Hello, fellow internet users. I am currently using Debian but would like a distro to try the new Gnome on. I have been using Debian for a while and I love the stability, but would like newer packages. I also, for no rational reason, would like to be able to use the default package manager exclusively. I used Fedora before and liked it more than Debian (apart from that it felt vaguely Windowsey) but I would like to distance myself from the whole red hat thing. What distro do you think I should get?
I’d like to help, but you said Fedora was “vaguely windowsey.” I’ve used Fedora off and on for close to a decade, and I have no clue what you mean. Like, it’s not at all windowsey in my experience.
So, in order to avoid what you’re talking about in other distros, I’m going to need some more details… what do you mean by “windowsey”?
Yeah, I feel like OP may not have actually used Fedora… By default Fedora is probably the least similar to Windows of any major distro (this is actually one of the most commonly expressed frustrations with new users).
This was a very minor complaint about some very minor UI choices. Fedora is an excellent distro.
Well, then you don’t want a pure Gnome experience. That’s what Fedora Workstation is. So any pure Gnome desktop is gonna feel “windowsey” to you. The new Gnome is excellent, but it’s still Gnome.
And I am even more confused as to what’s windowsey about it.
It wasn’t gnome. It was budgie but I wasn’t talking about the DE at all. I don’t know the name for it but it was the software that runs to display a loading bar during updates when rebooting. It was a very minor issue that I probably shouldn’t have mentioned, but I just like to see terminal stuff flying by at a million miles an hour during updates. I really shouldn’t have said that as it wasn’t my reason for switching. I am not one to judge a distro by its DE because that can be changed easily but the progress bar was a mild annoyance that I didn’t feel like figuring out how to change.
Edit: I am seriously sorry for describing such a small element of it as windowsey without elaborating. I stand by that element feeling windowsey, but Fedora itself is by no stretch of the imagination windowsey.
Ah! I see what you’re talking about! That particular load screen is becoming pretty common these days, although the themes differ quite a bit. I kind of miss the text flying by too, at least sometimes.
If you’re wanting to try out Gnome 45, the Fedora 39 beta is probably the easiest way. That’s what I’m doing. The loading screen you’re talking about is called Plymouth, and it can be easily disabled:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-disable-plymouth-on-linux
This process should work on any system running Plymouth.
I still don’t want to do Fedora as I don’t want to touch the red hat situation with a 50m pole, but thanks for telling me how to disable that. I think I am going to try OpenSuse Leap to try to get a balance between new packages and stability. I also have been messing with KDE a bit so I think I might switch back to KDE for a bit. I’m still gonna switch distros for generally newer software and I might try the new Gnome when it comes to Leap.
@HumanPerson @s20
I think you’ll be happy with the management tools in OpenSuSE They literally make almost everything simple to set up, from a GUI perspective, and if you actually know what you’re doing, it will make your day so much less stressful.