 So Tom Lawrence here today with Jay from LearnLinuxTV. Hi guys. We want to talk about getting started with Linux, but we're going to make first a couple of assumptions that you're starting with Ubuntu based distribution, which what do you have loaded on this laptop here? It started with Ubuntu Mate, spelled M-A-T-E in the Linux world. We always like to pronounce things strange. Well actually it's not strange if you know the origins of it, not going to get into that, but basically Ubuntu Mate is a distribution for lower-end computers, on higher-end computers too. So the reason I've done that is because we want to show several desktop environments. Mate is one, and by desktop environment we're talking about the suite of applications that give you a usable state graphically that you can interact with your computer. And with Linux you get multiple different desktop environments you can choose from. So in getting started with Linux, we, like I said, the assumption is going to be based on an Ubuntu distribution, which is Debian-based, that's an environment that both of us are very familiar with, and it's a well-supported environment. I know someone's out there going, but Arch and other distros, yes, we're aware of them. We know they exist. We're trying to, this is for more of a beginner, more of the base user experience. So if you're coming from the Windows world, it's a bit of confusion, because Windows is a mono system, like it's, you can change the wallpaper, you can change a few things without getting too hacky with Windows, but when you say I want to switch to Linux, you'll be presented with debates about which desktop environment you should use and which distribution you should use. So quick, yeah. I don't like the debate, because I feel like it's like, what color t-shirt should I wear today? Why is that a debate? You use whatever you like, whatever resonates with you, and it doesn't matter what other people think about it. You might like Nome, which is one of them. You might like Plasma, whatever. There's going to be one that appeals to you, and why I think that matters is because before Linux, if Linux didn't exist, what is the option? There is no option. It's either you use Windows and you get the Windows interface, and if you really, really don't like it, then you go to Mac, and maybe you'll like that one. If you're reversed and you're on a Mac and you decide you don't like it, then you can move to Windows, but you don't get to interchangeably remove the pieces to find the combination of software that you like, and that's what Linux gives you that I think is a major benefit. Right. I think there's been some articles recently about it's one of the reasons that people are hesitant to jump into the Linux world because those choices can seem overwhelming at times, and you're feared that you'll spend a lot of time on what might be the wrong choice, but the reality is there's not really a wrong choice. So I had Jay set up here, though, for a demonstration, was we loaded Ubuntu Mate, and then we loaded the other desktop environments, because when you talk about a distribution, and we're going to stick with the Ubuntu-based distributions, you talk about the out-of-box experience that you have with that distribution. So when I talk about PapOS, which is an Ubuntu distribution which runs GNOME, and then PapOS puts their customizations, what each of these distributions do is create an out-of-box experience, so to speak, from the time you load it, but any one of these, for the most part, any one of these distributions can be very much customized. So what he did was he loaded, well, we got Mate, we got the KDE desktop environment, and we have GNOME on here. We have GNOME. This is going to be one version, one major version behind at least, but these desktop environments haven't changed very much, so you most likely won't notice the difference. There isn't much difference on one version to the next other than small modifications. So what you see is, regardless of version, probably what you'll end up with. Right, and by the way, if there's enough likes and comments over on Jay's channel, he will show you how to take a distribution and load multiple desktop environments. That way, if you're indecisive, instead of swapping out and reloading a new distro, you can just log out, log back in, as shown here, and you can choose whichever desktop environment suits you that day. So if you're super indecisive but don't want a distro hop, Jay will make a video on how to do that. It's coming, subscribe to his channel, and it'll get there. It'll be within probably a few weeks or so. I'll have that done. We've got a few more videos we have to do first. So let's take a look at the first desktop here. Okay. So here what I have is GNOME, and what I've done is I kind of set up a custom GNOME. Why did I do that? I wanted you guys to see what GNOME looks like without a custom theme. Distributions, regardless of whether they're Ubuntu based or not, they will ship the desktop environment, but they will apply a theme or a skin on top. It'll change the background, the color scheme. So I wanted to show you guys what GNOME looks like with no theme, the way that the GNOME developers set it up. If you're using Ubuntu, you'll have a panel here on the left-hand side, which is not something that GNOME actually comes with. It's just a customization that Ubuntu makes. It's a good customization. A lot of people will appreciate having that, but I wanted you to see what a vanilla, unchanged GNOME experience looks like. So what we have here is GNOME. I forget which version