Posted: 3/21/2026 7:44:51 PM EDT
[Last Edit: Klee][Edited]
Yea i'm bored tonight..... I have been running Ubuntu as my main desktop for over 20 years, currently on Ubuntu 25.10 and I'm ready for a newer desktop experience. Only interested in easy to install distro's with a complete desktop. And yes I know you can use what ever desktop you want but the newer cool ones are not always offered either as an option during install or can be a pain to get going. I'm done with config files for X, that ship has sailed. Trying them on my ProxMox server. First is CachyOS with the COSMIC desktop.  Really liking it so far. Does not come with much installed but its easy to install programs using the Application installer. Used it to install Brave browser. I use YouTube videos to test my VM's and if they play smoothly i'm happy. Next I'm installing Ubuntu 26.04 pre-release daily build to try it out. Edit: the CachyOS vm is still running smoothly while I install A Ubuntu VM with 16 threads and 32 gigs of ram. I'm loving the latest server I built.  |
Ubuntu 26.04 pre release. It runs Gnome 50, tried vanilla Gnome 50 on the latest version of Debian and I did not like it. The Ubuntu version of Gnome has a few differences but it is just an update with the usual Ubuntu look, so very familiar. |
Debian 13.3.0 with Gnome 50. Two things I do not like, the user account that is used to install the system is not automatically added to the Sudo user group and the default Gnome desktop you do not have a dock on the desktop all the time you have to click on the lh upper corner to display it.  Yea I know both can be changed but I no longer want to have to dive into the guts of the system to change things to how things should already be. |
13B / 39C X5 / 35M yup reclassed more than once...
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| I've playing with linux since 1998. I totally ditched windows about 5 years ago. I have several PCs that I try distros on, but I always come back to Mint, specifically with the cinnamon desktop. It just works. Right now the wife is watching a movie off our Emby server, that's hosted on on a mint box. |
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss.
Robert A. Heinlein
"Leave the Artillerymen alone, they are an obstinate lot. . ."
Napoleon Bonaparte
Robert A. Heinlein
"Leave the Artillerymen alone, they are an obstinate lot. . ."
Napoleon Bonaparte
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I installed Pop!_OS in an attempt to try move away from Windows 11 for my gaming PC. While I really liked it, you can’t run Steam games that require TPM, like Battlefield 6, so I abandoned the idea. ETA: I’ve tun Ubuntu, Zorin, and Mint previously, so I wanted to give a different distribution a try. |
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Originally Posted By giantpune: kubuntu||gtfo I left KDE when it went to version 3.0. I try it every now and then and still do not really like it. KDE 2 is peak KDE.  I remember dual booting with Windows 2000 and some flavor of Linux, maybe Red Hat 7 point something, with KDE 2 as its desktop. I always loved Windows 2000. 
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Originally Posted By nominion: I installed Pop!_OS in an attempt to try move away from Windows 11 for my gaming PC. While I really liked it, you can’t run Steam games that require TPM, like Battlefield 6, so I abandoned the idea. ETA: I’ve tun Ubuntu, Zorin, and Mint previously, so I wanted to give a different distribution a try. Did you say Windows 11? Windows 11 VM.  Slowest to boot of the OS's so far, instantly starts to update and download shit I already uninstalled. I run it in a VM to remind myself how crappy it actually is. |
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Originally Posted By Klee: I left KDE when it went to version 3.0. I try it every now and then and still do not really like it. I dont like the default setup. But it is the most easily customizable. I cut my teeth on ubuntu with gnome2 back in the day. When they shitcanned gnome2, I switched to kde. It doesnt take 3 minutes to make the KDE desktop look and feel like gnome2 did. The default kde menu arrangement is too windows-wannabe. Spend a couple minutes to drag the menus around to be however you want them to be. |
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I settled on Cachy/Plasma 6.6. Cosmic isn’t ready for prime time yet IMO but it has promise. I agree with you about Windows 2000, I would take a modernized Pro desktop as my daily driver in a heartbeat. There are guys out there cobbling together driver and NVMe support for it, but it’s too much of a hassle for me at the moment. |
God's children are not for sale.
