Hello all I am looking for some insight and help in this matter. I have been playing around with Linux in various flavors for a few years off and on, mostly Ubuntu based ones. With the recent issues with Windows 10 and its data unsecurity and pretty much open spying I am on the fence about moving to a new OS. I've downloaded and installed a few different versions onto my laptop and I have to say that I can not find a home in any of these. I have used Windows for many years, started on version 3.0 and have used every version since. Windows just works and has any software needed for any situation, however im not inclined to share my life with the world. I have tried Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Mint 17.3, Elementary OS Freya, Zorin 11, Pinguy 15.xx just to name a few and all just fall short of the experience. The fonts are not as sharp or clean as Windows is, the interface is just lacking to me and doing simple things seems overly complicatied. Ive use pc's for over 20 years and I couldnt even find out what CPU I had, and finding anything on the hard drive, good night.

Also installing software is a bit on the snippy side. it seems if its something that is in the OS's default PPA its not too bad but if that or any other PPA isnt maintained perfectly, things start breaking fast. It took me over 30 minutes to install Chrome on Elementary OS, kept getting a 32 bit deb error, thing is i was trying to install a 64 bit version of chrome on a 64 bit versions of E-OS. Ended up finding the .deb file from a google search. Also my laptop has a Nvidia nvs 160 GPU in it, that for some reason when I installed the closed drivers from Nvidia causes E-OS to crap its self and die. Constant freezing and force rebooting. I tried Ubuntu but that damn Unity runs like crap and I hate it, Cant find a damn thing in there.

I really want to move away from windows and I am so on the foot of just sucking it up and buying a Mac but I really hate paying that kind of money for a pc that i cant even game on. Is there anything out there that just works in the linux community, something that is stable, supports the hardware most people have like my notebook, Dell Latitude 6400 Intel core 2 duo 2.5 4 gb ram nvidia nvs 160 I am looking for something that is clean, fast, usable, has a clear UI with sharp, crisp fonts that dont look like something from the snes. Has a great user experience and makes it intuitive for new users to find their files and install software without being a Network Engineer.

I have stuck to buntu variant cause I know how to use them, tried to use OpenSuse and well that was just a disaster in and of its self, same with Fedora, I want usabilty not some open source only OS, I dont mind buying software, I just want it to work and not have to spend days getting there for the first set of updates to kill it (Microsoft<----Calling you out here)



Thanks Kindly



Kyoten

I may be out of line here, but I think the first thing you might do is discard the Windows way of looking at things.

If Windows appears to "just work," it's because Microsoft will not allow Windows to be shipped on hardware that is not "Windows certified," that is, Windows ships only on hardware on which Windows will "just work." Windows thereby makes itself into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It might help were you to present the specific problems you are trying to solve one at a time. Nvidia graphics seems to be one (one that I fortunately have not had to deal with--my boxes are all Intel). Others seem to involve various PPAs. Note that PPAs are a Ubuntu thing; they are very much unofficial repositories, with the emphasis on "unofficial."

Lay out the issues one at a time and we will help you. Without specificity, though, it is difficult to address issues.

A lot of the fonts are NOT INSTALLED BY DEFAULT. So don't fret those, you can ADD them. Or even create new ones (for FREE). Or appropriate the ones you have sitting on your windows installs. I've even converted a few of the OLD fonts from when MS-DOS was microsoft's latest offering. Or acquisition at least. It's a brain + pattern recognition + familiarity thing that lets me be able to read without having to relearn how to read on modern anti-aliased fonts.


If you want it to FEEL more like windows you could use various window managers that LOOK like windows. IceWM was what I used for the longest. It even has a Win95 theme iirc. And probably an XP one. The main issue with being new to linux is knowing that something exists, and what it's called. If you're used to microsoft office, well there's star office which became open office which became libre-office. There are other office suites too. Much of the same stuff that windows had, just different and by a different name.

I'd go with Mint Mate edition. Try it out.

If you are looking for an operating system that isn't Windows, you probably should consider forgetting everything you know about operating systems. An operating system is a tool. Every distribution of Linux appeals to different types of people who have varying degrees of technical experience.

What day to day tasks do you do on your computer?

What type of security do you require?

What amount of effort do you expect to put into customizing your environment?

Your post was mostly a whole lot of grovelling about how hard Linux is to learn. Expect to struggle with Linux. You didn't learn to use Windows in a day, or even in a year.

Please provide more information about what user experience you expect to see. Then someone might be able to make an educated suggestion to refer you to a distribution that meets your needs.

