Linux

I want something that's basically like Windows 98.

Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) and Kubuntu are, in my opinion, the two most windows-looking distros out of the box. They use the Cinnamon and KDE desktop environment respectively, you can do a little googling to see if those look like you expect your desktop to work.

Does everyone just always know what they're doing at all times?

Fuck no, lol. I've done more stupid shit on Linux than windows would ever let me get away with. But Linux people tend to be a little more "tinkerers" than other computer users. Not everyone by any means, it's really more of the other way around: if you want to tinker with your computer, Linux gives the most freedom to do so. And when you tinker enough and make enough ~~mistakes~~ learning experiences, you tend to pick up some knowledge along the journey.

But a lot of the modern distros are very plug-and-play, to where it's not necessary to be a tinkerer to get going on Linux anymore.

::: spoiler You can technically do anything with anything. My saying that is dumb though. I'm not telling you the scope of intelligence involved.

Linux is the kernel. The kernel is something most users rarely interact with or understand. The kernel is basically interfacing with your hardware specifically and then creating an applications interface that all software can interact with.

So let's say your computer has a small auxiliary board inside that your USB ports are connected with. Your mouse is plugged into that USB port. The auxiliary board has this random Infinion chip that creates the USB hub. The kernel's job is to figure out how to use that Infinion chip and make a connection that is the same for all software to interface with. Your office suite or internet browser never needs to know how to interface with that infinion chip or any other specific hardware.

Windows has a micro kernel architecture. They publish a static spec for hardware manufacturers to write their own drivers for and the user must find and add them manually.

Linux is a monolithic kernel architecture. All kernel modules (drivers-ish) are included in the kernel itself and maintained by the community. The vast majority of hardware issues that happen in Linux are due to undocumented hardware; meaning there are no datasheets describing how the device works or how to program it. Undocumented hardware is due to seedy companies stealing IP and trying to hide it, and manipulating the market in an attempt to steal ownership from the end consumer while profiting from stagnation by selling old products while they lack engineering innovation and competitiveness in an open market. Soapbox over. The wonderful folks over at Debian are the ones that reverse engineer a lot of this stuff and make it work with Linux regardless of documentation.

Anyways, the Linux kernel is just part of the puzzle here. You can configure and compile your own custom kernel. Gentoo makes that quite easy to do for advanced users. Fedora has a nice guide I saw recently as well.

All CS students learn how operating systems work using Linux. There are lots of people who make their career in parts of Linux.

By itself Linux is basically just a terminal/command line. All the pretty graphics stuff requires other stuff like a DE.

The issue of initial scope complexity that you're facing is really common. All of the distros have a purpose. They are not just branding or team sports. All of these distros are made by packagers that each have their own methodologies and preferences. Most of these differences can create compatibility issues, especially if you do not understand them. However, all of the packagers are building on top of a similar base of software.

When some one says you can just swap this or that outside of the packages configured by the distro maintainers, they are implying you have the same experience and understanding about the distro configuration and packages as the maintainer and a full understanding of a POSIX system, or they are just a fool, or happened to have success after following someone's tutorial one time in a virtual machine. Few general users keep updating stuff like this over time. They just switch to a prepackaged distro that has the DE they want. The exception to this rule are savant types or people with no life or peripheral interests. Most of these people gravitate to Arch (and talk about it too if they are trolls), or use Gentoo where everything you do is configurable and made to compile yourself easily. The epic route is to do a Linux From Scratch build.

The best beginner's route is to give up our ancient old mod a civic to pretend-street-race culture and just use the vanilla experience. Ubuntu is a lot less popular now. Fedora is the new Ubuntu, while Mint is the goto if you want a Debian derivative or to game. Fedora is pretty well dialed and handles secure boot well. SB is outside of the kernel, so is a thing that distro packagers either provide or don't.

KDE is kinda like Windows. Mint has KDE and Fedora ships a KDE version too. I recommend just doing gnome, it seems a little funny at first, but it is well designed and intuitive. There are some headaches in the learning curve but it is not hard IMO.

Hey, welcome, fellow noob!

I hopped on the Linux train maybe 20 years ago and haven't had any non unix system in maybe 15 years.

Also, I don't know anything much. I can do basic tasks with a Terminal, but I don't think for example I could install Arch from scratch. Or if I'd accidentally opened VIM, I'd have to kill power to get out again. But I like to tinker. If you like to tinker it's a big plus, otherwise things, that don't work instantly, might get frustrating.

