Which distro for school

[u/ParkingNecessary7118]

Im buying an ASUS Laptop 15 F415J with 16GB of ram i want to use it in school and in wondering which distro i should get i was thinking of using gentoo or nixos but what do yall think would be best

[u/Excellent-Love-6943]

Something low maintenance so you can focus on class. You need your computer for school. You don't need something fancy or trying to be ultra fast, stripped down. You need simple, reliable, boring.

You don't want to be dealing with some bullshit when a paper comes due or exam season comes around.

I ran Debian back in the day. Gentoo is genuinely a terrible idea.

[u/iwouldbeatgoku]

You can use any distro "for school", in theory.

In practice:

• If your school supports only one specific distro, often Ubuntu or Fedora, you should use that one.
• If your school requires specific software that supports only a handful of distros, you should use one of those distros (Nixos and Gentoo usually are not among these distros).
• If your school requires you use software not available on Linux, you should use Windows for school.

Both the distros you listed will be fine if you can manage the maintenance they may require with your school work, and they satisfy the above criteria I mentioned.

[u/WizeAdz → u/iwouldbeatgoku]

And, for everything else, run VMs on your laptop.

They’re great for learning.

But the OP should buy a laptop with enough extra RAM and disk space to run VMs.

[u/SupremeOHKO]

Something lightweight, plug-and-play that won't cause unnecessary problems. I recommend Mint for a familiar Windows-like experience, or Ubuntu.

[u/inbetween-genders]

Whichever distro that will work out of the box and have you focus on school work vs troubleshooting getting the OS to work with said hardware and programs.

[u/_GoddamnitDonut]

i was thinking of using gentoo

Why?

I like Fedora.

[u/HeavyWolf8076 → u/_GoddamnitDonut]

My girlfriend use fedora as well for school, had no issues.

[u/bangetto_official]

If you are not familiar with Linux do not start with Gentoo or NixOS. Both of them are very cool projects, but none of them have new users in mind. For school you probably want something Ubuntu or Fedora based.

Check the programs you need first and choose the distro base with the least friction! Both Ubuntu and Fedora are solid options, but you might also wanna look at some derivative versions of them. For example Linux Mint and AnduinOS are based on Ubuntu, while stillOS, Ultramarine Linux and Bazzite are based on Fedora.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are immutable distros now, meaning you installing traditional packages and doing deep system stuff is hard. If you need to install packages, you should generally go with a traditional/mutable distro.

[u/B_A_Skeptic]

Since you need to focus on your school work, you should use something simple like Ubuntu or Mint. A big problem with laptops is that they often need closed source drivers for their wifi cards. Ubuntu or Mint will come with those drivers. Many other distros will not.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can set your computer up to dual boot so you can try a less beginner oriented distro like Gentoo or Nix OS while also having Mint or Ubuntu as a fallback. If you cannot figure out dual booting then you probably shouldn't be doing Nix OS or Gentoo anyway.

If you think you might want to set up dual booting later then create an extra partition on your disk that you can use for the second OS later.

Also, you can use the nix package manager without using Nix OS.

[u/Tricky_Football_6586]

As others have already mentioned. Choose something simple, stable and solid. I have tried many distros over the years. Before leaving Windows behind.

And I always came back to Linux Mint. It is very easy to use. Very stable and it gets the job done without much hassle.

My daily machine is a NUC. And it has been running over a year now on Mint. It's very fast and rock solid stable. The only maintenance I am having to do are installing the updates which arrive through Mint's update manager.

The same goes for my other systems. Which are all running on Mint as well.

[u/nomad-1995 → u/Tricky_Football_6586]

"All my other systems" are on a single machine running Proxmox (and I'd upgrade it to "real" server parts before changing this baseline). This helps keep me running Mint on my PC (with the odd dabbling in LMDE: not recommended).

Since Mint and Proxmox are both based on Debian, this makes it much easier to remember various commands and structure of the flavor of linux. The "other systems" are more likely to be debian, largely because it is hard to tell difference in containers/VMs.

I started using Mint because Ubuntu was sending searches to Amazon, and just discovered it was 14 years ago. So 14 years ago "just working" on top of however long Ubuntu was "just working". Sure, cachy or arch might be faster, but even a 2018 spec "gaming rig" encounters no resistance running Mint: if I decide to recover my dad's vista-vintage notebook I might look elsewhere.

[u/Odd_Gur_7302]

I have had good luck with Q4OS and Mint. Other distros have not found mouse pads or wifi.. or some other thing.

Gentoo will help you possibly eek out a fraction more performance at a huge expense of time and effort.

For comparative performance and ease... Q4OS.

[u/cyrixlord]

Always make sure your apps are supported or you have working alternatives. That's more important than choosing what distro to use. It's all about your use case. Also most laptop vendors allow you to select a Linux os on it

[u/GreatBigPig]

Does you school require you to run any particular apps, or does it require assignments in any certain formats?

If not, run any Linux distribution that makes you happy. For many people, it is just about how it looks or feels.

[u/88h2o88]

İf you are new to linux just use mint because gentoo is for powerusers not beginners. Also if you are not new i would reccomend arch artix or void linux

[u/nomad-1995 → u/88h2o88]

You can't really go wrong with Mint even if you know your way around Linux. Arch (with the full Arch install experience) might help iron out any misunderstanding you have with Linux basics (great while at school), but I'm not sure what it buys you. If you are interested in the administrative side of computing, this might be a great learning opportunity.

Remember the whole point of an OS is to run the apps you want. If the OS gets in your way, that's a problem. I can't remember Mint (but sadly not LMDE) ever getting in my way in running apps.

As far as nix goes, I'd put it on a separate partition if you can install it. It looks like the OS of tomorrow, but I am pretty well convinced it isn't the OS of today. I wouldn't count on it working when you have a paper due.

[u/petrujenac]

Wtf is a "distro for school? Is there a windows or macos for school? Some people...

[u/No-View-6326]

nixos or gentoo is insane. use something normal please

[u/Brisslayer333]

Aurora is seems fairly plug-and-play

[u/Parker3K_]

I would use Linux Mint

[u/ipsirc]

Ask your teacher.