Linux for Noobs: Choosing a Distro (10 distributions shown!)

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to my linux for noob series in the previous video i talked to you guys about desktop environments i showed you some common desktop environments and i went over some of the differences between them in this video i'm going to take it to the next level and show you 10 yes 10 different distributions that are contenders for your desktop or laptop to be fair there's many more distributions out there than the ones that i'm going to go over in this video but i picked 10 of the more popular distributions and who knows maybe this video might help you decide which distribution to install on your laptop or desktop and i'm excited to get into my list of 10 distributions that you can try but before i do i want to take a moment to mention the sponsor for today's video lenode lenode has been doing cloud computing since 2003 which is actually before amazon web services was even a thing on the node's platform you can get your server up and running in minutes and they include all of the popular distributions such as centos debian ubuntu fedora and get this also arch linux and let's be honest what could be better than a linux cloud server provider that allows you to tell all of your friends i run arch lenod has multiple server plans available to make any app scalable and flexible you can use it to host a blog set up a vpn server a minecraft server or you could do what i did and set up a website for your youtube channel because the official website for learn linux tv runs on lenode and lenode offers 24x7 365 support regardless of plan size so you can get live help from a real person when you need it new users can get started right now with one hundred dollars in credit towards a new account and i highly recommend you check them out because lenote is awesome thank you so much to lenode for your continued support of learn linux tv i really appreciate it now without any further ado let's go ahead and get into my list of 10 distributions that you can consider for installation on your computer [Music] so here i am with linux mint 20.1 specifically the cinnamon edition and there's two other versions of mint that are available as well they have versions based on mate and xfce but i wanted to show off the cinnamon edition because i feel like it's their flagship edition and it's actually really neat and linux mint is a very good choice for beginners it's easy to use and you get quite a few customization options as well so let's have a quick look around down here at the bottom of the screen you have a panel and the layout is very similar to windows in that you have a start menu equivalent here on the left hand side and then you have your status bar icons here on the right we also have some application icons here and if you click on one of them you'll see a little line that shows up underneath the icon to show that that application is running so essentially you can pin your favorite applications to the panel similar to the taskbar in windows and then you have that indicator on the bottom to show whether or not that application is running in here i just opened up the file manager and this is the nemo file manager which is actually one of my favorites it's very easy to use and you get all of the standard options that you would expect with a file manager for example i can click here to change the view to the detailed list view which is my personal favorite we also get a list of devices here on the left and then we also have shortcuts to various folders that are in your home folder here on the left so even when you start to navigate into other directories you can easily get back to a different one here from the left and similar to windows we have a computer icon here and when you open it up you'll have icons for the various storage devices that you may have attached to your computer so if you want to access a flash drive or something like that that's one way that you can do that if you want to open an application that's not listed here that's not one of these icons you can click on the mint menu right here and then we have various categories for the applications that are installed on the distribution and we get quite a few installed by default i didn't install any of these actually so for example we have firefox for the browser hex chat thunderbird for mail transmission for downloading bittorrent files we have a full office suite just like most of the distributions if not all of the distributions i'm going to mention we have libreoffice which is my favorite office suite but i'll leave it up to you to explore all of the applications if you do decide to go with linux mint and one of the things that i love most about the cinnamon edition of linux mint is how much customization that you have at your disposal when you access settings now of course we get the usual stuff if i click on backgrounds we could change the wallpaper and we have various categories here this one's pretty cool so already you could change the wallpaper but you could do that on pretty much every desktop environment anyway so let's take a look at some other options and things that we can tweak that are specific to linux mint things that are not as popular in other desktop environments so for example i'll click on themes and to illustrate just how much control you have here i'm going to open up the file manager again and basically what we can do is change the colors of pretty much everything on the desktop so if i go back to icon view and then i change the icon theme here i could just change it to something else like if i wanted the blue variation i could do that purple orange and so on so we get control over the coloration of the icons we could change the window borders as well so if for example you prefer a dark theme you can do that and then you can change the controls to match so i'll just change it to the dark theme as well and you can immediately see that we were able to easily change the coloration of well pretty much everything and there's a lot more that you can customize than just this i really like how you get full control over how you customize your desktop and everything is just very easy to use and this is a great distribution for beginners but it's also a great distribution for more