qweertz (they/she)

Nowadays it’s easy AF pretty much everywhere nowadays. Sometimes there are simple GUI tools that get you there with just a few clicks. Hardest it will get is having to look it up in a wiki for the distribution you are using (if it doesn’t have them preinstalled) and then following simple step-by-step instructions

My first was Ubuntu 14.04. and then 16.04. at school 💀. as early as 2015 iirc

Though Blackbox or Kali might be a contender too (one of the distros my father had installed for fun)

I had rly cool CS teachers, which also administered our infrastructure

then we used Linux Mint in the “Linux” club run by one of said teachers

For personal use, my first one was Manjaro in 2018 (I switched to it with a Windows dual boot, I got rid of Windows entirely in 2020 I think?). Somewhere I switched to Endeavour OS, tried out OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my laptop and eventually settled on Fedora bc of the Grub fiasco Arch had. Am using it to this day.
Though it’s in the form of Nobara on my desktop; I also plan on switching to Bluefin eventually

I get you, like “been there, done that”

Nowadays I have like 10 if not 15 extensions (most of which are not essential to my workflow) and they make the already wonderful Gnome base just better for me personally

this is why I usually wait with recent distribution upgrades, another upside is: it saves me a bunch of headaches too since – by the time I do upgrade – all the little bugs have usually been fixed

I (unfortunately) have to heavily recommend against using Nobara, especially if you have an Nvidia graphics card. It’s an amateur distribution in the original sense of the word and also lacks a large community, neither does it have a company behind it.

This leads to a lack of proper QA and testing in general. It’s OK but I would not recommend it to anyone

If you want to go with a “traditional” distro, go with Linux Mint, simply the most solid out there. I’d also recommend you check out Bluefin, it’s atomic (meaning that you are basically guaranteed to always have a working system, even after upgrades) and quite modern

This is why – if you want to keep your extensions – you wait with upgrading to a new Gnome version until your extensions support it…

AFAIK there is no stable extension API, leading to breakage with every version upgrade