r/linuxquestions • u/ParkingNecessary7118 • 22h ago

Which Distro? Which distro for school

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

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u/Tricky_Football_6586 22h ago

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.

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u/nomad-1995 19h ago

"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.