advanced users as well because even advanced users sometimes just want something that works out of the box so they can become productive a lot quicker there's definitely value in that but another thing that i want to show you guys is how you install software and we have an icon right here for the software manager and this is going to be a common thread while i check out other distributions in this video i'm going to show you how software is installed in that distribution but i'll give you a little spoiler though they're all essentially the same or the same idea and the concept is very simple a software manager in linux is very similar to an app store if you're more familiar with the mobile platforms you just simply click on an application that you want to install and you can find an application by going through the categories here so for example if i click on games we have quite a few games here and perhaps i want to install the sublime text editor i'll click on that i'll click on install and it's pretty much that easy it's already installed i didn't even have to edit that and speed it up it was actually that quick so now that i've installed sublime i can go up here if i don't know what category it's in and just start typing there it is so as you can see sublime has been installed it's very easy to install software on linux mint so if you are looking for a distribution that is good for beginners or you want something that works very well out of the box then linux mint is a great choice [Music] so here i am with debian debian is quite possibly one of if not the most influential distributions ever it has a very long history and quite a few other distributions are created or derived from debian ubuntu for example which we're going to check out later in this video is actually forked from debian so without debian a lot of the technologies that we enjoy in the linux community today just simply wouldn't exist in fact debian is one of the first if not the first distribution to offer a proper package manager and a package manager is something that we enjoy in virtually all distributions today and for the most part we have debian to thank for that now there's three main versions of debian available there's stable testing and unstable stable is the primary release the first one that i recommend anyone consider if they do want to install debian on their computer the testing release is actually the next version of debian stable it's a work in progress so eventually debian testing will become the new stable currently as of the time i'm recording this video debian is up to version 10 when it comes to debian stable and debian testing is actually going to become debian 11 when it's finished debian unstable is where you get the most bleeding edge software that'll eventually make it into debian testing and the software and debian testing will eventually make it into debian stable so you can kind of see the workflow that the developers have put in place to graduate a package or a suite of software from one version to the next when it comes to the desktop environment the default is gnome just like many other distributions and debian generally doesn't put a lot of branding into their distribution they do change the wallpaper and they do put the debian logo in various places like you see here but overall the gnome implementation in debian is pretty much vanilla which means they give you a gnome experience that's more akin to what the gnome developers have intended and gnome is a very interesting desktop environment in and of itself it doesn't follow the standard desktop paradigm of a panel at the bottom with a start menu equivalent like a lot of them do we have the panel up here at the top in the center where we see the clock we can click on that and we get notifications here on this side and on my end i've activated the do not disturb feature which is a feature of gnome i actually like quite a bit for recording because generally i don't like to see notifications show up in my recordings so i engage this right here which means that the notifications which would normally just pop up on the screen are actually going to be hidden until i access this menu on the right-hand side we have all of our system controls so for example you can see that i'm connected via ethernet it shows me how much battery i have left it gives me access to shut down the computer restart and things like that and then a link to settings right here where i can customize the gnome desktop gnome is more of a set it and forget it desktop environment if you want more control over all the settings of your desktop then gnome might not be the choice for you both kde plasma and cinnamon will offer you even more customization options than gnome but gnome is the default desktop environment for quite a few distributions although in debian it's nothing more than a check box because you can install whatever desktop environment in debian you'd like and gnome is a very unique desktop environment so if i click on activities for example you'll see that it's showing me all of the applications that are open side by side so if one application is on top of another and i could press the super key also known as the windows logo key to quickly access the activities overview without having to click on activities on the upper left hand corner of the screen we also have dynamic workspaces which is a feature of gnome i enjoy quite a bit here on the right we have the main desktop the one that we're on right now and then we have a blank one underneath it so now i have an empty desktop that i can use and i can segregate my applications by project which for me means that i can have a workspace dedicated to each task that i'm working on and i like that quite a bit if i was to open another application for example the file manager and then i go back to activities you'll see that i have a new empty workspace right here so that's what i mean by dynamic workspaces you always have at least one empty workspace to work with and if i was to close this application you could see that one of the workspaces went away so it automatically adjusts the number of workspaces that you have available you don't have to actually customize that yourself here on the left we have a panel that's normally hidden so if i click back here to the desktop it's gone