Like the title says I want to install a Linux distro on my old laptop. I am currently looking into installing a SSD, but I want to learn a distro for fun! I haven’t been able to find a good current resource aside from the Linux Masters here, so I am actually asking for help on the Internet! What distro is the best!?
I’d say for a new user it doesn’t really matter which distro you use as long as you find an environment you’re comfortable using to get your feet wet. I would highly recommend going for KDE if you come from Windows since it has a similar appearance. Gnome for those coming from Apple. With regards to your question; if you want stability, go for Debian as a distro. Especially on an older laptop like that it will work fine. You could grab the ISO via the official site here (Click on the “Live KDE” link) : https://www.debian.org/CD/live/ If you do happen to go for KDE, use the Discover program to find new software to install. If you would like to have flatpak, or snap support this can also be installed via Discover. If I remember correctly there’s also an appimage manager you could find via Discover, which will “install” all appimages to a specific folder so you can more easily find them there. Beyond the above it should be easy enough to get wise about Linux by using it. Even without installing you can use the liveimage for a while to get a feel for it, and I would definitely suggest looking around for what suits your tastes. Experiment to your heart’s content; if you break something you can just reinstall it from a new live image.
Would you say Debian is the lightest weight distro? Basically this will be used for college work maybe and just internet work stuff otherwise. So I’m trying to see just how well I can get this laptop to run at the baseline hardware.
I’d say it’s the most stable, but not necessarily the most lightweight, no. It certainly can be if you know what you’re doing; get a netinst image and build it up from TTY and you can make it as slimline as you want. KDE is a pretty intensive suite of programs, offering almost a complete 1-to-1 replacement of Windows, so it is definitely not lightweight, but it’s probaby the easiest to learn how to use Linux on, especially with Discover being an organised software store to find programs in. If you want lightweight and don’t mind getting frustrated because you don’t know Linux basics, don’t go for KDE but try something like LXDE instead. Looks like older Windows and generally functions fine, but doesn’t have Discover. You could still install it via something like Synaptic though. I believe most distros, including Debian, should have it available. You need to separate the user environment from the distro in your mind; Arch, Debian, Fedora, or other distros are just a collection of available packages which are installable and updatable via their respective package managers. Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, and other desktop environments are not bound by what distro they run on and are what you work with in the foreground. You can distrohop and use the same graphical frontend on another distro and it will work the same.
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