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If I had to pick, Ubuntu.
What I’d actually pick: Fedora
Workstation Edition (Gnome) or Plasma Edition (KDE Plasma), whatever your UX preference, with Gnome being more polished, minimalist, distraction-free, and Plasma being like Windows out of the box but much more powerful and customisable.
The name unfortunately conjures images of the tips fedora/m’lady meme, but the name predates that, and it’s a solid and well-supported distro that gets better with every update.
I don’t really dislike Ubuntu; they certainly get a lot right. But they have also made a few choices that I’m not really into. Most of all, the direction of Ubuntu is somewhat unpredictable, because Canonical is a for-profit business that has changing priorities.
Honestly, this isn’t much of a hypothetical for me. At work, my choices are Windows, Mac, or Ubuntu. I’m quite happy with Ubuntu, though I’ve switched away from the default desktop environment to i3.
I use Arch (BTW) on my personal systems. And Ubuntu isn’t as bad as I worried it would be.
My main gripe is snaps. Firefox is practically unusable as a snap. And my employer forbids installing any software (save for a select list of exceptions) not via the officially-supported Ubuntu way of doing things. Chrome is available without snap, so I use it on my work machine. Which annoys me, but if I’m less efficient in my job as a result, it’s their own fault.
Certainly Ubuntu. But fortunately I have more options to choose from.
Debian
Easily Ubuntu. Despite its general wonkiness and kind of a shit attitude towards upstreams, at least they’re not shoving mandatory tracking into all of your orifices, and aren’t integrating AI into everything because fuck you, you’ll like it.
Ubuntu is a bit of a shit distro, but I still have a soft spot for it because it was my first Linux experience.
If I had to choose between those two, I would choose Ubuntu without fail. However, I am currently using Linux Mint Debian Edition and really enjoying Cinnamon and the fact that it is based on Debian and not Ubuntu.
Fedora
I really dislike windows (and the likelihood of people on Lemmy having the same preference as me is very high), but if you need to do game development or most creative work, I would say to not bother with Linux, it’s not there yet to be fully honest. Maybe in 5 years Photoshop and the music creation software will support Linux, but for now there’s a few lesser known softwares that don’t have as many features. For the other kinds of work though, Linux I think is better than windows
most creative work
DaVinci Resolve is pretty good. Works on linux and certainly has more features than I need by a long shot. I think Adobe products are the main bottleneck for creative work on linux. Though, the Adobe set of products are so darn expensive, it’s really not a great solution if literally anything else can do the job instead.
I don’t know, you can get Photoshop and Lightroom for £10 a month, which is very cheap when you compare it to a night out or a takeaway, and at the moment, they’re better than the equivalents.
I do need to have another look at DaVinci Resolve though. I’ve heard loads of good things about it, but it was overkill for what I needed when I last tried it :)
Resolve is basically the only “professional-grade” software for creative work on Linux, and even there depending on hardware like video card the experience will be vastly different
Ubuntu is great for works out of the box kind of tasks, I have it on an old MacBook Pro 2012. With a free Ubuntu pro account I can get security updates for 22.10 lts until 2032! It’s already starting to act its age so security updates but a frozen OS helps not further tax it as software gets more complex. Point being there’s a niche even if in most other cases I might prefer something different.
While Ubuntu only ever metes out the occasional beating with things like spy lens, Windows has really been hitting it out of the park consistently. It is rivaled only maybe by Mac & iOS when it comes to punishing users for making stupid decisions. Their silently replacing local files with fronted copies served from MS’s own “cloud” was a real banger. I can’t wait to see what creative new ways they’ll come up with next to make normies suffer.
archlinux
Yeah, Ubuntu overall, but it depends on which version of each.
Windows 7, I’m so familiar with and have a collection of programs for without having to download anything, it would be fine for my needs, neither better or worse than Ubuntu. The only inherent improvement for my use case is the up to date security of a newer, supported OS.
I don’t game on pc currently because it just fucking hurts to sit in the chair long enough to play anything worth playing. I don’t do anything that requires Adobe products. That means Linux is going to be as good as an out of date windows on any version from the same time as when 7 lost support, and likely older versions too. There’s no functional difference in the kind of use I’d put either to. Again my use case.
So it comes down to security between versions.
Now, if I’m forced to pick between any more recent windows versions and any Ubuntu version, no way am I using windows unless it’s via VM. 8 was bad enough I wasn’t willing to move from 7. 10 jumped the shark and made me start using Linux to begin with. 11? Fuck no. Just no. Won’t do it. Won’t buy anything that has it and can’t be immediately loaded with something else.
However, canonical can fuck itself with snaps. Ubuntu works fine, I have no issues with anything other than snap really. I prefer mint w/cinnamon for my debian offspring, but that’s a different subject.
Ubuntu was the first distro I tried back when windows 10 came out and it became obvious what Microsoft was really trying to do. It was good enough that I dual booted with it and windows 7 for a long while, until I tried mint/cinnamon.
That computer still dual boots 7 and mint, it’s my media player. No internet connection, and whatever version of mint was on there when I got my newer box. I would have moved out to mint only, but musicbee. Can’t stand the available music players for Linux. I’ve tried them all over the years, and they can’t hold up to musicbee’s features. I also haven’t had success with the available ways to use musicbee on linux. I try every year or two though.
Ubuntu easily. I use linux for privacy reasons (and because I hate capitalism) sure ubuntu isn’t perfect in this regard but it is certainly better than windows
Windows
