So, I was told you can take any distro, pair it with any desktop environment, and badda bing, badda boom, unique linux in the room!
And a few years ago I tried getting into linux, and it didn’t work. I didn’t like ubuntu. I want something that’s basically like Windows 98.
Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. Well, I had some issue with one program, and I’m an idiot on linux. Have no clue what I’m doing. So the guides tell me to update the thing. So I do that, and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!
I never got it to start working again, and I just said screw it, I’m not dealing with this. Put it in a drawer, and haven’t touched it in about a year.
Well, now I’m think I’ll just start fresh. Install a new distro, and since Ubuntu seems to be the one with the most support, I’ll use that. Then I find out that LXDE visually is more in line with what I want.
So I figure I’ll slap on ubuntu, slap on LXDE, and then install retropie. And hopefully the fan will work again. So I start researching this LXDE, and the home page wants you to download the desktop environment already baked into a DIFFERENT distro! Wait, hold on. Am I wrong in thinging you can just download a desktop environment, and slap it on any distro? Because it might be me. I have no clue what I’m doing. And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for “Ubuntu Help”, there’s no community named that. There’s also no community named “Linux help”. Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you’d think would have a linux help community! This place loves linux. Does everyone just always know what they’re doing at all all times? Or am I just going crazy? I feel like I’m walking blind into a forest and bear traps line the ground. I have no idea how to even start this process…
Don’t download software from some random website.
Instead, use your package manager to install it or use something that ships with it. I would recommend Debian as its very stable and the installer gives you the option to install LXDE if you so choose. (Side note: LXDE isn’t well maintained) You likely will want to enable flatpaks for newer application support but that is pretty easy to do. Just go to flathub.org and choose how to install and then Debian
I want something that’s basically like Windows 98.
Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) and Kubuntu are, in my opinion, the two most windows-looking distros out of the box. They use the Cinnamon and KDE desktop environment respectively, you can do a little googling to see if those look like you expect your desktop to work.
Does everyone just always know what they’re doing at all times?
Fuck no, lol. I’ve done more stupid shit on Linux than windows would ever let me get away with. But Linux people tend to be a little more “tinkerers” than other computer users. Not everyone by any means, it’s really more of the other way around: if you want to tinker with your computer, Linux gives the most freedom to do so. And when you tinker enough and make enough
mistakeslearning experiences, you tend to pick up some knowledge along the journey.But a lot of the modern distros are very plug-and-play, to where it’s not necessary to be a tinkerer to get going on Linux anymore.
Linux Mint is so easy of a transition from Windows that I never tried anything else. As cliche as it is, “it just works”. Most I had to do was copy and paste a terminal line to open a port for Chromecast.
Mint MATE also looks and works a lot like Windows.
- You dont download software from Websites
- Use Lubuntu or other variants with LXQt or LXDE, dont do it yourself. They already have done the configs for you
As for 1. yea you download software from websites if it’s unavailable in your system repository, but most common software is available.
It’s like Microsoft Store or Google Play store, except everything is free (as in beer) and most of the time it works (it works, but bugs happen like everywhere else).
- Is wrong. Do not do it as it will cause so many issues and be the cause of some hair loss
So what do I do if I want to install VSCode? The official installation guide on their website says to download the deb file, why is such a big and popular tool not in the repository right away? Or better yet, if this is the officially endorsed why how are we to figure out the proper alternative?
Don’t follow the “official” instructions as that’s not the best practice. Install the VScode flatpak or better yet use VScodium
Ok, I’ll just default to flathub for app search instead, thanks.
Wish I wasn’t already running into bugs with it though - I started installing vscode and logseq with flatpak, it opened them in Mint’s Software Manager and there’s a spinny thing now indicating work is being done, but when I click on it it just says “Currently working on the following packages” and then… nothing, blank screen. No idea if it’s stuck or actually doing something in the background, but it’s been a while (way longer than those would usually require to be installed).
Not a good first impression for sure
- You shouldnt do that. If they dont have instructions on how to securely add a repo, their software will not update which is insecure.
Only a Linux user’s answer to “how do I install software that’s not packaged for my distro” would be “don’t”.
Hahaha no that was not my point.
Dont install random software from .deb packages etc.
