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Joined 9 days ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2025

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  • My Office Suite is LibreOffice and as far as I’m aware that’s Linux compatible

    It is very much compatible, haha. And usually comes pre-installed as the desktop office suite in many distros like Ubuntu and Debian that ship the Gnome desktop environment pre-installed.

    but would my ISP be impacted by Linux then?

    It should not be impacted at all. :)

    The simple aspect of my printer being compatible didn’t come to mind at first

    If you install any popular beginner friendly distro (like the ones I recommended) everything should work out of the box and it is very unlikely that any extra drivers need to be installed. For example on Archlinux no printing programs/services and drivers come pre-installed or enabled.

    So do not worry at all, if your laptop cover the main requirements, the distro should handle the rest automagically. If you have any more questions you can talk to me directly here on Lemmy, or we can figure something out.

    One thing though, Mint is based on Ubuntu which itself is based on Debian. But it doesn’t really matter.

    Since you are going to check what software you need/want for your new Linux device, you can always fill the gaps with Flatpaks on Flathub, these are meant to be universal packages for every Linux distro and usually you can find there the packages that your distro does not package natively. You can even find proprietary software like Discord and such.

    And again, if you have any more questions be sure reply or send me a message directly her eon Lemmy.






  • I responded this on an alt account:

    The most important decision as a new Linux user is the desktop environment, the most similar desktop environment to the Windows desktop are KDE Plasma and Cinnamon. This means your best options are:

    • Linux Mint (Cinnamon): They are the creators of the Cinnamon desktop environment and will be the default on installation.
    • Kubuntu (KDE Plasma): This is Ubuntu’s official KDE Plasma flavour, it comes with everything as usual just different desktop.
    • Fedora (KDE Edition): Same story as Ubuntu here, only that with Fedora’s own packages and environment.

    First I would check if the hardware is compatible (99% of the time is). Then I would check what software you need and/or want and check if it is available at these distros, and get familiar on how to install the software packages (either with their respective app stores or in the command line).

    There is a lot to learn but with these distros you can just install, forget and simply keep using them for eternity.

    The last and more important tip I have is to not to worry about the sea of options out there, you will not be missing anything huge by picking one or the other. Which is how most of new users feel (I did in my time).

    Hope you have a great Linux journey mate!