So I just got a new-to-me Samsung Galaxy Book Pro. I know it’s not the latest and greatest, but I got a good deal on it. Refurbished (Amazon Renewed). I’ll be ditching Windows in favor of Linux. Not sure whether to use it for distro-hopping and testing or as a second dedicated EndeavorOS daily driver to take with me when I’m out and about.
So EndeavourOS family, assuming I start out distro-hopping for a while, what might be your distro recommendations? Specifications below…
Specs:
*Samsung Galaxy Book Pro (1st Gen)
*Original Release Date: April, 2021
*512GB Samsung EVO SSD
*11th Gen Core i5-1135G7
*2.4GHz
*8GB LPDDR4X RAM
*Bluetooth
*WIFI 6e (802.11ax)
*15.6" Amoled Screen (Non-Touchscreen)
*Integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics
Not a bad idea. I was actually thinking about possibly trying something I’m either completely unfamiliar with or something I’ve only tried once or twice.
Yes, but it is definitely one of the better immutable distros that are out there. I tried to learn it but it does takes a fair bit of time to understand.
I’ve looked at this a few times and always found it a bit confusing but in saying that its been a while since I’ve tried anything other than Arch, Endeavour or similar arch based distros as they suite me and I am quite happy with them.
My suggestion would be, because I’m starting with this myself, to use it to get into setting up a Homelab if you’ve not done it already. Learn proxmox, network, nas, virtual router, firewall, docker and virtualization, and so on.
If you’re an advanced user, you might wannna try nixos, it’s been gaining some traction.
Don’t go gentoo, cuz it will cost you literal years of time to compile everything eventually.
fedora is worth a try it’s one of the better distros.’
garuda is a different execution of more or less the same goal as endeavouros, as is manjaro, but manjaro has been losing popularity (i moved to endeavour from manjaro in fact)
if u wanna get freaky, try BSD instead of Linux, see where that leads.
Void linux might be the best available alternative to arch.
But distro hopping isn’t really where it’s at, your distro… it doesn’t matter that much, so long as it works and you understand how to manage and configure it, it doesn’t truly matter. what matters most is your frontend.
Don’t go too crazy with distro hopping, at the end of the day you need to find the ideal environment for you, and there are a lot to choose from, gnome kde and xfce are just the basics of the basics. if you have time to burn on something like distro hopping, why not try a more exotic window manager/compositor like hyprland or awesome?
I haven’t found anything better than Arch for general desktop use. Void is very close, and no soystemd is a very nice touch, but Arch has slightly better repos. Fedora (with KDE) is decent, but there is too much soy in it.
+1 to trying window managers out. i3 and Sway have been great. There are some cool floating WM’s/compositors too. Labwc and Wayfire came standard on Raspberry Pi OS, which are similar to Openbox.
One of my favorite “desktop” distros out there is AntiX. It’s technically just systemd-free Debian with IceWM as standard, but there are also JWM, HerbsluftWM, and Fluxbox configs. It idles around ~250mb of RAM.
Seems Solus is active after their recent “near death experience.” And they seem to have an active forum community. Possible candidate for the laptop, still pondering.
So the laptop arrived. Pretty much mint condition. Windows 11 Pro installed.
It’s been a long time since installing linux on a newer laptop. The laptop that finally died was a 12 year old HP. I’m assuming being only 3 years old I’ll need to enter bios and locate secure boot and turn it off? Is there anything else I should do while in bios?
