Distros based on Ubuntu, such as Ubuntu itself, Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin, etc. are targeted toward new and casual users. They automate a lot of things that other distros assume their users want to do on their own.
Mint is a popular choice because it’s non-corporate and has a very Windows-like default UI. But you’d be fine on any of the ones I listed.
Choosing a distro is sort of like driving a car. If you’re not a car person, you probably don’t particularly care what your vehicle’s 0-60 is, or how much torque your engine gets, or something else. You probably just want something that’s comfortable and looks nice.
As you learn about linux, you may become very interested in it, to the degree that you care about things like init systems and package management. In that case, there will be distros that suit your tastes. But if you don’t care, it’s perfectly ok to just something that feels comfortable and looks nice.
The people who are passionate about linux will have the loudest voices, and will make their favorite distro sound really good, because they are passionate. You don’t have to be that passionate, though. And if at some point you do become that passionate, you will likely be motivated to learn all the fine details on your own so you can make an informed decision that suits your own tastes, so you really won’t have to worry about matching someone else’s.
It’s good that people get excited about linux, but under the hood the distros are more alike than they are different. Don’t feel you need to have some specific distro experience to be part of the discussion: just use what you like, and if at some point you become dissatisfied, then consider changing.
SSD for your OS. HDD for storage.
One time, a Windows 10 update unmounted my wife’s main drive and decided it would only boot to the backup copy she had on another drive. That was a fun one to troubleshoot.
So it looks like your old linux headers are causing dependency issues that are preventing upgrades. The dist-upgrade will delete the conflicting packages and update the dependencies. You should be good after that.
I’m thinking you want Arch btw. You can use archinstall to skip the tedious manual install process.
Nope. Big issue is Apple’s proprietary bootloaders for which there isn’t a great open source version.
Yep! I personally have the Galaxy Tab A 9.7.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Do note that even those marked community still have some issues: click the links directly to see the state of the OS.
That’s because they sell at community prices for little to no profit, either at cost or close to it. They’ve talked about eventually trying to get their prices into retail outlets with a retail markup, which would also pay for retail-level support rather than community support.
In other words, if you buy community, you’re buying just the hardware, and the community provided the software.
Do yourself a favor and nab Pinetab 2. The wifi and bluetooth drivers aren’t ready yet (you’ll need a dongle or to tether a phone,) but that’s part of the fun: you can join the Discord channel and watch the discussions and commits happening in real time.
For SBC, you can’t beat Raspberry Pi. The ecosystem is just there and the support outclasses every other board.
For hardware based on SBCs, Pine64 hands down. Devices like the Pinebook and Pinetab are SBCs in a hardware shell and as such should feel like cheap gadgets, but their build quality is excellent and these feel like premium devices. I have just started messing with the Pinetab 2 and it feels like a device 3x its price, to the degree that I don’t mind that the drivers and software for it are still a work in progress.
Minecraft is a procedurally generated open world video game.
For multiplayer, the computer hosting the game has to be able to load the portion of the world for each player. Having a dedicated computer hosting the server allows for much smoother gameplay experience then trying to have a single PC both run the server and client.
The machine we used for the server was literally one of my wife’s old work PCs and we just use it to host these types of games. We previously ran an ARC: Survival Evolved server on it.
Maybe you would like an immutable distro such as Fedora Silverblue?
Your PC can run any distro smoothly. What are you looking for that Mint doesn’t provide?
You’ve gotten a lot of good replies, so I’ll give you an example:
My wife and I set up a Minecraft server on an old work computer of hers. We would SSH in, start the server, and play. However, if the host lost the SSH session, the entire server would crash because the session would close.
With tmux, we could attach, start the server, and unattach. I could start the server and later my wife could attach to close it. I could SSH on my phone via iSH, attach, start the server, unattach, and close the app. We could troubleshoot mods together, since we could both see everything that happened in the session on our screens.
It offered a level of flexibility a traditional SSH session doesn’t give.
It should be noted that linux corporate is a bit different than other corporate. Ubuntu is still open source and doesn’t track you, and Canonical (their owner) knows if they piss off users too much, they’ll just switch distros.
But they do sometimes make top-level decisions that annoy the community (a lot of people hate their proprietary snap packages,) and have a different feel from community-based distros.