but in the activities overview we do see a panel here on the left this is essentially equivalent to your taskbar if you know windows for example all these icons are applications that are saved as favorites the system has pre-selected a few here or actually more than a few and if you open an application we have a dot underneath the icon to show that it's running and debian uses gnome software for installing additional software which is very common for most gnome distributions we're going to ignore this right here because i'm actually running this in demo mode it's not actually installed so normally this would give you access to install additional applications you would actually see the applications that are available here and they would be split up into categories but also we have the ability to update the distribution as well we have a dedicated tab for the purposes of installing updates it's really hard to be critical when it comes to debian because you really can't deny its importance in the linux community because again a lot of the technologies that we enjoy today all came from debian it's one of the most influential distributions in existence but unfortunately there's some rough edges that i need to make you guys aware of first and foremost hardware compatibility is really not that great in debian when it comes to laptops and desktops now don't get me wrong you could install debian and have an amazing experience and everything might even work out of the box without any customization being necessary however most of the time you will need to manually install drivers to get things to work and while that might not seem like a problem and technically it's not you just have to follow the instructions for the type of hardware that you have it is a thing that you have to do in debian that you generally don't have to do as much in other distributions for example if i go up here you can see that i'm connected via ethernet so what i've done is i've connected a usbc dock that has an ethernet jack because my laptop doesn't actually have an ethernet jack and this was required for me to actually get internet access at all this laptop does have wi-fi and the wi-fi card in this laptop worked out of the box with every distribution that i've tried in this video except for debian on my end i'm very familiar with the process of getting wi-fi to work in debian but for a new user that can pose a challenge and it's actually even worse in my case because debian stable doesn't even boot on this laptop at all this is a thinkpad x1 extreme and every distribution on this list had no problems booting at all only debbie and stable had an issue and there was just no way to easily get it to work without some tweaking so if a beginner was to try debian on this particular model they would most likely get frustrated and then possibly give up so you see debian on the screen then so how did i get it working actually what i'm doing is running debian testing debian testing has an updated kernel an updated software so it has a greater chance of working on a newer computer and when it comes to debian stable that's the main problem almost all of the software is extremely old compared to the software that ships with other competing distributions and that's part of the reason why it's called debian stable bleeding edge software is considered a risk and they don't include the latest and greatest software in debian stable because the focus is on stability not on having the latest versions of all the software that it includes so like a lot of people out there i am running debian testing like i mentioned it has newer software it has a greater likelihood of working but don't get me wrong even though i do have some criticisms when it comes to debian it is a great distribution and once you do get all of the hardware working on your installation it's going to serve you very very well the upgrade process from one release to the next has been flawless for me and regardless of whether or not debian works well on laptops and desktops it's a great choice for servers it's one of the best distributions that you can run on your server so if you ever do get into linux server administration debian is a great choice to consider now as far as whether or not i can recommend debian to my audience it really depends on how old or how new your computer is and whether you plan on running debian testing or stable i always recommend stable if you can because well it's more stable but if you have a newer computer you are probably not going to have a good experience with debian stable but if you have an older computer your likelihood of having a good experience is a lot higher i do recommend giving it a shot you can easily find out if debian is a good fit for your laptop or desktop by trying the live media debian makes available various live images that each feature a different desktop environment and you could download one and throw it on a flash drive boot it up and just see if all of your hardware works if it does you'll probably have a good experience if it doesn't support all of your hardware you can still have a good experience but you'll just need to put the work in and get everything working manually if that's not something that you want to do then you'll probably want to try out ubuntu instead because the hardware compatibility is going to be a lot better when it comes to intermediate users and advanced users debian is especially great because intermediate and advanced users usually don't have a problem with any manual tweaking that they might have to do to get something working and sometimes people just want a distribution that is not aligned to a company is more of a community project and sometimes having less corporate drama in your linux distribution might just be a good thing in and of itself so go ahead and try out a live image of debian on your computer see if it works and if it does you may as well install it [Music] fedora is a very popular distribution that features the gnome desktop environment just like debian but one of the main differences is that fedora is more bleeding edge and when you hear the term bleeding edge in the world of linux what that means is that it generally ships newer software than others but if you are looking for the latest and greatest software on your linux distribution