To everyone down voting and assuming this is ragebait, I would ask we take a step back. I think this is a genuine question and I can’t help but feel a bit heard that someone is asking it.

In the midst of all this ridiculous culture-warring, creators have a ton of anxiety now. It’s one thing to be afraid your creation will get you laughed at for being cringey, (as if that’s not a huge barrier already).

But it’s another entirely when it feels like in this era of “all art is political”, writing anyone who has recognizable human qualities will forcibly put you, the creator, into some ideological category where you’ll be scrutinized and judged personally based on your work’s perceived “agenda.”

The right with their relentless “woke-hunting”, the left with their “purity tests” to blame you for not championing their particular social cause. Showing your art seems to inevitably involve chumming the waters to the terminally online. This can also produce anxieties of being doxxed or something if it’s high profile enough.

That being said: My heart is warmed by all the overwhelmingly level headed responses in this thread. Seriously. It gives me hope.

Please notice I said FEELS a lot up there…Our perception is definitely muddied by how social media tends to megaphone the worst of society, and it tends to discourage us from being seen or interacting with others.

I’m glad threads like this demonstrate how genuine people can be. It provides quite a contrast.

While we’re at it…

Don’t make life choices based on the opinion of white supremacists.

Now your great life advice is even more universally applicable! :D

It’s gonna have to be “Linux From Scratch” at this point…starting with the hardware.

Also OP, if you want pretty and Cinnamon can’t do it for ya, you can always install KDE (my fav!) or GNOME or what have you right on top of your existing system.

Research before doing so! But it’s possible. :)

I also love Tumbleweed and rock it as my daily driver!

To complement this point, OP, you can also get that sweet rollback functionality in any distro! Usually the easiest way is selecting BTRFS as your file system on install, and installing a software called “TimeShift” that will manage snapshots for you.

BTRFS can be complicated, but basically, it allows remembering the changes in files, without needing to copy the ENTIRE file. This saves a ton of space. (You don’t need to get into the weeds deep diving if you don’t want to. Snapshots are great, everything else is great, as long as you aren’t doing crazy specific RAID setups or something lol)

Otherwise, on EXT4 for insurance, your rollbacks would just literally be copied files, which can eat your storage fast. :)

Tumbleweed is known for rolling (heh!) this in quite smoothly by default, but this is just an example how any distro can be tweaked how you like! (Highly recommend setting up Timeshift on ANY install.)

I absolutely second the advice in this comment: Try some live USBs or virtual machines and just play around for what feels right. Distro hopping can be lots of fun, but you’ll find one that “feels like home.”

:)

I agree with most folks here that usability-wise, both are truly fine! Mainly I think philosophy is where Mint might have an edge here.

Ubuntu, run by a corpo named Canonical, has had some controversial decisions in the past, such as inserting amazon ads into the system’s search feature, or “opt out” analytics being default, and lately, a system called “snap.”

Snap is controversial because it has a closed source backend, but effectively works just like its open-source counterpart, the “flatpak.” It’s packaged so the software has everything it needs to run.

Some people say they work great, others hate them, but Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy for you to have a choice in the matter.

If you don’t like the idea of snaps, it’s a bit of a pain to get rid of it. And otherwise, Ubuntu will sneakily use it as the default way to install most software. Philosophically, this can feel a lot like why people left Windows behind!

Long term, that’s why I favor and recommend Mint to most newcomers: It doesn’t play those games, sometimes the drivers work even better, the community is fantastic, and the vast knowledge that works on Ubuntu should work on Mint too.

So that’s mainly where the difference will lie.

Either way, I wouldn’t sweat it too much while you’re learning, as long as it does what you want! And purple-orange is pretty snazzy. ;)

Mint just feels a little “cleaner” in my humble opinion. Most software you’d want the latest of, like GIMP or Discord, will be found as a Flatpak in Mint’s app store.

Hope this helps you get a clearer view!

Let’s be honest, corporate was just mad they didn’t think of it sooner! :p

Yeah you make a really good point there! I was perhaps thinking too simplistically and scaling from my personal experience with playing around on my home machine.

