I’m switching from Windows to Linux, for performance, better looks, simplicity and better control over the environment.
Which would be the best Linux distribution I should use, that is beginner friendly.
Thank you for your help!
Matic
Rule 1 of using Julia on Linux (for most distros): Do not install Julia from the package manager but use the generic binaries from the website instead.
Apart from that, I would say that Julia is pretty distro-agnostic. My recommendation for a beginner would be Pop!_OS.
Have a look at this thread with lots of other recommendations:
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There is a discussion that touches on this in the early part of this thread. Apparently, for Arch Linuxes, you could use the package manager.
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I will weigh in here… I use Fedora on my personal laptop.
It depends really what your goals are. I would give two distros some consideration
Ubuntu. Always popular with AI types. You should have access to the latest versions of all packages.
Your call if you want to go with the very bleeding edge, or stick with an ‘LTS’ - Long Term Support version.
If you are more of an HPC type, CentOS was the choice up until recently. However with the hoo-hah over CentOS Stream the Rocky distribution may be taking the prime spot in HPC.
Big caveat here - I have no idea how Rocky works on a laptop.
There are of course many other Linux distributions. SuSE comes to mind as a leading distro also.
For beginner use look at Mint Linux. I have never used it but it is well thought of. Mint is based on Ubuntu
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I recommend Mint because it is easy and transition from Windows is also easy. It doesn’t give you any work, and the interface is clean, customizable and responsive (much more than Ubuntu’s). Having had to compile kernels 20 years ago, I am no beginner and I’m very satisfied with it.
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Sorry for the corny answer. But the one you are most comfortable in, that one will be the best.
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Hi development_mentor!
With Pop!_OS you get something that many call a better Ubuntu. With Fedora 34 you get a rolling distro that is usually working and has a good out of memory management and Gnome40 environment (in general a platform somehow similar to Red Hat Linux enterprise standard). With CrunchBang Plus Plus you get a Debian stable, user friendly, customizable, light graphical environment. If you are very futuristic (which I guess you are) and put emphasize on customization, please take a look at Qubes OS, however, in contrary to CrunchBang Plus Plus this OS requires significantly higher hardware specification from the very start. You may also find Clear Linux an interesting option (also rolling and Gnome40). It is not considered novice, however, I would find many of its features as novice friendly (i.e. installation and management of window managers that comes with its bundles). For this distro and Julia, I guess you may also get potential support from Elrod (I just read in the above mentioned thread that he is using it but beware if you are novice you may put yourself into trouble as the guy similar to helgee, DNF, HPC johnh, gbaraldi and leandromartinez98 looks to be on the advanced side here [frankly sometimes I barely understand the basics of what they are talking about] but again judging that some of your questions on this discussion list are very ahead of time I would seriously take Clear Linux and making friends with them into consideration). Clear Linux performance on average is ~ 5 to 10 % better than other distros but there are areas where those numbers are significantly higher. In general, there are many variables associated with your question. Unless you are entirely into development, you may also consider staying with Windows 10/11 as a daily driver and using Julia on a Linux remote machine (you may take a look for example at Oracle Cloud or Google Colab but there is also Julia Hub and other providers). In case of remote development, especially if you would constantly change machines, I would recommend to look at JILL (Julia Installer for Linux) which was also mentioned in one of the listed above threads. Hope you find the information useful and I guess development_mentor you are up to the challenge!
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Have you made a decision?
I forgot to add that Red Hat in its program called Developer Subscription for Individuals has the no-cost offer with entitlement to register 16 physical nodes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
I think that Arch and Gentoo are also worth taking a look especially if you are interested in learning some intricacies of Linux. I do not think there is a reason to be afraid of them even at the beginning.
P.S. Btw, really interesting topics raised by you. I mean neuromorphic computing and reinforcement learning.
I use Arch and really like it. However, I have started with Ubuntu and this was good because starting with Arch without knowing any Linux basics is kinda hard (even if the Arch Linux Wiki is great). At some point I got tired of Ubuntu, because of how it overwrote some configuration files, and how it made some advanced/alternative things very hard to configure. I started wanting a distro that shielded me less from the machinery behind it, and instead keep it simple and allowed me to tinker with it. Arch Linux is great for this purpose.
@Henrique_Becker I was under a great impression of topics raised by development_mentor and I visited also his github page to which he provided the link. I wrote the recommendation for Arch as I was sure that this would not be a problem for him at all. I have never been a heavy Arch user as it lacks support for one software package that I used to use on a daily basis. For everyday use the least problems I had was CrunchBang Plus Plus. However, I think that a lot depends on a personal taste and a particular machine as well as a particular use case.