You can use
- OS repos
- 3rd party OS repos
- 3rd party repos
- developer repos (like COPR, AUR or OBS)
- Flatpak
- homebrew
- Distrobox with a distro that has it as a package
So many options. There is an issue with 3rd party packaging, but at least for common software it is often better to use those, than a not updated official binary.
Or just use a Flatpak.
Gotta know your audience.
I haven’t used Ubuntu in a bit, but I’m decently familiar with linux overall. Looked up a guide. It indicated you could install LXDE with
sudo apt install lxdeand then reboot. The guide said that LXDE should be the default Desktop Environment now, because it’s the most recently installed one. If for whatever reason LXDE isn’t the new default, on the Login screen, in the upper left corner there should be a dialogue box to select whichever Desktop Environment you want as the new default.:D
I wish the Lemmy search could search inside your brain. When I get home, I’m going to try this. And assuming it doesn’t give me 50 million errors (or…even 1 error, as I don’t know what I’m doing), then this seems like a really easy thing to do. Now if something goes wrong…then I’m screwed. Most other people who use linux would be like “Oh, yeah, error 5227. Simple error. You just have to configure the combobulator, and process the hexagonal diagrams!”
And I would be like “…do what now?”
But as long as it’s just one simple copy/paste line in terminal…I SHOULD be fine…unless I’m not.
You can also get different varieties of Ubuntu with different default desktop environments, named as portmanteaus of [DE name] + “Ubuntu.” Specifically, there’s Kubuntu (with KDE), Xubuntu (with XFCE), and most relevantly, Lubuntu (with LXQT).
Note that LXQT isn’t the same thing as LXDE, but is sort of a successor to it (even though LXDE is also still maintained).
sudo apt install lxde(orsudo apt install lxqt, for that matter) is definitely simpler than starting over installing a Lubuntu image though, so try that first.https://vegastack.com/tutorials/how-to-install-lxde-on-ubuntu-22-04/ This is the guide I was using, if it helps. I’d take a look at section 1, step 2, where it shows the picture of the “Configure LightDM” menu. I think it’s probably not too bad, but I’d be curious to hear how it goes.
apt search lxde
Is the better start
Do you not realize that search engines exist? Probably 75% of people who resolve Linux errors by googling them had no clue before doing so
I’ve been trying to understand linux that way for 10 years. The problem is the tutorials will say “do this and this, and this, and this”. I’ll get maybe 30% through the tutorial, and get an error. But the tutorial didn’t account for an error. So I google the error, and find 10 different pages all telling me to do 10 different things.
But in doing 7 of those things, I screw 3 more things up because I don’t know what those things did. Or I did them wrong. And now I have 8 problems instead of 1.
Sometimes you just need a human teacher who knows what they’re doing. It’s like learning to cook, but not having taste buds. You can be told to add salt, but if you don’t know what salt does, or why you’re adding it, you might add too much, or not enough, or at the wrong time. But if a human teacher can explain what you’re doing, and what it does, and why it does that, THEN you might learn.
Username checks out
I would empathize with this issue, but it’s just not been my experience. Most of the time if I’ve done something reasonable I either get no error or a pretty easily google-able one. I’ve been using Linux pretty exclusively for a couple of years. I admit I had help from a guru for the first couple months but then again most of his help came into play with more advanced developer kinds of issues.
And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for “Ubuntu Help”, there’s no community named that. There’s also no community named “Linux help”. Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you’d think would have a linux help community!
Have you been by !linuxquestions@lemmy.zip yet? Nevertheless, this community should work just as well.
There’s also !linux4noobs@programming.dev or a community with the same name on Lemmy World. When specificity in a search fails, falling back to broader/more basic terms may help (e.g. searching for Ubuntu or Linux).
I have not, but if I have issues when I get home from work, those will be the places to check first!
the community you posted this on also has a pinned weekly linux help thread: https://programming.dev/post/19443450
Mint with cinnamon desktop is where it’s at for ease of use.
I just installed Pop!_OS and kept the customization to a minimum. I don’t love GNOME, but I wanted Pop!_OS for the supposed better (easier?) NVIDIA support. I prefer KDE plasma, but GNOME works just fine. I would not be surprised if I ran into some issues in trying to change my DE. I do mess with Linux more sometimes, but I usually use a VM or some other machine for that. I don’t want to break my daily driver.