then fedora is automatically a great fit the important thing to keep in mind is that fedora doesn't really change the gnome experience at all they do customize the wallpaper and i have to admit they generally do a very good job with the wallpapers i think they look great but other than that and some subtle changes here and there fedora is through and through a gnome distribution for better or worse and they give you the gnome experience as the gnome developers intended without all of the customizations that you might find in other distributions for example if i open up the file manager here you can see that they don't even customize the theme so in my opinion it ends up looking a little more generic but not everyone cares about that so it's not an issue for everyone one of the things that i like most about fedora is that the gnome integration is just very very good i mean it would be enough just to feature the latest and greatest gnome experience but the integration itself is just very very well integrated with the rest of the system so for example if i was to open up gnome software which is the main method in which you install software on fedora it's hard to see at first glance but the integration of gnome software is very good and probably the best of any gnome distribution that i've used for example we have all of the updates here in gnome software which is awesome but fedora actually integrates this with this system so that when you reboot it actually finishes installing the updates in a customized fedora environment which just means you get a first class experience when it comes to updating software and installing software in general and although it's beyond the scope of this particular video the gnome software integration in fedora integrates flat packs as well and flat packs are more of a universal package type that can be installed on various distributions but everything is integrated very well to the point where gnome software abstracts most of the underpinnings from you you don't actually see what's going on in the background unless you want to and it just makes it very easy to install software you just simply click on an application that you want to install and it's just that easy so for example if i wanted to install shutter i just click on that and then click the install button and as you can see shutter is now installed so overall i find fedora is very easy to use and i think it's a great choice for system engineers and developers but not so much beginners although beginners may have no problem using it it's not going to have the hardware support that ubuntu and popos has and it's also not going to be as beginner friendly as linux mint is but if you are looking for the latest and greatest norm release and you want to experience gnome exactly as the developers intended without all of the add-ons that other distributions put into their releases then fedora is a great fit [Music] so let's check out ubuntu mate this distribution is yet another spin on ubuntu it shares the same base as ubuntu itself but it uses the mate desktop environment instead and yeah i know it's a funny pronunciation and i'm probably butchering it myself but the fact is this distribution is great and it works very very well on older computers however the developers are careful to market ubuntu mate for that purpose because that's not the only reason why this distribution exists it's more so for those of you out there that prefer the older versions of ubuntu before they switch to unity and then later gnome even the layout is the same as older ubuntu releases with the two panels we have a panel up here at the top as well as one here at the bottom and if i open up an application we can see that we have a little tile here at the bottom for that application so your running applications will show up here at the bottom then on the top you can have all of your system controls and things like that we have a menu up here at the top as well for launching applications so here for example i have libreoffice no surprise there that comes with pretty much every distribution nowadays then up here we have our controls for various things like wi-fi battery volume and things like that now one thing that sets this apart from a lot of other distributions is the ubuntu mate welcome screen so i'm going to bring that up and at first it might not seem like much because a lot of distributions nowadays they have something like this and usually they do a good job too but ubuntu mate was among the first to really nail the concept of a welcome screen and it might not seem like a big deal but consider that this is the first thing that people will see when they use the distribution so the more helpful it can be the better so on this application we have some shortcuts to various things that we can configure and most of these things are available elsewhere on the desktop but for example if i wanted to customize the desktop layout i could actually choose a different layout altogether so if i click on this one right here the mutiny layout if you've ever seen the ubuntu versions that shipped with the unity desktop environment this is very similar to that style the bottom panel was moved here to the left and instead of application tiles we have icons instead and you can see a little triangle here it might be hard to see but it shows that this is an application that's running and then we have quick launch icons for various apps right here and i can change it to the redmin interface and what that does is essentially makes the layout very similar to windows with your start menu equivalent here on the left hand side and your system controls here on the right and for those of you that are mac fans we have this layout right here which gives you this little awesome panel and i actually quite like this panel to be honest and you can even customize it further by adding a piece of one to another so the customization goes beyond this but i only have so much time in one video the point is you get quite a few options here on the welcome screen so i'm going to switch this back to the original layout and another thing that i want to show off is this right here the software boutique and this in my opinion is one of the best things about ubuntu mate because when you have a new user or someone that is coming to