outsider you have absolutely no clue what your options are!

200+ distros, one would assume they all have some unique characteristics, but unless you spend months reading through scattered, unverified and mostly outdated internet resources, how on earth am you supposed to know what those are and what they mean for you and your everyday work flow?

That's why the usual client, the Windows defector, usually just asks for "something that is as close to Windows as possible". Because what he/she/it needs is a simply a reliable OS to run programs on , not a platform to tweak and to play with. This usually goes way over the heads of the Linux gurus, who's idea of fun is to recompile a kernel, or to test a keyboard and mouse-less OS controlled by throwing M&Ms against a charged metal plate...

Horses for courses, Mr Average needs an OS which just works, doesn't get in the way, and is easy (for a normal person) to find support for. Ideally with LTS releases, since normal people do not consider reinstalling everything as "fun". As for the technical considerations, on the ideal distro they are totally transparent, as in "it just works".

Just my 2 cents worth...

"who's idea of fun is [...] to test a keyboard and mouse-less OS controlled by throwing M&Ms against a charged metal plate..."

But that *was* fun, right up until some bastard upstream recompiled libmetalplate.so to use a conflicting version of libplate.so and I had to mount the root filesystem in a different system in order to pin the package versions.

"Mr Average needs an OS which just works, doesn't get in the way, and is easy (for a normal person) to find support for."

This. Specifically the third requirement, despite the fact that Windows increasingly doesn't actually deliver on that front. No-one is going to make the jump unless they have a promise from an experienced friend that they will hand-hold and fix problems. With a decent distro, that support will not be a burden long-term, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can learn Linux from the interwebs painlessly.

Possibly a fourth requirement is to have a second computer (permanently on hand) that you can use to fix the first one. Most geeks take that for granted and most normal people don't have it.

A second computer on hand?

There are nine in the room I am in right now! (No, fondleslabs do not count)

Are you just counting the ones that are on?

In this room, I have 4 on right now, another 2 in standby, a stack of 4 laptops that are usable but turned off at the moment, my PiDP11 and a BBC Micro ready to be turned on, and a new firewall with PfSense made more usable by installing many of the missing bits of FreeBSD waiting to be deployed. And I think there's a working Archimedes A3020 somewhere in here!

Do what everyone else seems to do - Install Mint, then write a blog about your experience.

Small correction here. What the usual client, the Windows would-be defector wants is free as in beer Windows.

He/she needs to continue using Windows without paying a dime. This is why everybody is silently putting up with forced activation, telemetry, cloud login, advertising plastered all over the place etc, because they just want to continue using the MS OS.

@ThatOne said: "200+ distros, one would assume they all have some unique characteristics, but unless you spend months reading through scattered, unverified and mostly outdated internet resources, how on earth am you supposed to know what those are ... "

Perhaps someone ought to write an El Reg article on which Linux distro to pick ...

So I guess that leaves us with only OS the suits the needs of Mr./Mrs./Miss Average : Microsoft Windows.

@ThatOne

..."what he/she/it needs is a simply a reliable OS to run programs on..."

I have been very happy with Mageia since, well, almost forever, as I started with Mandrake 9 (I think) in 2004/5.

The biggest problem I had with it was with updates - sometimes it will give you a warning that it needs to be rebooted for a kernel update, BUT THERE WOULD BE FURTHER UPDATES WAITING IN THE WINGS; should you reboot without waiting for URPMI to fetch the later updates, you can end up with an OS that does not boot into the desktop. Luckily it is easy enough to just hit Alt-F2 for a console, log on as root (or su to root) and complete the update.

Other than that it is a joy to use (for me, at least).

The excellent Register humor will definitely scare people away from Linux here. That's probably a good thing. Linux is awesome, but no matter what distribution you use, the average user will more easily find support for Windows or MacOS. Linux is for people who like to break things. ChromeOS excluded. All our older family members should run ChromeOS on ChromeBooks so that nothing ever breaks.

I've used Mint for a number of years. I just want a stable OS that allows me to do the things I want to do. I've had very few breakages using it; I'd say less problems than I used to have using Windows. It just works, as they say.

I'm with Andy Non here. Mint manages to be as user-friendly as old times Windows (XP, 7). It doesn't require any special computer knowledge to install and run, and ex-Windows users should normally immediately feel comfortable with it.

It's definitely the distro I suggest to non-IT people who want to break free from Microsoft's death spiral.

"Linux is for people who like to break things."

As opposed to people who want things broken for them and therefore choose Windows?

No thanks. I want an OS that enables me to do things without breakage and that's Linux.