It sort of works, but as with anything on Linux, the reality is a lot less pleasant than in theory. For distros like Debian, it is very easy to install a new DE, since its baked into the installer, but other distros may or may not work as well if you try to install a completely new DE. I recommend trying a bunch of distros with different DE installed and find one that suits your needs.
Linux Mint has already been suggested. I recommend the XFCE edition and adding the Chicago95 theme for a pretty close Windows95/98 look. That should be a reasonable starting point.
Hey, welcome, fellow noob!
I hopped on the Linux train maybe 20 years ago and haven’t had any non unix system in maybe 15 years.
Also, I don’t know anything much. I can do basic tasks with a Terminal, but I don’t think for example I could install Arch from scratch. Or if I’d accidentally opened VIM, I’d have to kill power to get out again. But I like to tinker. If you like to tinker it’s a big plus, otherwise things, that don’t work instantly, might get frustrating.
As others said, use a pre built distro + DE environment, especially if you don’t really know what you do. Another thing that I’d recommend: a distro that be backed up easily. So you can tinker and start over, if necessary.
If I don’t know, how to fix a thing, I usually look up my question online. The problem with that is: I’ll find solutions containing commands that I don’t know, what they do. I have “fixed” my OS to death before, so it’s always nice to have a recent backup.
Ubuntu is the biggest, although it’s not old-school like win98 and comes with idealistic problems for many people. If you didn’t really enjoy it, I wouldn’t go back, just because it has the biggest community. Community isn’t only about size.
Mint is rock solid, I’ve run that a long time with different DEs.
Another distro, I can’t really recommend (as I haven’t used it further than live USB yet), but might be very interesting for you, is MX Linux. It comes with simple DEs and more importantly: a ton of GUI tools (including a back up tool where you can back up the entire OS including apps and settings as a flash USB).
I don’t know, if I was able to help anything. I just wanted to reassure, that there are (maybe even many) Linux users that don’t really know what they do.
As with many skills in life, I believe, the best way to learn is by just doing it. There will be failures. And each failure is a big opportunity to learn something.
:q!
The first vim command anybody should memorize. Quit without saving.
As others said, use a pre built distro + DE environment, especially if you don’t really know what you do. Another thing that I’d recommend: a distro that be backed up easily. So you can tinker and start over, if necessary.
homer simpson voice Ooooooo! Expain how!
Hopefully, if I keep my installation small, and my game roms on a different partition, I can just stick a USB stick in, and backup before I do anything stupid. Then if I break it, I can reflash the first partition from my USB backup, and my rom files partition won’t be affected, since they were never the problem.
Yeah, for newbies I always recommend sticking to the big distros meant for ease of use. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, or openSUSE. Only once you’re familiar would I recommend venturing into the harder and lesser known distros.
Once you pick one of those, you can download a “spin” or “edition” for the desktop environment you want. So, you’d want Lubuntu for Ubuntu+LXQt.
Debian over Ubuntu as Ubuntu isn’t all that user focused these days
I love Debian, but I’d still put it more in the advanced category than Ubuntu. Not much, but it does rely more on the user understanding how Linux systems work.
It requires a basic understanding just like Ubuntu
Think of it this way
There’s your core of the system, the kernel part. It’s the engine of the thing but basically its the package manager. This is what Ubuntu, Redhat, Arch, etc is. It’s all interchangeable in some ways and also locked into a specific place you get your packages and updates. It could be any desktop and all of the desktop environments or just a command line.
So more often than not, the core will favor a specific desktop environment. You can always install multiple environments and they’ll work but there’s some things that are suited for one desktop environment over the other. Many of the basic apps don’t work outside their environments. KDE apps don’t always work in Gnome and vis versa.
So when you download Ubuntu, your basically says give me the package manager that points to the Ubuntu repositories that will understand your version of the core and give you prepackaged software that is meant to work with Gnome.
If you go with Kubuntu you’ll get the same treatment but with the KDE desktop environment and all of its basic stuff.
But you can install KDE on Ubuntu and you can install Gnome on Kubuntu.
You can mix and match all the desktops if you want but at some point it does cause problems because the developers make different decisions and use different software that you’re package manager has to deal with.
So some distros do things different, have different configurations and package managers. I use Arch which uses pacman (package manager) to give you core software that they keep up-to-date and test but it’s limited in what it offers. So instead it has an AUR that can be accessed though many different sub package managers, like yay
I could go on but I hope this makes a little sense about the difference in distribution and desktop environments.