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Originally Posted By Klee: I always loved Windows 2000. Peak Windows. |
This is...a clue - Pat_Rogers
I'm not adequately aluminumized for this thread. - gonzo_beyondo
CO, MI, OR - Please lobby your legislators to end discrimination against non-resident CCW permit holders
I'm not adequately aluminumized for this thread. - gonzo_beyondo
CO, MI, OR - Please lobby your legislators to end discrimination against non-resident CCW permit holders
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Originally Posted By nominion: I installed Pop!_OS in an attempt to try move away from Windows 11 for my gaming PC. While I really liked it, you can’t run Steam games that require TPM, like Battlefield 6, so I abandoned the idea. ETA: I’ve tun Ubuntu, Zorin, and Mint previously, so I wanted to give a different distribution a try. Installed PopOS. Debian/Ubuntu based and that is a plus since I am very familure with it. Also has the COSMIC desktop that I am really liking in CachyOS. I hope it goes to version 26.04 when that is released by Ubuntu. Seems a little slower on bootup verses CachyOS.  |
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Try Slackware if you want to challenge yourself (it's way easier to install than it used to be.) There's a very live distros based on it, liveslak and Salix being a couple. Been a user since 1998, full time 100% since 2002. XFCE is your best bet, but you can choose what UI you want in the installer, and they still support some crazy old ones. |
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Originally Posted By seek2: Try Slackware if you want to challenge yourself (it's way easier to install than it used to be.) There's a very live distros based on it, liveslak and Salix being a couple. Been a user since 1998, full time 100% since 2002. XFCE is your best bet, but you can choose what UI you want in the installer, and they still support some crazy old ones. I haven't used Slackware since the late 1990's. And i'm done with being challenged by Linux, I guess I've gotten lazy now that i'm in my 60's. |
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Kali is the way. I messed around with Mint back in the day as at least at that time it was by far the cleanest looking. I remember almost nothing running natively and then you had Wine or some shit to get Windows programs to run and even then they didn't. VMs are a PITA and not practical. Went back to Windows. I try it every few years but have never been impressed. |
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[ Originally Posted By -Obsessed-: Kali is the way. I messed around with Mint back in the day as at least at that time it was by far the cleanest looking. I remember almost nothing running natively and then you had Wine or some shit to get Windows programs to run and even then they didn't. VMs are a PITA and not practical. Went back to Windows. I try it every few years but have never been impressed. Kali is not the way, running as root is not a good thing. Just running it for shits and giggles is fine but not as a daily driver. Been there and done that. VM's are super easy in ProxMox and on serious hardware you can not tell your on a VM unless you game and even then you can run GPU passthrough if you are willing to mess with it. I don't game any more except for Solitaire in a Windows VM.  My ProxMox has dual Xeon Gold 6148 cpu's with 192 gigs of ram and I can run muiltiple VM's with videos and anything else a standard desktop can do and it's running smoothly. My last ProxMox server ran dual Xeon E5-2670 V2 cpus and 128 gigs of ram and ran decent but would not run videos at full screen smoothly like the current server. I do not run Windows programs in Linux, I run Windows programs on Windows either dual booting or on a Windows laptop but mostly in a Windows VM. My main computer also has a 2TB nvme drive with Windows 11 on it that if I need to I boot into it but I haven't booted into Windows on this pc in probably a year. |
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Getting back to the original theme of this thread, looks like PopOS is in the running as my next distro. PopOS 26.04 is supposed to be released a couple of weeks after Ubuntu 26.04. I'll mess around with other distros over the next few weeks. Trying Fedora Cosmic Spin next and am currently downloading it, probably wont be tonight. I haven't ran Fedora since just before the first version of Ubuntu came out. |
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I HATE gnome and I HATE any sort of UI with the stupid icon set in a dock. I dislike any sort of bar across the top or sides. A desktop should have very few icons and anything that goes completely across the screen should be at the bottom. I like Debian based stuff. Ironically I currently run Zorin which is gnome but heavily skinned. I've been thinking about trying another distro but not sure what yet and I'm currently pretty settled in on Zorin. |
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Originally Posted By Firefinder37: I've playing with linux since 1998. I totally ditched windows about 5 years ago. I have several PCs that I try distros on, but I always come back to Mint, specifically with the cinnamon desktop. It just works. Right now the wife is watching a movie off our Emby server, that's hosted on on a mint box. ^this...not just subjectively better either. Typically, OnlyOffice, Draw.IO (local), and Thunderbird - off to the races with no issues IME. I like 'em all & still have a thing for old *nix things running as VM's, but for a daily driver Mint/LMDE are hard to beat. |
| I played around with various Linux distros when Win XP was about to go end of support in 2014. Linux Mint, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Zorin. But the one I liked best was Linux Lite, small, lightweight, fast. I'd have no problems going back to Linux, the only thing is I wish someone would write a Linux program that would allow me to backup my iPhone to my hard drive, similar to iTunes but without the music player portion of it |
| I just installed Fedora KDE from Mint this weekend. Liking it so far. Out of curiosity what VM are you using? I'm going to install one sometime this week for windows. I used Boxes on Mint, don't remember but seems like I had problems setting it up in the beginning. |
| I have largely used Debian based distros over the years but I'm really happy with Cachy on my laptop. My desktop is a server/desktop so I want something more stable than a rolling release distro but I may move from Mint to something that is not Debian based. Not liking what I'm hearing coming out of the Debian "leadership" to make me think that solid stable code is their main goal. |
Fighting for underscores everywhere.
