I used Rocky 8 with Cinnamon desktop coming from copr registries, that’s really nice desktop too. Also has the bottom left start menu equivalent if you like. I’m also not a Gnome fan, although Cinnamon is based on Gnome, it’s far far better looking as well as I feel cleaner to operate and use every day.
I’ve yet to try it on Rocky 9 though, but will do soon.
Apparently you don’t like Rocky, you don’t like Fedora, you don’t know anything about them but you believe you are allowed to spit on them here and there.
So do us a favour: Back off and let us alone.
I am personnaly on Fedora since FC4 - about 20 years and more recently Centos- and never had to complain or regret.
Thanks
I never said I didn’t like any of those distro’s. I have also used all of them. But you, like me are a Linux veteran. But in my opinion those distro’s just aren’t suited for Linux newbies. They are more for the pro’s. For the rest you need something that is as easy to use as possible.
While I don’t disagree, one must differentiate between user and admin.
A user does not care what they have as long as they can easily run the applications that they need.
The admin has to tune the system for the user(s).
I user is the admin, then difficulty of setup does matter. In this thread the OP is a the admin, but not the main user. The difficulty can still matter, but not necessarily as much. The main question is whether distro Y can provide good UX or not. IMHO, EL can.
I’m not sure he can. An experienced Linux Admin probably wouldn’t need to ask this Question (I don’t want to offend the Asker, but that’s the impression I got). Inexperienced Linux Admins will have to invest a lot of time to learn the important things, & maintenance of the system can then also take up a lot of time.
In my point of view if he installs Rocky on his PC to get to know the things, that is fine, but not on someone else’s.
@rindi The OP asked for advice before he hosed the machine and installed it. He said he doesn’t have a lot of time to erase it and install stuff without knowing if someone has used similar specs to his. Valid question. Doesn’t need to be advanced user for that. Save him time from erasing it, installing, and reverting to Windows if something doesn’t work. A day or so lost.
I know someone who had a wife using Windows on a laptop, no end of problems due to infections of viruses, etc, etc. Constant questions on using it. He took the laptop, removed Windows and installed Linux on it. Didn’t show her how to use it other than here is where you find the programs. Zero questions during the next year or two after this, and zero problems as well.
If all you are going to do is click through a graphical interface to run apps for office, browsing the internet, etc, you don’t need to know much at all to use Rocky as a desktop, or any other distro for that matter.
Since RHEL 8, there’s only one RHEL. Server vs desktop depends on what you load.
Ubuntu default is server as well. Ubuntu Workstation comes as a distinct iso. Kubuntu and Xubuntu are kindof forks and I believe they’re focused on use as workstation.
I agree that using a live iso to test drive is a good first step. This will help identify hardware issues, and let the user test drive the applications and DE.
HyperV is not available on Home versions, so that may not be available. VirtualBox is simple to set up and build a VM. An advantage of this is that you can run it full screen and it seems like the base OS of the system. This will NOT let you confirm compatibility of the hardware, since that is abstracted in a VM.
Not sure how the system will work, with bitlocker and such, when you remove the m.2 and later insert it back in. It’s possible the encryption key will be lost in the shuffle and the data will become inaccessible, permanently.
Just to clarify, I have been running production CentOS webservers for the last ten years, and I set up and continue to manage an entire local office with a Debian file server, two Ubuntu servers running as domain controllers, (serving Windows workstations exclusively - the business uses custom workstation software that only runs on Windows) … an Ubuntu backup repository (rsync of Debian to cloud backup that only runs on Ubuntu!), a local Centos intranet web server running custom PHP and Python apps that serve from our (Windows) Oracle database, and another Centos server running ZoneMinder security camera network. So I am something of an intermediate linux admin - just never use them as workstations, but I know that hardware driver details can sometimes be a deal breaker. (So far, not the case with ROCKY)
As @iwalker mentions above, the whole point of this thread was just to see if anyone happened to have experience with similar hardware. And now I can vouch that it’s smooth sailing to install ROCKY 9 on an HP ELITEDESK 800 G3 Mini … if anyone in future googles for that and finds this thread