it is. More on that in a minute, but what sets GNOME apart from most, if not actually all desktop environments, is that it's the way you interact with it is very strange, but very useful. Now I say strange because when I open up a window, I'll just open up files right here. You can see that there's a couple of things missing, namely minimize and maximize. Where is that? There's a close button here, but it just closes it. If you want to get it out of the way, how do you do that? So using GNOME to some people can be like kind of jarring. Well, they have to relearn standard paradigms here. And while that can be a little bit, you know, overwhelming at first, when you understand how GNOME works, I think it's actually a very good desktop environment. It is my preferred desktop environment. And I'll add to the comment. This is when people start arguing with me going, but all as Papa West did was put a little bit of polish on GNOME. I'm like, that little bit of polish makes a big difference. I know it's GNOME. And this is also why Ubuntu has their own spin like GNOME, Ubuntu and things like that. Because once again, even Ubuntu has customized it, but those little customization, especially if you're new to Linux are huge because the first question, like you said, where's my maximize and minimize? And just the general functional buttons that I'm used to in other environments in Windows and Mac. Now, one of the things that was very confusing to me when I first saw this was you can still minimize it. So if you right click the title bar, there's minimize. Where did it go? There's no panel. There's no doc. There's no doc. But if you hit the super key, also known as the Windows logo key, then you will see all the applications you have minimized. Now this gets right into the main thing about GNOME is that it's workspace centric. And every desktop environment has workspaces in some form or fashion. And the concept of a workspace is you have separate desktops. So here on the right-hand side, if I use my mouse and I scroll over to the right, you can see that I have two workspaces here. Now the thing is with GNOME is that anytime you are on a workspace, the last one, so to speak, and then you add a new application, you'll notice you have a third one added. And if I'm switching to this one and I launched an application, so I launched GNOME software, now you can see I have four. So if I was to go ahead and close one of these, so let's just go ahead and close this, then you notice it's going to go away. And that's called dynamic workspaces, which is very specific to GNOME. No other desktop environment has this. Other desktop environments, you have a static number of workspaces, whereas GNOME adds them as you need them. But that aids in multitasking because you can have, in my case, is how I use it, a separate project on each workspace. So if I'm working with a client, I have all their stuff on one, and I'm working with another client, I have all their stuff, and maybe I have a workspace for my email, my messenger talking with clients or whatever. I have a workspace for each designated thing that I'm doing, and it helps me be more productive on my machine. And I use it a lot because my life is a series of disruptions of what I'm working on, and you know, someone needs something all of a sudden. I'm working on editing a video, and I have everything laid out the way I want. I can just open up on our workspace and jump on a project real quick and have it without disrupting or minimizing or having too many cluttered windows on there. So it's another thing that maybe when you're coming from the windows world, you're not used to that. There's been add-ons for windows over the years to add similar things like dynamic workspaces, but it's something we've enjoyed for a long time. And once you get used to the concept, it's actually really easy to manage to have everything over there, kind of a good way to declutter. It's one of the reasons I really like GNOME. Yeah. And so I guess what that comes back to is you just have to learn how it works. So in this case, minimize should just say hide. Yeah. Because essentially it's not actually minimizing what it is, but it's hiding it because if you hit the super key, then you know, it shows up. And you can have more than one app on one workspace. You don't have to be limited to just one, but you have whatever is related to the current task at hand, all on that one workspace. And what I do instead of minimizing anything ever, you know, normally the concept of can minimize the thing I'm working on so I can do the next thing, is pop up another workspace. So instead of hiding all the icons or minimizing them, I just moved to another workspace. So even though I have PopOS, which has some of the minimizing features, I never use them at all. Yeah. And the thing is here that GNOME is just a learning experience. It's some people will, you'll hear in the comments or see in the comments all over the place. People will just, you know, they will just hate GNOME. Like some people will just love it and praise it. Other people will just hate it. And I think the hate comes from it's just a learning experience. But once you get past that, I feel like you'll find that it makes sense and it's actually very useful. It might not be for you. That's why you can replace it with another one. But you'll probably, you know, understand it. But this comes back to if you pick a distro like PopOS, it's more complete to a user who is brand new, so you don't have to do any customizations. And even myself, I know how to customize a stock generic