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Originally Posted By cb73: I just installed Fedora KDE from Mint this weekend. Liking it so far. Out of curiosity what VM are you using? I'm going to install one sometime this week for windows. I used Boxes on Mint, don't remember but seems like I had problems setting it up in the beginning. I'm using a dual Xeon ProxMox server as the VM host. |
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Big fan of Mint (mate) myself when wanting a GUI Linux experience. Debian for all my headless servers. |
Abolish the FBI, ATF, and the NSA.
Any citizen accused of a crime is presumed innocent until bankrupted beyond all reasonable doubt.
Boycott Colorado - don't reward communists in Denver with your business.
Any citizen accused of a crime is presumed innocent until bankrupted beyond all reasonable doubt.
Boycott Colorado - don't reward communists in Denver with your business.
It's done. I had to leave for a bit and installed it on my fast 1 tb nvme drive when I came back. Then I had to reboot to make sure the install didn't hose the Windows install, after I booted into Windows 11 I let it do some updates. So far pretty painless. Still configuring stuff. |
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No sound in my VM's also performance is worse than under Ubuntu. Also some of the GUI buttons are black with zero text. Also errors out during some file copying. Overall it needs more polish to be usable to me. I googled the VM sound issue and it seems others are having issues in PopOS. Downloading Ubuntu 24.04.4 desktop again and will run that for now. |
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Originally Posted By TOTSA: I’m running Mint on a laptop and ProxMox on a mini PC in the basement. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04.4 again, was running 25.10 for a while but it had a few minor issues. Ubuntu 24.04.4 is solid so far. I run ProxMox on a maxi PC in my hobby room. 
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Originally Posted By Klee: Did you say Windows 11? Windows 11 VM. https://i.imgur.com/XPwwOPP.png Slowest to boot of the OS's so far, instantly starts to update and download shit I already uninstalled. I run it in a VM to remind myself how crappy it actually is. Gotta do a lot of GPO tweaks to limit the stupid update options. I'm moving away from Windows myself. Transitioned to a Mac 2 years ago and has been my daily ever since. Still have a Windows PC for gaming (that i do less and less of) and for file management. MacOS finder is woefully under powered. I broke down and bought parallels for the Mac to run a Windows VM just to do the windowy things. Now that im on an M5pro macbook, i can play my games in the VM or natively so the Gaming PC will probably get sold off while prices are still high. Then my Proxmox server has a few linux distros on it, like Mint, Ubuntu and Kali. I might try out Catchy. |
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I am running LMDE or LM debian edition. The normal LM would not work well on my year old system (7800X3D, 96BG DDR5 5600, 7900 XT). LMDE is stable a MFer. Works great. |
Protecting privacy will come at a cost. Use encrypted email (Proton), messaging (Signal), and password manager (KeepassXC). Use a vetted VPN only!, Social media is mind poison.
| I had started playing with NixOS and was really liking it. I'm always a fan of RHEL…easy enough to get through the dev program. Also playing with CoreOS some but haven't played much in a quick minute. |
"Have you heard of the Gospel according to NIMS?" - Some EMC...Probably
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Originally Posted By giantpune: kubuntu||gtfo I played around & distro hopped for a while, but kept cycling back to Kubuntu. Runs great on my mix of hardware, does what I need it to do, meshes with my workflow, and can handle the occasional windows stuff through WinBoat. I'm not dogmatic about it, but at this point would need a compelling reason to switch. I will note that I'm not a gamer, so that's never been a factor for me. |
"Life is too serious to be taken seriously" - Ray Bradbury
KoW callsign 'Ribs'
KoW callsign 'Ribs'
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Looks like Linux Kernel 7.0 is a bit buggy after upgrading the kernel in ProxMox also seems to have some issues in the VM's also. So I installed it on real hardwear. Asrock z370 Pro 4 motherboard with a I3 8100 and 8 gigs of ram, and for fun I threw in a old AMD HD 7700 video card. Runs the 46 & 2 Tool video that I use to test sound and video playback in a VM really great. I decided to do the same test on this install on actual hardware.  |
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I use Arch BTW Kidding. Ubuntu 24.04LTS, 25.04 Desktop, and well Alpine if that counts (Docker images). Recently all featuring cool ASCII art upon login and running HTCondor. And llama.cpp / MstyStudio / MstyClaw / LMStudio to try to automate my job down to like an hour a day.
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