Hi, for my entire life essentially I have used windows (I’m not that old tho). Although, for a few months last year, I used Manjaro cause my school gave me a 7-year-old computer and Windows was too heavy. I honestly liked Manjaro a lot, but I don’t if it’s the best for me.
Things I just can’t stand about Windows:
– Doesn’t work half the time — as a programmer, I have to constantly mess with stuff, and windows decides to be an asshole about it. I would venture to say that I have spend over 30% of the time on my computer fixing it.
– Viruses — I like downloading free stuff and viruses are just a fact of life for this.
– Slow — I will have discord, a dozen chrome tabs, and spotify open and it will lag when I switch desktops.
– Driver Issues — I have had to deal with more display, network, power, and mouse drivers than I can even recount.
– Awful with second monitors — constantly worrying whether it would recognize my monitor every time I plug my laptop into its dock.
Things I’m also looking for:
– Python, Java, Javascript, and Cuda support
– Support for running .exe files
– Simple setup
– Speed and good memory management
– It just works
– Second monitor support
Some additional comments:
Over the past 2 years or so I’ve become mildly familiar with Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Raspbian so I’m not an absolute noob. I’m an avid Chrome user and I will constantly have at least 25 tabs open across 3 different windows, so I would like to be able to do this without really worrying about lag or OOM stuff (ik chrome uses bricks of ram, that’s why I’m mentioning this). In addition to all this, my daily driver is the HP envy x360 15m-dr0012dx (i7-8565U), and recently my battery life has been absolute garbage, like 1.5 hours with medium usage, as opposed to the 8 hour battery life it started with (~1 year ago). I’m fairly sure the batter is physically in good shape (95% health), at least thats what the windows battery health tool told me. Anyways, I think this is a result of lots of background tasks + potentially a virus. One more thing to note, I want a very user-friendly experience, as in I can access nearly everything from well-designed GUIs. One thing I think windows did really well is the start menu (its slow tho) and its search, they are just so convenient and I would like a Linux distro that has that or something similar (one of the reasons I originally choose Manjaro). As an added note, I would like the ability to play around with it and make it look fancy like the people at r/unixporn but not as hardcore.
Thank you!
TLDR: I’m looking for a solid Linux distro to use instead of Windows
EDIT: One big thing is I would still like to dual boot it with windows