linux for the very first time usually the first question that they ask is how do i install and then insert the name of the software that they want to install that's essentially the first question that comes up now what you could do with this application is go through the various categories and you can see that there's quite a few here so if you wanted to install google chrome you can click the install button for that and then if i go over here to games for example we even have steam and minecraft as well now not every application that you can install in a linux distribution is featured in this particular application however the majority of the applications that are the most common that people ask for are all here in fact you can even install spotify right from this application as well and there you go there's all kinds of applications here that you can install that are just very easy to access now a lot of these applications can be installed via the command line or another utility you don't actually have to use the software boutique to install any of these applications but some of them are a little more challenging than others and will make you go through more steps but regardless of what the process is to get a piece of software installed the software boutique basically abstracts that from you and just takes care of it because at the end of the day not everyone cares how an application is installed they just want it installed ubuntu mate is a great distribution for those of you that want something that's more resource friendly that's not going to saturate your memory and cpu not that other distributions do but ubuntu mate just gets out of the way and let your hardware work and do what it does best run your applications you get full customization and easy access to various applications that are commonly requested so it's a great distribution to try for beginners and i think it's even great for advanced users as well ubuntu mate is just well awesome [Music] so let's take a look at zubuntu subuntu features the xfce desktop environment and it's really great for older computers but it's also great for newer computers as well if you have an older computer then i think you'll find that zubuntu runs reasonably well and that's because ubuntu uses fewer system resources than some other distributions and it's very responsive for example i'll open up the file manager and just look how fast that opened i didn't even have to edit the video to remove any extended load times it's just very fast the default layout has the panel here at the top of the screen open applications will actually have a tile which is very similar to older operating systems we have the xfce menu here on the left side we can use that to launch all kinds of applications any application that's installed can be launched via that menu so here's firefox the default browser for example and we have our system controls here on the upper right we have the clock volume control battery status we have this network icon that we can use to connect to a wi-fi network or a wired network if any pop-up alerts appear we'll actually also see them here as well we can enable do not disturb mode if we don't want to be bothered we have a bluetooth menu for adding bluetooth devices under settings we have additional drivers and we could use that to install any proprietary drivers that we may need to unlock the full performance of our hardware so in my case it's giving me the ability to install the proprietary nvidia driver and that would be required if i wanted to play some games on zubuntu and to get that installed i can click here at the top to download the latest version and then apply the changes but i'm not going to do that because this is just a demo anyway but as you can see installing any additional drivers that you may need is a very easy task when it comes to adding new software we have an application that's cleverly named software and here it is and then we can install any of the applications here that we'd like by simply clicking on one so for example thunderbird i'll click install and it's installing right now and just look at how fast everything is i mean it's already up to 99 the dialogue to ask for the password was almost instantaneous and that's one of the many things that i love about zubuntu it's just very responsive which means that it's a great fit for older computers and newer computers as well like i've mentioned and if you're looking for a distribution that's easy to use and doesn't have all these flashy animations and effects all over the place wasting your ram then zubuntu might be a good distribution to check out [Music] so let's take a look at kubuntu kubuntu is a distribution that's based on ubuntu but the main difference is that it features the plasma desktop environment rather than gnome which is what ubuntu defaults to and plasma itself is actually based on a completely different tool kit which means it has a very different look and feel overall than virtually any other desktop environment that you can pick from and personally i think it looks great now the default layout has a panel here at the bottom with a start menu equivalent on the bottom left corner and you can use this application launcher to well launch applications it's very easy to use and it's actually among my favorites you have different tabs here on the bottom and it starts you off on the favorites section and here we have some default favorites that the system has installed for me but it's very easy to remove one if you don't want one for example if i don't use the command line often then i can simply remove console the default terminal app from this list and i just love the default applications that come with kubuntu so for example we have the dolphin file manager and dolphin is a funny name for a file manager nothing against dolphins but i don't understand what a dolphin has to do with managing files but anyway the dolphin file manager is one of my favorite file managers it just looks great it's simple without being too simple and there's a lot of options that are hidden and you can customize this in various ways and it goes beyond just simply changing the view mode which you could do in virtually any file manager you just have all kinds of control as far as how we want everything to look if we open up the settings