GNOME. I like the fact that out of the box, I love PopOS and it's already there. Hence the reason I do my reviews and I've set up still, you know, using PopOS. And one of the things you'll find, at least in my opinion, I think most people will probably agree with this, that it's not the most beautiful looking desktop. If you think about the icon theme, the color gradients, the window border, I don't think anybody will make the argument, even GNOME lovers like myself, that it's got a very beautiful theme. So what you'll find often across different distributions, especially with Ubuntu, is they will apply a very specific theme to it to give it that user interface experience that it would otherwise be missing. In fact, recent GNOME released a new theme. It really doesn't look much different than the old one. It looks better, yes, but still not going to compare to macOS or even Windows unfortunately. It just looks very, very plain. So pretty much every distro, other than Fedora, will apply a custom theme to it. Yeah, and even custom icon packs, custom those little fonts and things like that, that are really, you know, to tighten it up to make it match the environment that the whoever put the distro together wants you to see. And what you're seeing here is GNOME software on the screen right now, which is a GNOME specific application for managing your installed packages. I'm not going to get into detail on that because I have reviews on my channel where I go over that part. And pretty much every review, at least most of them, I talk about how do you install apps, but you can see basically from a high level, you know, if you want to install something, just click on it, click the install button, ask for your password, pretty easy. But when you install an app, okay, how do you get to it? That's probably the most important thing and probably something I should have gone over first, right? How do I get to my apps? When I hit the super key, I have these three right here, but I also have show applications down here at the bottom. And when you click on that, you have a listing of all applications, which is on right now. You can use your mouse wheel, scroll through them. So this is my personal laptop. I have a bunch of games and stuff on here. But you also have frequent as well. So you see the apps that you've used most frequently. And this is how you actually get to the individual application. So if I wanted to run something like, you know, Dolphin, this is a KDE file manager. And here I am running it in GNOME. I can do that because it's installed in applications, installed on one desktop environment will show up in another. Yeah. And that's probably the other reason we're doing this video is we're going to show you that we have, you can install different applications. You're running GNOME. You can install KDE live as a KDE native application. I use it in GNOME. And when you switch desktop environments, the applications are going to be the same. And make a mental note, guys, looking at the screen, what Dolphin looks like right now, right? Yeah. You see it's got brown icons or brownish icons. It's got the GNOME theme, right? But this is a plasma application. So what I'm going to do right now is actually log out of here. And we'll switch to the next environment. In which I'm going to make plasma so you can see the difference. And now we're over in KDE. And notice that this same application is up on my screen, which I think it remembers the applications that were most recently, or it was open when I logged out, which was Dolphin. The same file manager you just saw in GNOME just a few seconds ago. Here it is in KDE. Now you can see the theme in... Now, actually what I should say first, plasma slash KDE. I say KDE, I'll say plasma. I'm talking to the same thing. Tom and I have been using Linux for a ginormous number of years. And we know it as KDE. You installed GNOME or KDE. They want you to call it plasma now. So that's actually what it's called. And that's what you're seeing on the screen right now is the plasma desktop. But out of habit, we cannot break the habit of calling it KDE. So if I say KDE or if I say plasma, I'm talking about the same thing. So Dolphin is the file manager. And again, you just saw that in GNOME. And now you're seeing it here in KDE. It's applying the KDE theme to it, which in my opinion, the look and feel of KDE. This is default. This is not a distribution custom theme here. This is just what plasma slash KDE looks like. Stock looks like before any of the disc shows. Because there is a KBUN2 and there's KDE NEON. And I've given reviews of KDE NEON because I like it. And I still might switch back to it at some point. I don't know. I go back and forth. You know, even though I'm a long time Linux, you should occasionally want different things. I have an upcoming project that I'll be doing a video on with X2Go. And I want to probably use KDE on the back end for a virtual server because KDE works really well with X2Go. And it natively supports KDE live without any updates based on that distribution. Because it's all part of the KDE foundation repositories without anything extra. So I think in my opinion, the theme looks a lot better here than it does in GNOME by default. I mean, again, the distro hasn't even gotten to this yet. They haven't applied any custom anything to it. They present a better theme overall. And one of the things about plasma is that it is probably the most customizable desktop environment in existence. Yes. The amount of customization might even overwhelm you. You might want less choice than this. And