As others said, use a pre built distro + DE environment, especially if you don't really know what you do. Another thing that I'd recommend: a distro that be backed up easily. So you can tinker and start over, if necessary.

If I don't know, how to fix a thing, I usually look up my question online. The problem with that is: I'll find solutions containing commands that I don't know, what they do. I have "fixed" my OS to death before, so it's always nice to have a recent backup.

Ubuntu is the biggest, although it's not old-school like win98 and comes with idealistic problems for many people. If you didn't really enjoy it, I wouldn't go back, just because it has the biggest community. Community isn't only about size.

Mint is rock solid, I've run that a long time with different DEs.

Another distro, I can't really recommend (as I haven't used it further than live USB yet), but might be very interesting for you, is MX Linux. It comes with simple DEs and more importantly: a ton of GUI tools (including a back up tool where you can back up the entire OS including apps and settings as a flash USB).

I don't know, if I was able to help anything. I just wanted to reassure, that there are (maybe even many) Linux users that don't really know what they do.

As with many skills in life, I believe, the best way to learn is by just doing it. There will be failures. And each failure is a big opportunity to learn something.

Yeah, for newbies I always recommend sticking to the big distros meant for ease of use. Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, or openSUSE. Only once you’re familiar would I recommend venturing into the harder and lesser known distros.

Once you pick one of those, you can download a “spin” or “edition” for the desktop environment you want. So, you’d want Lubuntu for Ubuntu+LXQt.

just use zorin. its made to be easy and with loads out of the box and look like windows.

I haven't used Ubuntu in a bit, but I'm decently familiar with linux overall. Looked up a guide. It indicated you could install LXDE with sudo apt install lxde and then reboot. The guide said that LXDE should be the default Desktop Environment now, because it's the most recently installed one. If for whatever reason LXDE isn't the new default, on the Login screen, in the upper left corner there should be a dialogue box to select whichever Desktop Environment you want as the new default.

It sort of works, but as with anything on Linux, the reality is a lot less pleasant than in theory. For distros like Debian, it is very easy to install a new DE, since its baked into the installer, but other distros may or may not work as well if you try to install a completely new DE. I recommend trying a bunch of distros with different DE installed and find one that suits your needs.

Think of it this way

There's your core of the system, the kernel part. It's the engine of the thing but basically its the package manager. This is what Ubuntu, Redhat, Arch, etc is. It's all interchangeable in some ways and also locked into a specific place you get your packages and updates. It could be any desktop and all of the desktop environments or just a command line.

So more often than not, the core will favor a specific desktop environment. You can always install multiple environments and they'll work but there's some things that are suited for one desktop environment over the other. Many of the basic apps don't work outside their environments. KDE apps don't always work in Gnome and vis versa.

So when you download Ubuntu, your basically says give me the package manager that points to the Ubuntu repositories that will understand your version of the core and give you prepackaged software that is meant to work with Gnome.

If you go with Kubuntu you'll get the same treatment but with the KDE desktop environment and all of its basic stuff.

But you can install KDE on Ubuntu and you can install Gnome on Kubuntu.

You can mix and match all the desktops if you want but at some point it does cause problems because the developers make different decisions and use different software that you're package manager has to deal with.

So some distros do things different, have different configurations and package managers. I use Arch which uses pacman (package manager) to give you core software that they keep up-to-date and test but it's limited in what it offers. So instead it has an AUR that can be accessed though many different sub package managers, like yay

I could go on but I hope this makes a little sense about the difference in distribution and desktop environments.

If you want a Windows 98 style desktop, look at KDE. It's a lot like how Windows works

And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for “Ubuntu Help”, there’s no community named that. There’s also no community named “Linux help”. Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you’d think would have a linux help community!

Have you been by [email protected] yet? Nevertheless, this community should work just as well.

There's also [email protected] or a community with the same name on Lemmy World. When specificity in a search fails, falling back to broader/more basic terms may help (e.g. searching for Ubuntu or Linux).

So Ubuntu has a version called Lubuntu, which used to come with LXDE, but now it comes with LXQt. So this will require you to install LXDE with the tasksel command, unless you start with Ubuntu desktopless. But I'd say to definitely check out Kubuntu, it's the KDE version, and I feel like KDE and LXDE are quite similar. Both have an older windows overall appearance.

You can install any desktop environment on any distro, but its better to choose one with it preinstalled.

If you want windows 95, maybe try something like linux mint xcfe or xubuntu with the chicago95 theme.

Also if you want ubuntu with a de other than gnome, download one of these.