for example we can customize virtually anything you might be able to think of including things like asking for a confirmation when you're about to move things to the trash whether or not to show previews when you're managing files and various settings as you can see here i'll leave it up to you to explore the settings in the dolphin file manager but overall i really like this one a lot in addition to that we have k sysguard and this is the application on kubuntu that we can use to see how our system resources are doing so we could check our system load for example swap history network history we also have a process table here we can sort by cpu usage memory usage and so on and this makes it very easy to find out what on your system is hogging all of that cpu if that ever were to happen then we also have discover which is their equivalent of the software managers that we've seen earlier in this video and like those it's also very easy to use for example i can install caden live which is actually the application that i'm going to use to edit this video before you see it and it was right there on the list very easy to install and now it's there i can click on it and then go to launch it and here's caden live pretty cool perhaps my favorite aspect of the plasma desktop is just how much customization you get it's a lot like cinnamon but you get even more customization to the point where you can even do some silly things the plasma desktop is not going to stop you it'll let you do whatever you want so for example if i right click the desktop then i go here to add widgets i can add all kinds of things like an analog clock i can add an application launcher which is kind of silly because you know it's better served being here on the panel but again if you want to do it the plasma desktop will let you do it and won't stop you even if it's a little weird you can scroll through the different widgets here that you can add so i can add a bluetooth widget here to the desktop which is just an icon again it's kind of silly but it gives you a quick access menu to add bluetooth devices it's probably better to put it here on the panel actually so i'll drop it right there and i think that looks a lot better that's probably where it's supposed to go but again they won't stop you and if you want to add a bluetooth device to your system you can do that through this menu so i'll remove this and this and even this and that's not all if you go to system settings you can configure even more things i mean just look at all these options that you have you can change the global theme so if you like dark themes for example just click on this and then apply the change and now we have dark mode i'll leave it up to you to explore all the settings here but the plasma desktop is great it runs fast it gives you full control over virtually everything so if you are a control freak then the plasma desktop is for you and the kubuntu distribution features plasma in every release so it's a great way to get started with the plasma desktop [Music] now let's check out mangero nanjaro is a very awesome distribution and what really sets it apart from all of the other ones on this list is that it's a rolling release distribution which means that you install it once and upgrade forever and generally speaking when it comes to rolling distributions there's never a new release a new release when you do see one on a rolling distribution is generally just a snapshot of where things are at that point in time manchero is a bit interesting though because they do implement features that sometimes do align to new releases which is not really typical when it comes to rolling distros but the idea remains the same you install it once and you upgrade forever you generally don't have to worry about having to start all the way over and doing a clean install at some point in the future because again the whole point is that you just have to install it one time and then you keep up on the updates and you'll get all the new features as they come available now to be fair i probably should have included arch linux on this list arch is the distribution on which manjaro is based but arch is more of an advanced distribution and while i do love arch quite a bit it's more of an advanced distribution and this series is catered more towards beginners but arch is definitely something that i recommend you check out but by checking out manjero you are getting the full benefit of arch because again that's what it's based on and you still benefit from the rolling release style that arch linux has but mangero actually builds some customizations on top of it and some extra tools which makes it in some ways even better the default desktop in manjero is technically xfce although the line has been blurred quite a bit they offer other desktop environment versions as well but the xfce edition has long been considered the flagship of this distribution so that's the one that i'm going over but if you want to check out manjero you don't have to check out the xfce edition they have plasma and gnome among others as well so just take your pick if you want to check it out but since we're here we may as well check out the xfce spin and the first thing i want to mention is that some of the icons like right here for example are going to look a little weird in the recording and that's not manjaro's fault i just have this finicky screen recorder and sometimes things don't scale well when it's 4k long story so if you see any screen artifacts or some oddities on the screen just go ahead and ignore it mangero features a custom theme which is more apparent if i open the file manager it's like a c green i think it is which is pretty cool and they have attention to detail all over the desktop it's just a great distribution overall but they also include a lot of tweaks that other distributions just don't so for example if i go here to settings and scroll down a bit we have manjaro settings manager right here and when i open that up although it's a little hard to see because again scaling issues with my screen recorder i'll try to get that fixed we have an option here to change the kernel that we're running and that gives us a lot of options as far as how we have our system configured now right here i'm running kernel 5.9 that's the version that comes