some people want choice, but they don't want this much choice. I mean, if you go to the panel here, for example, I could add widgets to it. And I can, well, I just added another panel here to the top. But basically you can add another panel. You can add widgets to the panel and look at all these things. I mean, you can add any number of things here to the panel or the desktop. So folder view. I'm going to drag over here to the desktop. Now what's cool about this is that you can attach it to any folder. And as your base folder, right now it's at the desktop. But what I could do is I could go here and I want to show my home directory. So I'll apply that. And now it's showing what's in my home directory. But if that wasn't enough, you can actually hover over each individual item and you can browse through your actual files from your desktop. And that's just something you can add to your desktop. But what happens if I add it to the panel? Okay, I added this same thing to the panel, same widget. I added it down here. The behavior changes. It does the same thing. But I'm able to browse and do the same thing from the panel at the bottom, but it's still the same widget. And there's just a large number of applications here. I don't know if it's still here, but at one point they had a comic strip reader. So you can have comic strips on your desktop and terminal commands. There's a device notifier so I could, well, I don't know why. I would add that to my desktop. But if I had USB devices, I could have them listed here. It's pretty outstanding. And you can get lost and make a game. I actually watched a person at a really cool desktop. They had posted and read it and they had a video they made just on all the step-by-step customizations of said desktop. And so that's one of the things that is really attractive about KDE or Plasma is the level of customization you can get lost in it. And if you're coming from a Windows environment, you may have noticed a couple common themes here. We have, essentially, we're going to call it a start button in the bottom of the corner. We have applications that go ahead and minimize some of them because, like, open up the file manager again. They do show up down at the bottom in a tray, like a sys tray that you're used to. Right here. And you've got your minimize icon, maximize, like we were missing in GNOME. This is what's known as a traditional desktop environment. I hate calling it that because this whole concept of a modern interface and a traditional interface was a complete failure. You had Windows 8. Here's a modern interface. We're doing away with desktop icons or all these other things for the start menu. And GNOME pretty much did the same thing. Didn't really catch on. People complained. Now all these older concepts came back. Windows reverted back to the start menu. And even Mac OS 10, or I should say Mac OS now, they changed the name too. Mac OS now introduced a new feature for desktop icon. So that's not going away. So they call it a traditional desktop environment. But basically that just means you have a panel. You have a minimize, maximize. You have all the standard components that we've had since practically Windows 95. Yeah. And the other thing too, you can download. They have custom theming options. So if you don't want to do it, there's, I know, a theme. Is there still a theme store in it? Is that by default? Yeah. There is system settings and appearance. If I remember correctly, I think it's here. Get new looks. Yep. Get new looks. And then it takes a little over. Then you can just literally download and put themes and apply them. Quality may vary. Thank you for having some type of rating system in here. Yep. Two and a half stars. I just clicked install. Oh boy. This will be interesting. But actually it might just be because there's no ratings on it yet. I don't know what else to that. I'm not sure. Because very little has more than that. It might be. Maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe there's a reason for it. I don't know. It's installing. So we'll see if it works. Yeah. But obviously right out of the box here, you can start customizing it and have, you know, apply someone else's theme. And then you can then take and customize that theme some more. Then you can save that as your own theme, et cetera, et cetera. Like I said, it offers a lot of options on that. And I also like, There we go. Yeah. You can download. There's no cuts here. You can see we just change it to a completely dark theme. Yep. Completely different themes. So Plasma is great for, I would say, people that like a more Windows-like interface, but also want more customization because they'll get a lot more customization out of that. Yeah. You may be intimidated, but out of the box works pretty good. And the KDE Neon Spin, once again, it's a Linux, it's WM based, Ubuntu based, so it's not the base of it, which someone's going to argue that it's not actually a distribution because they don't call it that. It's a CD you can download and install, so for sake of semantics here, you can download and install. And it's a great choice. And once again, like I said, the reason I bring up Ubuntu slash WM base is because it's an easy environment to get support for. App to get installed, and away you go. Steam is supported on it. Steam is supported on it. That's a good one. That's a big one. That's a real big one, because a lot of people want to play games, and you might find you love this other distribution, and you think it's the greatest thing you've ever tried, but Steam doesn't work. Oops. I got to install