I run Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop PC and Debian with Gnome on a mini PC. I use the latter as a server and disabled the GUI, but Gnome was hard to get used to. I use my PC for casual gaming, browsing, and casual Python development. I am not a Linux power user but pretty familiar with the terminal. Setting up native Python without relying on UV/conda on Debian was a nightmare, but I guess that’s an edge case. I really love Linux Mint, and I also really like Cinnamon.
Python without UV/Conda is always somewhat of a pain on Linux, well, if you need a specific version that is. It comes pre-installed on virtually all distros, because the distros use it themselves to script stuff in the OS. That also means, if you install a different Python version OS-wide, you can break those OS scripts.
Admittedly, it is somewhat of a larger pain on Debian, though, because it will stay behind on older Python versions for longer than most other distros. After the Python 2→3 transition, they also continued to alias python to python2 for quite some years (I’m actually not sure, if they alias to python3 by now)…
If you’re used to Windows then maybe give KDE a shot. Similar concepts to Windows (like a taskbar at the bottom of the screen) but extremely customizable. You can install KDE on Debian - on an existing system, the easiest way is to run tasksel and select KDE Plasma.
I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC with Debian as a server and only ssh to it. I used Ubuntu with gnome at work for a couple of years (I could ignore it back then with the Ubuntu theme, which I liked more)
Never tried out KDE, I know it is very popular. But I am super happy with Cinnamon and I don’t see a reason to switch on my main PC. Of course I grew up with Windows, that may explain why I get along with Cinnamon so well…
I run Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop PC and Debian with Gnome on a mini PC. I use the latter as a server and disabled the GUI, but Gnome was hard to get used to. I use my PC for casual gaming, browsing, and casual Python development. I am not a Linux power user but pretty familiar with the terminal. Setting up native Python without relying on UV/conda on Debian was a nightmare, but I guess that’s an edge case. I really love Linux Mint, and I also really like Cinnamon.
Python without UV/Conda is always somewhat of a pain on Linux, well, if you need a specific version that is. It comes pre-installed on virtually all distros, because the distros use it themselves to script stuff in the OS. That also means, if you install a different Python version OS-wide, you can break those OS scripts.
Admittedly, it is somewhat of a larger pain on Debian, though, because it will stay behind on older Python versions for longer than most other distros. After the Python 2→3 transition, they also continued to alias
pythontopython2for quite some years (I’m actually not sure, if they alias topython3by now)…If you’re used to Windows then maybe give KDE a shot. Similar concepts to Windows (like a taskbar at the bottom of the screen) but extremely customizable. You can install KDE on Debian - on an existing system, the easiest way is to run tasksel and select KDE Plasma.
I’m fairly new to Linux and I’ve been using Kubuntu, and so far I really like KDE coming from a lifetime of using Windows.
I disabled the graphical interface as I use the mini PC with Debian as a server and only ssh to it. I used Ubuntu with gnome at work for a couple of years (I could ignore it back then with the Ubuntu theme, which I liked more)
Never tried out KDE, I know it is very popular. But I am super happy with Cinnamon and I don’t see a reason to switch on my main PC. Of course I grew up with Windows, that may explain why I get along with Cinnamon so well…
Yeah, I mean Cinnamon matches what Windows does really quite closely, down to even the default keyboard shortcuts being virtually the same.
KDE doesn’t match it quite as closely, but it’s just power-user heaven…
Oh yeah, that makes sense.