I'm indecisive. Tell me what distro to install on my newish T-series chinkpad.
I've dabbled with ubuntu, debian, mint, and suse, but didn't fall in love with any of them.Mint was pretty good for simplicity and usability; suse was decent because it was so usable upon startup.
I've got 12gb of ram and a mid-tier i5 so it need not be super light, but I wouldn't mind better battery life than on windows if possible.
I'm a cs undergrad and about to start some more involved programming, if that means anything. I have no idea if there are any distros that are recommended over another for coding.
wat do?
>>54367477
Gentoo is nice. So is Fedora and Lubuntu or Kubuntu
>>54367502
I was tempted by gentoo but wonder if it is worth the hassle of maintaining for a "business/school" laptop.
>>54367477
I'm running Debian on both my Thinkpad and desktop. "Unstable" on the former, "Testing" on the latter. I'm really happy with it, it's a beautiful distro. It's extremely reliable and built on a rock solid base (Stable). You have the option to enable the 'contrib' and 'non-free' sources for more software/driver options, or just leave it as it is for 100% pure free software on the main repositories.
>>54367939
>>54367477
And I just noticed you said you dabbled with debian but didn't like it. Nevermind my post then, I just went by your image.
>>54367634
You've got it backwards.
In my experience, Ubuntu is easy to set up and a bitch to maintain. And gentoo is hard to set up buy trivial to maintain.
But! If you promise you're only going to do very simple things on your computer then just go with fedora or whatever
>>54367477
manjaro
>>54368091
>>54367955
I really didn't spend enough time with it to know how I really felt about it because I was having problems with a driver for my network adapter, but that was with an older t61 I was playing with.
I might try it again on my main laptop.
>>54368099
>>54368127
You should, it's great. But then again I'm biased because I feel really at home with it.
I recommend you do a netinstall while plugged to an ethernet chord, just in case your wi-fi needs non-free drivers
If asked during install to get certain non-free drivers for your network adapter, you can either
>get them from the Debian repos in another computer by googling them, putting them on an USB, and sticking them in before continuing with install
>just continue with the install and get them from the Debian repos on the fresh machine.
Either way, it'll just werk.
>>54368202
>I recommend you do a netinstall while plugged to an ethernet chord, just in case your wi-fi needs non-free drivers
That seems like a good idea, I did not do that with the old thinkpad, which is probably where I fucked up.
Thanks!
>>54367477
I use fedora with rpmfusion repos, I think its pretty good.