Ubuntu. And usually what happens to me is I end up back on the Ubuntu base because some piece of software I want to run only works there, only because it's nothing against the other distribution. It's just the developer of said application only tests it on the most popular distribution. So that kind of happens. Right. So if you wanted to run this on Arch, you'll find that you may have to dig a little bit further. You may have to spend a little bit more time in the forums. They have great documentation for Arch, but it's not going to be as easy as if you do. Even though it's KDE, if you typed in like Ubuntu 1804, and then how to do something, you'll find an instruction set that should match the install. Oh yeah. And you'll definitely be able to get it running. So Arch is one of my favorite distributions, and I'm not saying you'll never get certain things to run. It's just some things are easier to do. Yeah. We're out of the box. And we're talking about getting started. So yep. Well, those are really tight. One thing I'll comment on, this theme, this maybe why it doesn't start, those are really small. Yeah, those are kind of really tiny. These window control icons here. So next we're going to check out Mate. So I'll log out of here. All right. So here we are on the Mate desktop. And this is specifically Ubuntu Mate, which is the version of Ubuntu that ships with this interface. So that's what you're seeing. Since this is the first one we installed, we actually are getting the distribution specific tweaks here. But the overall idea is the same regardless. So basically this is another traditional interface. You have your application menu at the top left here. And then you have your running applications here at the bottom. We have our workspaces. So if you remember that from GNOME, we have a static number of interfaces down here at the bottom. You can add additional ones. But basically what you're seeing is the default desktop as presented in Ubuntu Mate. And Mate has probably, I would consider it like a flatter look. It doesn't have some of the 3D stuff that you get with GNOME. You know, and it's something, I like the kind of cool UI tweaks that Papa West has because it brings out the icons in that little 3D manner. I mean those little tweaks are pretty cool. And Ubuntu does that too. I know I'm talking more probably on Ubuntu customization. It's been customized over. So the Ubuntu GNOME does that. But Mate is a little bit lighter weight of a desktop. So if you don't want something, you know, sucking up CPU cycles to 3D your icons because that's not super relevant, Mate's good. And Mate's got a familiar, if you're coming from the Windows world, although when we stuck the time at the top, we had an application launcher at the bottom. We have a, is it launchable? I'm sorry, launch just from the top, but docks at the bottom, right? Yeah, by default. So I'll get into it in a minute. It's actually very customizable. You can rearrange this. It's almost as customizable as Plasma. Very close. And what you're seeing is just the welcome screen that comes up, which is very specific to Ubuntu Mate. It's not something you're going to see in any other distro here. But we are talking about Ubuntu-based distros. So if you're running this, that's what you would actually see here. But the welcome screen, if you go to the software section here, allows you to get up and running with some very popular applications like really quickly. So if you go to games, for example, and you just look at the games that are here, a lot of these are the free open source games you can get pretty much anywhere. But look here, you have Minecraft. And I play Minecraft. And if you've played Minecraft in Linux, you know it's not hard to install, but there's a process. You have to get Java working. You have to do this. You have to do that. So with this, you actually have a one click install. You just click the button. It'll probably ask for my password, most likely. And I'll just go ahead and do it. Why not? And it'll basically just install that, which I think is great for people that just want to get up and running with popular applications. And that's not even all. I mean, there's going to be like, I believe Slack is in here. Google Chrome is in here. A lot of applications that a lot of people would want to install. But that's specific to Ubuntu Mate. Getting back to the actual Mate desktop itself, as Tom was saying, is very traditional. So you have your applications down here. Whoops, that's not your password. So running applications are down here at the bottom. And then you have your application menu up here at the top. And you have all this empty space. So why do you have so much empty space? So what you can do is you can add to the panel, kind of similar to KDE Plasma, any of these different types of applets here, whatever you want to call it. And I'll add a weather report. And this is one of the ones I actually do add to pretty much every implementation of Mate. I can just put in my location here. So if you want to see how depressing the weather is in Detroit, for example, you want a constant reminder of that. You can put that there in your panel. That's why we're here making videos and not out there where it's raining. Yeah, raining or cold or some kind of thing. But there's other things you can do here. It's up to 48. It's warmer than expected. Warmer than I thought it would be around this time. But you can customize it. But one thing that I think is cool about the Ubuntu Mate flavor, is there's a Mate tweak. Actually, this is not specific to Ubuntu Mate, but