Thank you for the help, and I have had it up to here with MS and Windows, the windows 10 thing just killed it for me. Ok first off is the graphics issues, in both Mint 17.3 Cinnamon and Elementary OS I have no issues until with stability until I install the nvidia drivers, then all goes to a hand basket. Sometime it will work fine for a shift or 2 (8 hours of work) then bam the entire system will hang/freeze and require a forced reboot (hold down power button) once this happens the first time, its down hill from there with complete freezing sometimes within a min. after booting up. If i dont use any 3d, like no compiz or anything pretty and stay with the default xorg drivers its fine.

Ive had some issues with software, mainly time killing stuff, i enjoy playing games and wanted to play Drakensang online, which is supposed to be playable in the browser but alas it doesnt even give me the option anymore, this isnt OS specific, not even windows gives me that option. I found a really nice guide on how to install the desktop app using wine and Play on Linux. My hardware should have been able to run it fine, but after following it to the Letter, I was unable to get even 5fps, and that was at login. Not a deal breaker but would be nice to have, WoW however works like a charm with almost nothing done to make it run but im not a fan of paying a sub. each month to play the game (tested using a free server but that scares me since bliz. is not playing nice)

My biggest gripe of all, the fonts. In Windows my text is crisp, sharp, and clear. Linux seems to be fuzzy, like watching non hd content on a 1080p tv. Ive tried it on other pc's as well, some with amd video cards, one with intel hd 3000, and mine with the nvidia and it just doesnt look good to me. Ive tried ubuntu tweaks, elementary tweaks and gnome tweaks, themes, everything i could find but it just doesnt look good. This is my biggest issue with it, after an hour of using chrome to surf the web i have a headache from straining to read the fonts. This doesnt happen on windows or osx (on the fence with apple as it stands, really want the new macbook) I have run around in circles trying to fix the font issues but to no avail, even typing a document in LibreOffice doesnt look clear but I can boot up windows and its fine as frog hair. Any help would be much appreicated as well as which distro is good for someone who knows enough to get hurt in linux, something not so complicated.

Running Linux requires a certain amount of commitment and study.

Once you have decided upon a distribution that you want to keep; study the distributions documentation and the Package Management System and learn how to run it efficiently. I recommend running Slackware as it is rock solid and it's an incredible teacher. Once you learn Slack no other distro will ever intimidate you again; seriously:--

-::-I don't recommend any distribution based on Ubuntu and I have my reasons for that.-::-

So install the True Type Microsoft fonts on your Linux box and enjoy them:-
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...-ubuntu-linux/

If you hate the GUI that much build your own <or> tweak what you have. Make use of the 'Tweak Tool'
http://lifehacker.com/5775914/gettin...-compatibility
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...op_environment

As far as simple things seeming overly complicated; again there is a degree of getting knowledge and obtaining it. If you don't educate yourself and read Linux documentation things can seem impossible.

You will only get results if you apply yourself to a degree of commitment.

-::-We Geeks here didn't become Geeks overnight we applied ourselves respectively with dedication and the drive to learn what we didn't know.-::-

Persistence is the key:-

I dont think linux is that hard to learn, at least the working knowledge anyway. I have over 20 years experience on windows and Im not a complete Noob at linux. I have used a couple distros for work and used to actually install it on customer computers who didnt have a recover disc or didnt want to buy one. I started with PclinuxOS years ago, then moved to Ubuntu around 9.04 and used that on my work pc until I discovered Mint. Thing is, this is a recent problem for me. My old work pc was a 1.8ghz core 2 duo acer laptop with 3 gig ram, 120gig hard drive and intel 950 video. Never had a problem, fonts were clear, crisp, I used this pc for 3 years running Mint on it until I quit the job. Needed something I could run data backups on that wouldnt get eat up with the virus's that was on customers hard drives. I have no real issues using the terminal, though im still learing commands and what to do. Things that get me is like last month, I had a notebook here that had Ubuntu on it, was a friends and we just installed 14.04 LTS on it. New install and he wanted the OSX theme on it, i found the page with the instruction and followed them to the letter, half way thru it broke completely, locks up and when we restarted and tried to use the terminal again we kept getting errors about files being locked, had to wipe the drive and start over. Now this isnt nothing that windows doesnt do either, ive had new installs crap and die in 3 minutes, but I at least had an idea what happened, with this, im clueless and no idea where to even look.

This still isnt a breaking issue, stuff happens and I know that all too well.

As for software, web browsing/ netflix/hulu/ Working with tons of Excel and Word docs with heavy formatting (this doesnt work well in linux, seems office has some special sauce afer all that LibreOffice cant view) some web design (not an issue in Linux, mostly html) and one biggie that is killing me, I use a lot of usb drives, hard drive, usb flash drives and the like. I have taken to buying all usb3.0 that i can find. So i have 2 or 3 usb2.0 flash drives, one usb2.0 hdd and like 7 usb3.0 flash drives and a 500gb usb 3.0 hard drive. In windows the usb3.0 has a very noticeable speed difference from the usb2.0 in linux they are pretty much the same speed. I assume this is because I dont have the driver installed, but I cant not for the life of me find the linux equivalent of the device manager. I have no idea how to see if something is installed or not. That is part of the complicated part i was talking about.

