I was hoping someone could give a recommendation for a noob friendly distro that works well on my laptop, an HP Envy x360 Convertible 15m-es0xxx, i7 16 GB RAM. Thanks for your help and I apologize if these questions aren’t allowed here
I suggest Fedora Kinoite. An atomic version of Fedora (meaning it’s hard to mess up and easy to revert if you do manage to f things up) and it uses the Plasma desktop. The kernel is quite up-to-date and everything feels modern. I’ve transitioned a few noobs from Windows and they haven’t had any issues besides learning basics that are just different than what they are used to.
Mint with Cinnamon feels outdated and Ubuntu is a thing of the past with questionable tactics and goals.
gave fedora a shot today (with kde) because i see it recommended a lot. i found it difficult to get a working guide for nvidia drivers, had to reinstall the first time because all i got was a black screen. had lots of difficulty mounting secondary hard drive, programs refusing to install and not launching or nowhere to be found after installing, and everything works ridiculously slow even though i have powerful hardware. after almost smashing my head through the monitor i gave up and installed kubuntu, which also seems to have little hickups like stuttering and lagging when downloading something. is it supposed to be this hard? mint is still the only properly working distro i have seen.
i found it difficult to get a working guide for nvidia drivers
I am saddened to hear that. Did you try the guide found on RPM Fusion?
As another user said, opting for a derivative with built-in Nvidia drivers might be another option worth considering.
rpm fusion guide was a tad confusing for me and my rtx 30 series wasn’t listed so i didn’t know what to install. i did find a good guide after some trial and error and a full reinstall.
i have used nobara in the past, and i quite liked it and would have kept it but it had (and still has) this weird issue when i suspend my pc and/or turn off the monitor (oled tv), it won’t get signal anymore until i reboot.
anyway for now i ended up going back to mint for the 6th time and everything works so maybe i just stick with it 😂
I personally haven’t ever had it that difficult. My laptop has an nvidia card running mint and is dual booting with Windows with no issues. I’ve previously setup an encrypted Ubuntu on an external drive that can be loaded on any computer without issues. I’ve used Bazzite on an all AMD modern gaming powerhouse, and Kinoite on two laptops with integrated graphics with no issues. Also KDE Neon on a crappy old HP Laptop with no issues.
So you may have done something wrong in the process of installation, maybe your USB drive was corrupted, or maybe you tinkered alittle too much while not knowing exactly what you were doing.
i suspected a corrupted usb too, but i used a different usb stick every time and with fedora i redownloaded the iso file when i reinstalled,
i am quite familiar with kde since i used nobara kde for a good while as my first daily driver linux os, but the experience has always been a bit broken. i can make the taskbar f-ck itself up by looking at it wrong and a reboot usually fixes it.
some really weird stuff started happening today in kubuntu too, like whatsapp web consumes 10 - 20% of cpu nonstop on every browser. and every time the internet connection cuts off (when suspending or reconnecting vpn), a popup says kded5 wants to add a new wallet… and i swear, this wasn’t my doing 😅
Yeah I get what you’re saying. I would put some caution for Fedora Kinoite - if you want a system that just works and you don’t want to tinker, then it’s great. It just works, and it updates in a very sane and stable why. But if you want to learn Linux and tinker, then it can be very frustrating working with an Atomic distro at the start.
So if I was putting Linux on my parents laptop and didn’t want to be dealing with too much tech-support, I’d probably go for an atomic distro. But if the user wants to learn how to use linux, play with it, tinker then I think an atomic desktop is too restrictive to start out on.
While Mint with Cinnamon isn’t the most cutting edge feel to it, there is a huge wealth of resources out there for people to tinker and play with the system and it’s a great spring board in to other parts of the Linux world. I do love KDE Plasma though - it’s my favourite DE and I used to run it on Mint before I finally moved to a KDE based distro.