"ChromeOS excluded. All our older family members should run ChromeOS on ChromeBooks so that nothing ever breaks."

If all you want to do is use somebody else's computer via a browser, that's fine to do a limited number of things. However as one of the older family members that wouldn't suit me (neither does your blatent ageism). Self & wife run Devuan (an old MSI is on Mint + KDE). A couple of cousins-in-law are on Zorin.

My wife has two systems with Ubuntu (currently 18.04) installed on them (a laptop that she uses for casual use, and a desktop with two screens for genealogy work). They both are configured for her to use Cinnamon, with a Windows XP skin on it (this goes back to when I first moved her off of her Windows XP system). The only time I get bothered by her not being able to use them is when they drop off the Mesh WiFi (which happens more often than I can explain!)

She doesn't really care what they are running as long as she can get to the Internet, read her mail, and sometimes print the odd house brochure (she thinks we're going to move sometime, I've not yet disillusioned her about why we can't afford the houses she's looking at).

I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop ever since Mandriva started going down the drain (new management at the company). I can't recall it ever "breaking".

As for ChormeOS, that's more or less Linux but with Google being root instead of you. You can do the same thing by installing Debian and not giving the user the root password.

If you think ChromeOS doesn't break then you've not had the pleasure of using it.

This is something that I like. I want my computers to be boring - ie just work and not have things fail because of some improvement (ie update) that breaks the way that I do things. This is why my servers run RedHat (or Rocky) or Debian - long lifetimes. I can keep the base OS but run the current version of PHP or similar -- so get the best of both worlds.

Linux Mint for my laptop and what I recommend to friends.

OK: I will also run bleeding edge (Arch) in a VM as I am a techie and want to see what is coming down the line. If I was not I would not.

The one thing that I would like stable OSs to update is the latest Unicode glyphs - so that I can understand what friends are saying when they send an email containing a new emoji.

"so that I can understand what friends are saying when they send an email containing a new emoji."

I would take the view that if they need Unicode emojis they're probably not saying anything worth understanding.

So we're a Mac house, after the Great Windows Update From Hell and subsequent inability to run Windows in 4 GB RAM (I've lost count of the number of slow-running friends laptops I have been asked to look at), but how to back up, and store files not generally needed but still wanted? Apple has stopped selling kit for that, so after buying and hating a Seagate file server that allegedly ran Time Machine, I built my own four-disk RAID 1 server on Ubuntu Server. After a couple of hiccups I now have a smooth running small server offering Time Machine, Samba file shares and miniDLNA for watching videos on TV. Yes, it isn't out-of-the-box working, but a bit of patience and Googling helps me stand on the shoulders of giants who've had my problems and fixed them.

I wouldn't spec a laptop/desktop with less than 8GB of RAM these days with any OS.

Not because of OS bloat, but because 4GB isn't enough RAM to fit an OS and a modern web browser (connecting to modern websites).

I'm right in the middle of a project upgrading a whole bunch of desktops that were quite happily running Linux Mint on 4GB of RAM to 8GB purely because the users are having to access more 'responsive' websites (which are anything but).

Or I suppose I could run a different web browser which isn't compatible with those sites, that's not really a solution in a business though.

For a short time, windows actually didn't suck. But it would seem that Microsoft were unhappy about that situation and so forced some updates our way...

In the beginnings and for a short time Microsoft followed the old system of giving customers value for their money.

But they soon switched to the modern system of taking as much money as possible while giving as little value as possible. Figures: More profit.

Well, kind of modern, it was already fashionable in the 1700s among a specific profession: "Take everything, give nothing back! Arrr!"

Well, kind of modern, it was already fashionable in the 1700s among a specific profession: "Take everything, give nothing back! Arrr!"

I thought lawyers predated the 1700s?

Hmm, dunno, 1700 BCE sounds about right. End of the neolithic, start of the Mycenaean project. Yeah, I'd say lawyers probably came crawling out from under their rocks about then.

Windows didn't suck with Win2k. Windows XP was OK but was also not secure enough for general usage.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all operating systems suck. Some just suck less than others.

it's not so much a quantitative question – sucking MORE or LESS – but a qualitative one: you choose in what way the OS will annoy you. With Windows, it's all the vulnerabilities and crappy updates, with Mac it's the walled garden and the childish treatment, with Linux it's the initial installation and driver set-up.

And you forgot MX-Linux, which is to Debian what Mint is to Ubuntu : easy to install, with all the drivers and codecs, and Debian-based. Optionally systemD-free