with manjaro as of the time i'm recording this video but if i had this installed i'm actually running in live mode right now i would have a selection of kernels that i could choose from here so if i wanted to use a kernel that was more bleeding edge well i'd be able to do that in addition to that we also have a hardware configuration option this is where i can install additional drivers and you get quite a few things to choose from here so if your computer might benefit from extra drivers for example my nvidia card then manjaro makes it very easy to get your hardware up and running to its fullest potential and those are just some of the tweaks that i really enjoy about mangero and you can find out more about mangero on any of my reviews for this distribution i have several on my channel already but overall i think that is a great fit and it's my recommendation if you want to try a rolling release i think there's a lot of value in considering a rolling release distribution so if that's something that you want to consider then go ahead and give mangero a try [Music] and here we have ubuntu like many other distributions ubuntu also uses the gnome desktop environment but they include some interesting tweaks that set it apart from others and the most prominent of which is this panel here on the left as you saw in the previous sections gnome generally doesn't have a panel other than the one here at the top so the ubuntu developers have added this panel here on the left to basically make it easier to use you could turn it off if you don't like it but i think it's a very good addition to the distribution because well it could be helpful like many other panels we can click on any of these icons right here to launch an application and as you can see there's a little dot to the left of the firefox icon to show that it's running and we can access even more applications by clicking down here and that brings us to the gnome applications menu so we can launch any application even if it's not one that's listed here on the left and essentially all these icons here are just favorites anyway so i can remove one if i don't want it to show up and then i can right click on any of these icons right here add that to favorites i can also add the system monitor to the favorites as well then we can launch various applications and use the desktop now other than some tweaks and some theming even the theming's improved as you can see here ubuntu is generally a gnome distribution and if gnome is your desktop environment of choice i think you will be well served by ubuntu because their implementation of gnome is pretty good personally i prefer popos which we will be getting to later in the video but if it wasn't for popos then i think ubuntu would be my distribution of choice anyway for adding new applications we have ubuntu software right here which is essentially a skinned version of gnome software just like many other software managers in linux we have quick access to applications that we can install in our distribution here and then we can also install updates as well from this same application another aspect that i like a lot about ubuntu is that it's very easy to use on a desktop or laptop because most things will work out of the box and for the things that don't work out of the box it's very easy to get those things working so if i go back to the applications menu for example we have additional drivers right here if i click on that and it automatically put me here on the additional drivers tab but if there's any hardware on your computer that might need a driver in order to enable full functionality of that hardware then you'll be able to enable that here and as you can see it's found the nvidia card in this laptop if i don't install this then games might not work all that well if they work at all but i could go ahead and use this utility here to install the driver by just selecting the version of the driver i just go with the latest one and then apply i'm not going to apply the changes because i'm going to blow this away to try out yet another distribution but you get the idea it's things like this that makes ubuntu a great choice for laptops and desktops because it has quite possibly the best hardware compatibility of any distribution out there for laptops and desktops so it's definitely a great fit and it's especially a great choice if you have a newer computer because sometimes other distributions take a little longer to catch up and have the drivers that are required to make all of the hardware work properly ubuntu generally gets that done very quickly so if you have any problems with other distributions especially debian then ubuntu might be a great fit for you so let's check out popos pop os is a distribution from system 76 and that's a company that actually makes linux computers that ship with linux and this distribution is the default distribution that they ship with their computers however you don't actually have to have a system 76 computer in order to run popos its purpose is to work on whatever computer you might have you still want to check compatibility as you would with any distribution but i find that popos often works great and it's worked on every computer that i've personally tried it on i get the question a lot you know what's my favorite distribution what's my daily driver and well this is it popos is my personal favorite this distribution like many others in this video are based on ubuntu and at first it might seem kind of odd to have another gnome distribution based on ubuntu when ubuntu itself uses gnome so why would we want to have another gnome distribution that's based on ubuntu when we can just use ubuntu itself what sets popos apart is that they make so many customizations to the distribution to set it apart from ubuntu it's not just the theme although the theme is the first thing i'll mention because it looks really great in my opinion so if i open up the file manager here you can already see that they've customized the theme quite a bit and it doesn't even look like ubuntu but the similarities end there there's all kinds of different tweaks and additions that they've made to the distribution and if you want to run games popos is especially great for that because there's actually optimizations for games built into the distribution in