Although realistically, it seems the situation is pretty bad because freaky-giant-mega-computers are both training models AND answering countless silly queries per second. So at scale it sucks all around.

Minus the terrible fad-device-cycle manufacturing aspect, if they’re really sticking to their guns on pushing this LLM madness, do you think this wave of onboard “Ai chips” will make any impact on lessening natural resource usage at scale?

(Also offtopic but I wonder how much a sweet juicy exploit target these “ai modules” will turn out to be.)

Dammit, Manjaro. Why you gotta be WEIRD?! I used to love their branding, but they keep doing crazy things that would clearly alienate the userbase that’s left…

NGL on pretty much any install, I’d end up looking up pros and cons of every filesystem AGAIN…

… It’s BTRFS now. Simple. Easy. Lol

But it was a lotta research to reach that conclusion. So yeah I get that newbie apprehension!

To be fair: “For each answer it gives”, nah. You can run a model on your home computer even. It might not be so bad if we just had an established model and asked it questions.

The “forest destroying” is really in training those models.

Of course at this point I guess it’s just semantics, because as long as it gets used, those companies are gonna be non-stop training those stupid models until they’ve created a barren wasteland and there’s nothing left…

So yeah, overall pretty destructive and it sucks…

Yeah I honestly legit enjoyed my fond time with old Windows machines back when they were fun and user-oriented instead of the user-exploitative SAAS monsters they are now.

Win10 wasn’t even SO bad as everyone says…well, until recently when they started forcing Microsoft Accounts on install and harass you with their ads every 3 forced updates. Ugh.

Now they’re on the Ai bandwagon? Yeah they’re real small in my rearview mirror now.

I think it’s just a different landscape now, and I’m glad Linux was there to jump to after all these companies started losing their collective minds.

“Linux is open source and free! You can do whatever you want with it! It’s our thing!”

Microsoft: “Whatever I want with it?..Free?..Hm…This is my thing .”

XP was totally a wild time, to Dad’s credit though! hahaha

It was that funky era of needing like 4 different anti malware programs, and downloading game patches from various hopefully-trusty file hosts, or nabbing the suspiciously convenient “Linkin-Park-Meteora-FULL_ALBUM.exe” off of Kazaa which would promptly rootkit your whole system.

Routinely running Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG, and CCleaner to combat constantly-reinstalling spyware.

Heck, I consider myself kinda smart but I still had Bonzi Buddy for a while! …I mean, c’mon, funnee purpl monke. Who could resist?

Like wow, now that I think back on it, you really needed a bit of “street smarts” back then. Nowadays security has gotten a lot better and one can get away with just “Not downloading weird Russian Web3 games off the dark web” and they’ll usually be relatively fine. Lol.

TL;DR: Windows XP was compatible with Bonzi Buddy, Mandriva was definitely a more secure choice, seeing as it couldn’t run Bonzi Buddy unless you were determined with WINE maybe?

… It’s cool you got introduced to Linux so early. Cool dad. :)

That’s defo Broadcom’s fault. Unfortunately when Linux is a second class citizen, hardware vendors will make crappy Windows and maybe Mac drivers, but a lot of Linux support seems like it needs to be reverse engineered or something, if the company itself refuses to play ball. :(

This was the case with NVIDIA for a long while. Still kinda is. Hopefully that’s improving though.

Fair disclosure, I personally run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, BUT…

Honestly for this situation I think Linux Mint might be your on-ramp. It’s very familiar from a user experience perspective from someone coming from Windows, and everything can be done with GUI apps.

It updates the entire system smoothly through an “app store” so it stays nice and secure. “Cinnamon” is also a highly attractive and smooth desktop environment.

I’ve switched a few people to it who were sick of Windows on older machines, but NOT computer people at all, and they’ve enjoyed it a lot! The nicest thing is it will feel like your computer again, not like you’re leasing it from Microsoft.

Don’t try and “completely switch over” in one go.

