All of these can be run on any Linux distro. Dropbox is probably a better choice than Google Drive as Google drive doesn't have an official Linux app (but you can get it working beyond just using it in a Web browser if its a must).

I'd go.with Linux Mint as it's well supported but any point release distro will serve your needs well. For example Fedora KDD or OpenSuSE Leap, Debian etc. I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu.

+1 for fedora kde

I've tried dozens of distros this year. Kept arch for my personal use and fedora for shared. Fedora was the easiest to setup with everything working as they should out of the "box".

unless you use a touchscreen, don't install gnome

@ImminentOrbit@lemmy.world

Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about apt already. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.

And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.

On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.

If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don't want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.

Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I've used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.

It's relevant for a few reasons with regard to new users:

1) Snap is SLOW
2) Snap takes up a massive amount of space

Switching somebody with 256GB of storage to Ubuntu and pointing them to the Gonna software store to install whatever they want is just asking for confusion and problems.

What happened to all my disk space?

Why does it take 8 seconds for a browser to start?

These are new users who expect things to operate as they've known them to operate coming from Windows or MacOS. Ubuntu is just problematic to that point of view.

I've switched hundreds of desktop users in the past few years, and the above expectations and experience is what made me switch to Fedora.

Ubuntu is problematic at current.

You're not getting it...

A 125MB package like Firefox has up to 5 versions by default kept under the Snap system. Do this 10x across different packages, and suddenly you're missing a lot of storage you can't account for.

Second, SNAP IS JUST SLOW. People don't like when it takes 5-10 seconds to launch a very simple app. Let's not even get into the performance being absolutely horrendous when you need direct access to memory or GPU. It's not what people want.

Last, your problem with Nvidia drivers lies with Nvidia themselves. I run a cluster of a thousand instances which never hiccup on the Nvidia server+CUDA drivers.

Desktop is a shit show, and that's their fault. Don't blame your misunderstanding of these two things to be the fault of the distro.

Oh no 1gb of space is being used windows users totally care about that as they go from an OS that out of the box takes 100gb to one that takes 30gb. Thats pretending what you said is true because Snap doesnt store 5 versions by default it stores two. Secondly the common runtimes are shared between applications and versions so the amount of extra space when storing multiple versions is minor also distro packaging also stores multiple versions by default 3 if I recall correctly for dnf.

I think the fact that you think a win10 user cares more about an app taking a few seconds longer to open on first load than their GPU driver being unstable(from a new user perspective) is everything. Yes! the driver is nvidia's fault but its also fedora intentionally choosing to not ship it out of the box. Many other distro's do this so nvidia users dont have to go through the hassle of foss drivers and them breaking every kernel update.

Also I dont blame fedora for this, fedora doesnt target new users and as a fedora user I like that they aim to ship a fully foss system and I think they make it easy to include properitary packages if thats something you want. However its pointless to point someone to a distro where you have to then give them a bunch of extra steps to enable basic functionality when there are plenty of distros that work out of the box.

For a new user one of the ublue spins is a good choice. They get the base fedora experience with nvidia gpu's sorted out of the box and flatpak.

You apparently don't deal with actual end-users, so let me inform you...they absolutely fucking care.

You seem to keep skipping the part where SNAP IS 10X SLOWER.

Get lost with your lazy argument.

I decided to go with Linux mint. After installing it alongside windows, it won't boot into either. If I reboot from my USB stick, it says that maybe it's too far away from the start of the drive to be detected. But I believe there is some intel /hp stuff that includes some kind of boot that might also be interfering. Does anyone have a good way forward from here?

Link from boot repair: paste.ubuntu.com/p/GJcsXfRkrj/

Did you nuke the whole disk? Just 1 big Linux partition?

Try enabling/disabling Secure Boot.

That's not entirely true. Snap is a good reason to avoid Ubuntu as you're not given the choice whether day to day apps like Firefox are a native app or snap app. You can only have snap versions. The lack of choice in having a slower less efficient version of apps forced on users without official alternatives is a good enough reason for people to recommend avoiding Ubuntu.

That is regardless of all the commercial and proprietary concerns people have.

That does not apply to Ubuntu based system like Mint where users are given choices and still benefit from other aspects of the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Putting "company things" in quotes like you don't believe people when they say Ubuntu has let them down...

Ubuntu is fine for very beginners, but don't lie and say "it's fine", only to have any competent user discover
very quickly that snaps take precedence over deb, snaps will be reenabled on minor release upgrades, even if you disabled them, ubuntu's built-in NVIDIA install support has become abysmal, ubuntu has recently made the choice to fall out of step with its own supported DEs with regard to xorg support, etc.

Putting “company things” in quotes like you don’t believe people when they say Ubuntu has let them down…

That's not true. I believe them. I just don't care.