If you want a Windows 98 style desktop, look at KDE. It’s a lot like how Windows works
You can technically do anything with anything. My saying that is dumb though. I'm not telling you the scope of intelligence involved.
Linux is the kernel. The kernel is something most users rarely interact with or understand. The kernel is basically interfacing with your hardware specifically and then creating an applications interface that all software can interact with.
So let’s say your computer has a small auxiliary board inside that your USB ports are connected with. Your mouse is plugged into that USB port. The auxiliary board has this random Infinion chip that creates the USB hub. The kernel’s job is to figure out how to use that Infinion chip and make a connection that is the same for all software to interface with. Your office suite or internet browser never needs to know how to interface with that infinion chip or any other specific hardware.
Windows has a micro kernel architecture. They publish a static spec for hardware manufacturers to write their own drivers for and the user must find and add them manually.
Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture. All kernel modules (drivers-ish) are included in the kernel itself and maintained by the community. The vast majority of hardware issues that happen in Linux are due to undocumented hardware; meaning there are no datasheets describing how the device works or how to program it. Undocumented hardware is due to seedy companies stealing IP and trying to hide it, and manipulating the market in an attempt to steal ownership from the end consumer while profiting from stagnation by selling old products while they lack engineering innovation and competitiveness in an open market. Soapbox over. The wonderful folks over at Debian are the ones that reverse engineer a lot of this stuff and make it work with Linux regardless of documentation.
Anyways, the Linux kernel is just part of the puzzle here. You can configure and compile your own custom kernel. Gentoo makes that quite easy to do for advanced users. Fedora has a nice guide I saw recently as well.
All CS students learn how operating systems work using Linux. There are lots of people who make their career in parts of Linux.
By itself Linux is basically just a terminal/command line. All the pretty graphics stuff requires other stuff like a DE.
The issue of initial scope complexity that you’re facing is really common. All of the distros have a purpose. They are not just branding or team sports. All of these distros are made by packagers that each have their own methodologies and preferences. Most of these differences can create compatibility issues, especially if you do not understand them. However, all of the packagers are building on top of a similar base of software.
When some one says you can just swap this or that outside of the packages configured by the distro maintainers, they are implying you have the same experience and understanding about the distro configuration and packages as the maintainer and a full understanding of a POSIX system, or they are just a fool, or happened to have success after following someone’s tutorial one time in a virtual machine. Few general users keep updating stuff like this over time. They just switch to a prepackaged distro that has the DE they want. The exception to this rule are savant types or people with no life or peripheral interests. Most of these people gravitate to Arch (and talk about it too if they are trolls), or use Gentoo where everything you do is configurable and made to compile yourself easily. The epic route is to do a Linux From Scratch build.
The best beginner’s route is to give up our ancient old mod a civic to pretend-street-race culture and just use the vanilla experience. Ubuntu is a lot less popular now. Fedora is the new Ubuntu, while Mint is the goto if you want a Debian derivative or to game. Fedora is pretty well dialed and handles secure boot well. SB is outside of the kernel, so is a thing that distro packagers either provide or don’t.
KDE is kinda like Windows. Mint has KDE and Fedora ships a KDE version too. I recommend just doing gnome, it seems a little funny at first, but it is well designed and intuitive. There are some headaches in the learning curve but it is not hard IMO.
This is kind of long…
just use zorin. its made to be easy and with loads out of the box and look like windows.
Pick a rolling release distribution with a limited number of opinionated choices. Arch is a good one. Void is another (although far less main stream).
Ubuntu is very non-modular and highly opinionated, probably avoid that.
I recommend XFCE over LXDE, it’s probably a better compromise in terms of what you’re looking for.
So, my advice:
- Install endeavourOS (or arch directly if so inclined)
- Choose xfce at install time
- you may install gnome and then xfce over the top of you like
- you may also like KDE plasma, but try to avoid a mix and match with gnome/xfce and KDE, you’ll find some theming etc will be a nuisance
- Keep it up to date.
Bullshit. Ubuntu is perfectly capable of doing what OP wants. They just didn’t know that LXDE was already available in Ubuntu itself. I don’t use Ubuntu at the moment but I bet it’s just
sudo apt install lxdeand then selecting LXDE on login. Done.