these layouts that they start you off with kind of is. So Mate tweak, you can get with any Mate. And that just allows you to change things like, okay, what icon do I want on the desktop? So I just added the computer icon, add a network icon or add nothing. Basically, you can customize that. You can customize your windows settings here. But what I like here is you can customize your interface. So let's go ahead and set it to Redmond. See what happens. Ooh, Redmond. Yep. What's in Redmond? So if you really want a traditional environment, and this is kind of showing one of the problems I have with this, is sometimes it doesn't work on the first try. I'm not really sure why. So if you ever have that problem, you just kind of set it to something else. And it'll work. And then you just go back and try again. Just a little bug, but it will work. See how it worked the second try. I will mention real quick, there's a tweak tool for every desktop. Yes. There's a tweak tool for the Plasma desktop. There's a tweak tool called Nome Tweaks for the Nome desktop. And then this is for the Monte one. So anything that's not, so to speak, unlocked, you can just load the tweak tool for that particular desktop environment and go further with it. And I think this is pretty well thought out, the Redmond theme, because you have your application menu now at the bottom left. But the same panel is where your running applications are. And they even remember the quick launch from older Windows. I had the icons here between the start menu and the running applications. They thought of that and they put those here. Even the show desktop, where it used to be in Windows Vista and earlier, is right there. And I would even say that if you are coming from Windows 7 and are trying to skip the Windows 10 world, this might be a good one because you don't have to change. You're going to be running Linux, which is obviously a big change in your life coming. If you change this to your primary operating system. But it has at least a familiar layout for you. So you can start at least from that basis to make the transition easier. And for muscle memory is to go to the bottom left for everything. It's still there. And system tray icons on the right-hand side. That's battery icon, your volume and everything's there. But what if you're coming from Mac? So I'm going to use the Cupertino layout. And look at that. We have our applications back up here at the top left. We have a full screen application launcher now, just like we have with macOS nowadays. Then you also have your panel here at the bottom. With the cool fancy mouse over thing. With the mouse over thing. I do like that. That is really cool. I'll even sometimes load this. This is the Plank panel. And it's not specific to Mate at all. They just included it here because I thought it would be cool. You can install this on any desktop environment. It doesn't even matter. You can throw this on PopOS. Standard Ubuntu. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter what desktop environment you're using. You can install this little panel here and run it on pretty much anything. It's pretty slick. Does it have the little bouncy thing? Or is that a default customization? I know. When you launch something? Yeah, it does. It's like the icons. I know that's came from the Mac role, but it's a look school. The icons get excited. I know there was another customization I've seen where you can customize it so it kind of accordions out with all the apps. It even puts the window controls on the top left. Yeah. So if your muscle memory is to go in that direction, then you can do that. And here's the file manager. So I mean nothing amazing about it, but you can see if you need to browse your files or whatnot, you have the ability to do that from the file manager. And it includes pretty much everything you want. Now Firefox is installed. One thing I'll mention, pretty much every desktop environment, or I should say spin of Ubuntu or what have you, is going to default to Firefox for most things. Google Chrome is available in Linux as well, but this is just a good starting point. You have the browser here. Yeah, Mate is good for people that want, like you were mentioning low resource usage, but in addition to that, maybe you might want to custom tailor it to your preferred usage from your previous operating system. You could replicate that here. Yes, because even with the GNOME tweaks and unlocking things, the GNOME developers will only allow you to do what they see fit for you allowed to do. They are somewhat restrictive. For its prettiness, it's not the most customizable one. Versus the KD Plasma system is like, everything's on the table. I don't care what you want to do, you can tweak it and make it weird and however you want. The Mate is kind of the in-between for that. One last thing I'll show on this is the theme. You're seeing a very distribution-specific theme. The colors of the window border and the icons, that's not how Mate looks, that's just how they present it. If I go here to interface, actually a theme, let's just see what it looks like before they put their finishing touches on it. I'm going to go and find, here it is, the default theme for Mate. I'm going to apply it. You can see that they also don't have an amazing or beautiful looking theme by default. Mate, they give you this theme, which looks pretty good, I think, especially my favorite color is green, so I'm a little biased here. There's no shortage of that here, but you can see this is the theme they give you. Then I switch back to the Menta theme, which