Look up how to try Linux in a virtual machine on your existing setup (so you don’t have to risk anything!) and just try it and play around with installing and using it.

An old laptop or something is also a great way to try it out.

You can always dual-boot if you want. I sure did for a while until Win10 started BSODing for no discernable reason, and refused to let me “refresh this PC” because “Sorry, can’t. Goodbye.”

I still have it, just in case, but it’s been most of the year since I’ve even bothered logging into it.

If you game: you’ll want Heroic Launcher for your GoG/EA stuff, and Steam of course, and maybe Bottles to run your old CD/DVD games maybe. :)

Sometimes things take a little tweaking, but Mint’s community is fantastic and helpful. You really will start to learn a lot about computers just by using Linux a little and trying things, while Windows makes every effort to hide things from you. (“wE’rE gEtTiNg ThInGs ReAdY” who’s “we”?!)

As you start to get comfortable with it, it will grow with you. You can start trying to get the hang of the terminal, or jump to another distro once you learn why you might prefer to.

But you really can’t go wrong just trying Mint out. It’s overall just a pleasant OS.

ProTip: You’ll be asked about a file system when you install any distro. I spent COUNTLESS HOURS on researching this question. BTRFS can be a bit of an advanced file system, but if you just “set it and forget it”, it has the ability to take incremental snapshots without taking a ton of space! So if something really goes south, you can use an app called “Timeshift” to just roll back.

This is great for your root drive / partition, but I wouldn’t suggest it for your home folder. :)

(Just like Windows rollback used to do, but…more reliable lol)

Lol sorry for the ramble but I hope this might help you feel a little less lost at the grocery store. ;)

So, any of those will work with almost any distro. I’d personally recommend Jellyfin because Plex is run by a private company and it has turned around and bit its users lately.

I think you might want to look up installation instructions for Jellyfin here to understand it a little better: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation

As for what distro? Lots of choices! One thing to remember is there’s so many ways to set things up and everyone has different preferences, so it’s really difficult to just say “Do A, B, and C.” But maybe I can help a bit without assuming anything about your experience level.

Jellyfin is just a “front-end” server app that runs on top of an OS, that you can access through a browser on your network. All it does is give you a very convenient way to serve up media files you give it access to, across your network! :)

My setup as an example: I personally run a server OS called “Proxmox”, wherein I made a virtual machine for OpenMediaVault (a custom Linux OS for making a file server), which helps me run a Docker container for Jellyfin.

(Docker containers are really cool but can be a bit advanced)

But if you think of each component as a building block that you understand and set up, you will get a better idea of what you can learn or leave out for your particular setup.

But let’s make it simpler! I didn’t know anything about this either when I first started. Say you have an old PC with some drives laying around. You could just as well install OpenMediaVault bare metal as the OS, and install Jellyfin within it maybe. That might be enough to get you watching your backed up DVDs on your home network!

Open Media Vault is a modified version of Debian Linux, if I recall correctly. It’s made specifically to get a solid file server up and running. It has a great community too.

https://www.openmediavault.org/

Here’s a really good site with some server tidbits I found useful as well https://perfectmediaserver.com/

I’d also suggest checking out “selfhosted” communities here on Lemmy or maybe that “/r/” site lol.

YouTube can also be handy here, for understanding how to get things going. Things like “ProxMox home server guide” or “Jellyfin server setup”, “OpenMediaVault jellyfin docker”, that kinda thing. You might find one video explains a topic better for you than another.

Sorry it’s super late after a long hike for me but I hope some of this helps you a little on your journey! It’s definitely something to take your time in, more than a “weekend and it’s finished forever” kind of project. :)

Surely you won’t regret 7 proxies.

Oh yeah, I’ll quickly shut that down when they wanna do that “kids these days with the technology” nonsense, usually as some excuse for why these older folks who’ve had 40+ years to figure out computers still can’t check their own email.

No, Timmy isn’t “so smart with technology” because he can consoom on a device designed for infinite low-friction consumption.

Or people who are so “weary” of danger.