fact if your computer has an nvidia gpu they actually make a dedicated version of popos for computers with nvidia cards so you can get even more performance with that version now i've already gone over what the gnome desktop environment is and what makes it different than the others but what makes the popos implementation different than other distributions again is the additions and tweaks that they've made for example if i was to open up another application for example firefox i now have the firefox window on top of the file manager window and it's pretty easy to get back as you already know i can press super i get an overview of all of the applications that are on that workspace and then i can click on it but a good example of what sets popos apart is tiling integration and we have an icon for that right here so if i click on that and then enable tile mode you can see immediately that both applications arrange themselves on the desktop equally and they're sharing the screen if i open up another application you can see that the layout has now accommodated the terminal that i've opened and well this is known as tiling mode and if you didn't already know what tiling mode was you can see just by the way it looks what tiling mode is it tiles all the applications on your screen in a very intelligent way and you can even group applications as well so for example if i press super and then s this little bar appears up here at the top and i can actually drag another window on top of it and now both of those applications share this same quadrant in the tiling mode here which essentially means that you could take advantage of tiling even on computers that don't have a high resolution display but if your computer does have a high resolution display then tiling is even more awesome on my desk i have an ultra wide display and tiling mode is just great on that display but anyway popos is a very awesome distribution and i highly recommend that you try it out there's many more tweaks than what i've gone over just now i could talk all day about popos and i even have entire videos about popos if you want to learn more but if you are looking for a distribution that's based on gnome with all kinds of tweaks to make the desktop and laptop experience even better then popos is a great distribution to check out here i am with elementary os and this is probably the most unique of the distributions that i've gone over so far this distro is based on ubuntu like many of the others on this list but what really sets it apart from the others is that it's using the pantheon desktop environment which is mostly exclusive to elementary os the other distributions that we've gone over so far they've all featured a desktop environment that for the most part is installable on other distributions as well for example earlier we covered kubuntu which features the plasma desktop but you can install plasma on other distributions fairly easily the pantheon is mainly exclusive to elementary os now you can install the pantheon desktop environment on other distributions but it's a little harder to do because it was developed with elementary os in mind a lot of people out there often compare elementary os to mac os and i can kind of understand why the panel down here at the bottom certainly does look similar i have to admit but i don't know if i completely agree with that comparison if i open up an application here's the epiphany web browser for example which is the default browser in elementary os and here we see the close icon is all the way on the left which is similar to mac os and then we have the window controls on the window border itself which is also similar to mac os but other than that pantheon has a personality of its own now down here we have a multitasking view which is pretty cool and that allows us to see the workspaces we have open on our computer and earlier i showed you guys the concept of dynamic workspaces and we have a similar concept here but it's not dynamic but i really love the way that they've implemented this it just looks beautiful up here at the top left corner of the screen we have an applications menu and here we can see all the applications that are installed on our computer and then we can launch whatever app we want to launch from this menu we also have a video player probably not a great example because i don't have any video files on this laptop right now but we have all the standard applications that we'd expect to find pre-installed like a file manager i've already mentioned the videos app the web browser we have a music player an application we can use to view photos a utility we could take screenshots with a mail application an application to view the webcam but you get the idea we have a full suite of applications installed here by default now in my experience i wouldn't recommend installing elementary os on an older computer but if you have a newish computer then elementary os is a great choice you get a beautiful desktop awesome applications out of the box it's just an awesome distribution with great attention to detail and i highly recommend that you check it out so there you go if you had a chance to check out some of the distributions in my list which one is your favorite so far let me know in the comments down below i look forward to hearing what you guys have to say about any of the 10 distributions that i've gone over or any of those that i haven't i don't know yet what we're going to do in the next episode but i can't wait to get into that but in the meantime please subscribe if you haven't already done so and click that like button if you like this video because that lets youtube know that you want to see more linux content just like this thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 47,013

Rating: 4.918263 out of 5

Keywords: Linux, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, linux for noobs, distro, distribution, ubuntu, debian, ubuntu mate, pop, pop_os, pop!_os, kubuntu, xubuntu, linux mint, mint, fedora, elementary, elementary os, manjaro, linux distro, best linux distro, linux distributions, distro reviews, linux desktop, best linux, top linux distributions, best linux os, best linux distros 2021, linux mint review

Id: Azh3-ZfUq5Q

Length: 56min 40sec (3400 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021