is their default. You can see they don't really spend a lot of time customizing that. In fact, I don't really think they've really customized it ever or much. The entire life of this. I would try it years ago, and I think that looks exactly the same. Just to give you a difference of what it looks like between the way the developers present the user interface, and then when the distribution gets a hold of it, they put their finishing touches on it. Like I said, this is getting started with it. It's something you can do. You can load these different desktop environments on one system. They're all sharing the same home drive, so that means your bookmarks and Firefox are the same on all across all of them. This is an option to do it. If you're picking a distribution, like I said, it comes down to a little customization. Hopefully, we at least give you some ideas and expansion, but if you go, I just want to start basic, go with Ubuntu because it is well documented, well supported. You'll find a ton of Q&A answers for any problem you're trying to solve, like how do I do X, Y, Z, and then put your Ubuntu version number on there, and you'll probably find an exact answer how to do it. That's going to be more challenging with some of the other distributions, so it depends if you're up for that challenge or if you're a long-time Linux user, but even as long-time Linux users, me and Jay find ourselves gravitating towards some of the Ubuntu-based distributions because they're a little bit easier, but if you're getting started, I'm going to recommend the default Ubuntu, but if you want to look a little of these desktop environments, hopefully we've explained them well, and I know there's more of them out there, because someone's going to post about deep-in, they're going to post about Linux Mint and some of the other customizations out there. It goes beyond the talk on this. Maybe we'll do separate reviews of those operating systems, but Jay has a few other reviews of, you already have Arch and a few others on here. I have a new series of Arch coming out very, very soon that will walk you through the process of setting that up. It's not for beginners, but it could be for a beginner that wants to not be a beginner, like someone who aspires to know a lot or to grow, and Arch is a great way for a beginner to become more efficient and know more about the internals of things, so it depends on what your end goal is. I think one question that's probably going to come up in the comments, and I think I'm going to kind of predict this, is which one to go with on my 10-year-old computer. I'm going to say not standard Ubuntu, in my opinion. Yeah, and that's one of the things when it comes with older computers, I've even known being a lot of 3D and stuff like that, it's going to struggle a little more. The other problem is your overall experience. If you're going to start with Linux, grabbing an old computer is going to give you a horrible experience, because I've had people, oh, I loaded Linux in the computer. It boots faster than it did with Windows, but I can't use it. I'm like, yeah, because it won't even watch YouTube. Too many things, the browser itself needs too much processor power. So if you're going to start with Linux, you at least need a decent computer to run it on, or you will have a slow computer experience, and it's not the operating system. It's not even Windows fault at that point. If you have a computer that's eight or nine years old that wasn't a very high-end processor, it's not even going to watch YouTube. You're going to watch it get real laggy, scrolling through some websites, because there's just too many elements on the screen to render. These are issues you're going to have. Obviously, with games outside of playing some really basic games, the same problem is going to happen. Linux won't magically make your computer faster. If you have an old computer, it's an old computer. So your experience will vary. I take issue with the Linux community in general, saying, you know, Linux is a great choice for old computers. It can be. It's depending on your old computer, right? If you had a computer that was high-end back then, sure, probably, or maybe just have a decent machine, but I mean even canonical, the makers of Ubuntu when Windows XP was ending support, they were advertising, use Ubuntu, because it'll make that old computer new again. I'm like, no, don't say that. It won't happen. Right. I mean, think about Windows XP. How much RAM do we have back then? 256 megabytes and 512 megabytes? Yeah. A single browser tab could eat more than that. Exactly. So you just run into an experience that doesn't work very well. I don't want anyone to have a bad experience in Linux, and go, that's the reason they don't. It's still an old, slow computer. It's unfortunate if that's the way it is. They do have uses. There's other things and special projects you can use them for, but for your general daily use, I'm talking about people who want to surf the web, go on social media sites, or play some games on their old computers, not going to do it. But hopefully this gave you some ideas on where to get started in Linux. We'd love to see more people on there, and subscribe to LearnLinuxTV to see some of the reviews. And I scatter around and repace a few reviews here and here too of some Linux stuff. So I'll leave comments below in your thoughts, and I'll see you next time. See you later. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon, and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. 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