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I'm on the market to buy a new laptop, and Lemmy has successfully coaxed and goaded me to give Linux a serious try.
I've never used *nix as my personal OS.
Which hardware/laptop do you recommend? And which OS to pair it with for a Linux newbie?
I'm a software engineer, and quit my job to pursue an MSc in AI. So my uses will be:
Just gonna throw in a recommendation for Nobara as a distro. Based on Fedora, maintained by Glorious egroll who makes great versions of proton. Distro is tuned for gaming but is great for regular use too. Used it for over a year and set my GF up with it as her first Linux desktop.
+1 for Nobara. I never could stand the farting around it took to get Fedora to use codecs and non-free software, so I was a little off-put trying Nobara, but it's been a pleasure to use. I still miss the AUR but not as much as the last time I left the Arch ecosystem. And it comes out of the box ready to game, with everything you are going to need to have the best experience you'll find on Linux without having to beat your head against all weird things you have to do to configure properly.
And KDE is a first-class citizen instead of sitting on the backburner waiting for a chance. I liked that change in the last release even though it was working well enough despite being non-default.
As someone who's only ever used GNOME and has a Nobara install, what would the transition be like and is it worth it to reimage my machine with a KDE N39 install?
You could just add the plasma-full package or the more minimal group and log out, it'll be a choice in the display manager login screen. I'd go with the Wayland session. If you can't run Wayland because of GPU issues, you're probably better off with Gnome.