I really dont mean to sound like im whiny or just want a reason not to use linux, i really want off the MS bandwagon, I refuse to use windows 10 and from my understanding the new cpus from intel past skylake will require 10 to work, I do game a lot so i will have to keep win 7/8.1 on my gaming machine for now but outside that I want to move over to linux, i just cant find a distro that suits me and I can work with and know whats going on

As for the Gui, I really like the look of the older Ubuntu say 9.04. I hate unity with a purple passion and it runs like crap on my laptop, however I really like the Ubuntu Mate edition, Ubuntu based distros is what I have knowledge of but for some reason they seem to be a bit on the unstable side. Also years ago, back when ubuntu was under version 10, Linux seemed to be so much faster and lighter on resources, I mean back in the single core days of amd 64's and Pentium 4's and Pentium D's (kinda dual core but has an identity crisis)

Take this pc I am typing on now, Dell Latitude with Intel core I5 M520, 8 gig ddr3 ram, Intel hd 3000 video. Ubuntu used to be super smooth on modest hardware Like a celeron M520 1.6ghz with a gig of ram. I put a spare drive in this one, installed mint 17.3 Cinnamon and while it ran fine and didnt have issues, it wasnt as fast as i would have thought, given how Mint on my old acer ran like a dream.

I have found a distro that has my interest but seems to be in beta right now, Apricity OS, its OSX inspired like Elementary OS but based on Arch and a rolling release so no reinstalling. Anyone out there have any experience with this OS. Ive never used Arch before, is there a good selection of software for Arch and how do you install it. Sorry that might sound noobish but I am used to .deb files so not sure if other distros work like this or not.

I so did not know that was possible

Will show you if a program or application is installed or not.

To see if drivers and modules are being used by the kernel run:
and read through the output to find the driver for the device and or Google if your not sure the driver your looking for.

A friend of mine is running Apricity OS and it rocks!
It's been running very well for 3 weeks now and I only had one slight problem that I had to help my friend fix the user id issue. (not hard to fix btw)

To update it just run:
Aside from that the Arch Linux Documentation and WiKi's are great info. if you have the time to read up.

Download the Apricity OS .iso (Beta) and burn it to cd or use unetbootin and put it on a usb flash drive and install it that way. Apricity OS's installer is similar to the Anaconda installer and is easy to work with.

You can use the Software Manager that comes with Apricity to install most of what you want.
OR you can use the AUR and use the commandline utility "pacman" to install what you want from the repository.

Causes and effect.

I was once almost like that. But I wanted to learn something. Exercise my brain. That is one reason I went to Linux. Now when I use Windows I get "headaches".

I would like to add, if I may, that searching for a 'home' OS may be misleading. I have three laptops I use often. On one I currently run Sparky (having tired of VSIDO), this one runs Mint, my other runs Debian, kolibri, Win10. FreeDos four way boot. My son is running Elementary.
The wife and older boy run Windows (because it came on what they purchased) and they are not interested in changing. Yet.

Your OS is only a tool: a way to get to do what you want. You may want different tools for different jobs. All of the Linux tools are pretty good, but not all equally good for all things.

I have only ever had one machine with nvidia, and I did not install the performance drivers on that machine. They do not appear very stable to me, and I do not need that level of video performance. The games I play are mostly DOS games or modern rewrites for (native) Linux and are not video intensive at that level.

While I run a LOT of RHEL and CentOS at work, at home I prefer Debian based systems. Generally, not Ubuntu itself, but some *buntu spinoffs are not bad.

Whatever you load, I would not install extra repositories unless they are known stable and recommended. If you cannot find what you need in the ones properly maintained for your OS then find something else. The most stable OS in the world can be broken by a single package not intended for that OS, or badly designed or packaged. (There are well maintained and solid repositories for several distributions, CentOS and RHEL bring the EPEL to mind.)

As for desktop, I like the CDE concept, and ALL of them do that well enough. If you have full KDE plasma, the cube animations are mind blowing to someone from Windows. If you want speed fluxbox, LXDE, icewm, or any of the lighter environments that still allow customization will serve well. Gnome is ok, but I just cannot get excited about it: the job gets done but it is a bit heavy and not at all special these days, ALL of them will 'just work' if you do not install something to break them.

My point is to not get hung up on finding a home distro. They are all pretty good, and a BIG advantage of Linux over Windows is that Linux does NOT lock you in! Instead of looking for the "ONE TRUE ANSWER", consider diving into the toybox any playing with things. We have the BEST toys!!!

Or, you could just downgrade to 7/8.1 which still have longer support than most of the Linux distros anyway. And face this same question in four/seven years...