What are corporate users using?
Windows on PCs, Linux is used mostly only on servers (RedHat/SuSe), hardware brands are usually HP, Dell and Lenovo.
I think that is my standard
Why? Do you expect companies to ask you to use your own PC for work instead of providing the tools you need? Be wary of those who do, using whatever personal PC for company work can lead to data breaches and that’s a very serious problem.
she didn’t really want to switch to Win 11
On which computer? Her own?
Does not the company provide a PC with the tools needed? If yes, she has no right to decide what goes on it, the company does and she should respect that, doing what you want on a company PC can get you in serious trouble, way more serious than finding out you’re using a pirated version of Office.
If the company expects her to use her own PC, they should at least provide the needed software licenses, Office365 can be used on the web, no need to install anything and it can be used on Linux no problem.
BUT the serious problem remains of having company data on her own PC, the best thing to do in such a case would be creating a VM, encrypting the file system and keeping all company data contained inside the VM.
Tho in such a case I would change company, no serious company today would expect employees to keep company data freely on whatever personal PC, that could lead to data breaches, I would never want to be involved in case like that, tho I live in EU, we have very strict laws about data integrity and privacy, dunno about other countries.
I didn’t add which GPU I have but I saw you asking in other posts so: currently NVIDIA 4070 with proprietary drivers.
I’ve been using NVIDIA on my Linux desktop for over a decade, it always worked very well tho you have to install proprietary drivers (opensource ones are not good enough if you use software that requires performance), Linux MX has a script (menu item) to install them, very easy.
In all this time, only a couple of times I had serious problems with a kernel update (something that can happen with any distro), but Linux MX always keeps boot entries for the last 3 kernels so when it happened I just booted with a previous one and waited a few days for devs to fix it (no tinkering on my part required).
NVIDIA cards have problems on laptops, those I only buy Intel, but a dedicated card on desktop is good.
Yeah Lutris has fantastic scripts that do everything for you, also the Steam store is really good even if you don’t buy from them, checking that a game is verified for Steam Deck is a guarantee it will work on any other Linux PC.
Debain (alt Linux Mint DE) Pro: The most stable OS I’ve used, with a wide range of software support both officially in the distros package manager, or from developers own website. I am most familiar with this OS and APT Cons: Ancient packages which may cause issues with Davinci Resolve and Video Games
I don’t use Davinci Resolve but I do play videogames, I build my own desktop for it and I use Linux MX (Debian), it’s rock solid.
“Ancient packages” are not a problem with backports, there are also flatpacks if some backports are not enough for you, or DEB packages directly from software developers (I manually install a couple of those).
The only games you will have problems with are those implementing invasive DRM, but that’s not a “Debian” problem, Linux in general doesn’t support that kind of DRM (not yet at least), tho I personally don’t mind since I think DRM is stupid and I’ve always tried to avoid it.
I use Linux MX on my gaming desktop and LMDE on my laptop. I also have an encrypted LMDE VM that I use for some working stuff, since I have to use Windows on my company PC (but we’re allowed to have Virtualbox on it).
The desktop is pretty new, I built it a month ago after almost 10 years, it’s i9 and rtx 4070. The laptop is several years old (HP spectre), but since the previous one gave me so many headaches with nvidia optimus, I decided to go full Intel, I’m happy I did because I had no problems with it whatsoever, Intel only on laptops for me going on.
Amazing job as always!
I never liked GNOME, too inflexible as you said. My favorite is XFCE and it couldn’t be easier, right click on the entry on the app menu and select add to desktop.
And if you want a custom one, right-click on desktop, create launcher, give it a name and click browse to select the file you want to run, that’s it. Create link if you want to link to a folder.
I think you would get more suitable recommendations if you told us what your use cases are. Did someone else give you those requirements? Are you new to Linux?
Arch, Slackware current (KDE), Suse tumbleweed, Debian sid and Fedora tick all the boxes but I wouldn’t recommend Arch nor Slackware to someone who never used Linux before, nor I would recommend Debian sid for desktop usage (unless you know what you’re doing) because its packages are not controlled by their security team.
Free and open-source. Receives regular software and kernel updates.
All of them (desktop). The difference in updates is between a rolling release or non-rolling one.
Rolling means they receive updates to software and kernels continuously as soon as they are released, you always have the latest versions but that could lead to instabilities, non-rolling (or stable) are updated less frequently so are more stable, which one to choose depends on what you need to do with it.
Avoids X11.
Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Slackware current, Debian, Arch, if you choose GNOME or KDE you’ll have Wayland as default AFAIK, probably others.
Supports full-disk encryption during installation. Doesn’t freeze regular releases for more than 1 year.
All of the above.
We recommend against “Long Term Support” or “stable” distro releases for desktop usage.
LTS is a version, not a distro. Distros that offer LTS versions also have a non-LTS ones, get those and you’re fine. Tho not wanting a stable is weird, they can be the best for desktop usage depending on what you need to do.
Supports a wide variety of hardware.
That depends on the kernel, all kernels support a wide variety of hardware, non-LTS versions are best for more modern hardware.
Preference towards larger projects.
All distros mentioned are large projects, Debian is probably the biggest, it also supports several different architectures.
Do I basically just start off installing one distro on the full hard drive and then when I go to install the others, just choose the “run alongside” option? or would I have to manually partition things out?
If you install one distro on full hard drive you won’t have room anymore for the rest, if you want multiple operating systems on your machine you need to partition manually with some planning ahead on how to allocate the space.
Any thing to worry about with conflicts between different types of distros
They don’t interfere with each other, they don’t even “see” each other once you booted into one, they only share the boot manager.
That being said, what you intend to do was the only way to learn many years ago when computers weren’t as powerful as they are today (I did learn that way), but today ANY PC can manage virtual machines, they are much more practical and can save you a lot of time when you mess things up, because whatever you do is confined within the VM and doesn’t affect your PC as a whole.
Install Virtualbox, have a look at how it works and use that to do all experiments you want, you can even learn to multiboot inside a single VM, without the risk of messing up your system.
LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)