A mistake people make very often is to conflate the distro with a “look” or “theme” to the UI, and it’s not their fault.
Distros bundle a desktop environment which contains many applications used to navigate the computer graphically with things like “file managers” such as Windows explorer for example.
A DE can bundle lots of programs or very few and these programs differ in looks and functionality, not only that but these programs can be installed / uninstalled regardless of what distro you’re using.
In short: distro doesn’t affect DE but must distros bundle a DE based on things like philosophy, functionality or maybe just looks.
There are many DEs which is why I suggested installing CachyOS as part of the installation shows you options, you can try them out rewipe the drive, try out another one in less than 3 minutes. So it’s the perfect sandbox environment to try new things. I guess you can use VMs as well, not sure how well cachyos works on VM.
As a personal note on DEs when I first used Linux about 5 years ago I used KDE plasma because I thought it was the most windows-like. But I had many issues with KDE, chances are if you use your search engine you’ll see similar complaints about it which I likely share.
5 years in the future my favourite DE is basically using Sway and a file manager like Nautilus. Sway has Swaybar as a status bar and that’s really all I need.
Not sure if Sway counts as a DE though, I think it’s a window manager first and foremost.
Thank you. Looks like I have some homework to do. I’m getting excited, I’ve been reading a bunch about Linux and there are sooo many options. I’m barely started and already loving Linux.
A mistake people make very often is to conflate the distro with a “look” or “theme” to the UI, and it’s not their fault.
Distros bundle a desktop environment which contains many applications used to navigate the computer graphically with things like “file managers” such as Windows explorer for example.
A DE can bundle lots of programs or very few and these programs differ in looks and functionality, not only that but these programs can be installed / uninstalled regardless of what distro you’re using.
In short: distro doesn’t affect DE but must distros bundle a DE based on things like philosophy, functionality or maybe just looks.
There are many DEs which is why I suggested installing CachyOS as part of the installation shows you options, you can try them out rewipe the drive, try out another one in less than 3 minutes. So it’s the perfect sandbox environment to try new things. I guess you can use VMs as well, not sure how well cachyos works on VM.
As a personal note on DEs when I first used Linux about 5 years ago I used KDE plasma because I thought it was the most windows-like. But I had many issues with KDE, chances are if you use your search engine you’ll see similar complaints about it which I likely share.
5 years in the future my favourite DE is basically using Sway and a file manager like Nautilus. Sway has Swaybar as a status bar and that’s really all I need.
Not sure if Sway counts as a DE though, I think it’s a window manager first and foremost.
Thank you. Looks like I have some homework to do. I’m getting excited, I’ve been reading a bunch about Linux and there are sooo many options. I’m barely started and already loving Linux.
My piece of advice if you have 2 drives, and this goes for any OS not just Linux.
that way you can wipe the first drive whenever you run into anything or you want to change anything without being worried about losing data
make sure your browser is using a password manager so stored passwords don’t vanish