I recommend Linux Mint (21.2), which a based on Ubuntu (22.04) and Debian. The cinnamon desktop environment it comes with is pretty similar to windows 7, which makes it easier to use. I think 21.2 will remain supported until 2027 as LTS.

It’s not super difficult to host your own gitlab instance tbh.

Not directly related but RISC-V is also really nice to to program with. I hope it takes off because it has fewer niche instructions that may slow down a system (x86 sucks in that regard).

Lmao my university also uses centos 7 for their ancient-ass SSH server. Even the professors just told us to use a VM because they didn’t want to use an old version of clang anymore.

Yeah gcc and mingw took ages back when I learned cpp a few years ago. This was back in high school when I barely knew what Linux was, so it never occurred to me that I could do that. Eventually gave up on setting it up in VScode and used codeblocks and spent the semester dealing with that GUI.

There’s some themes for cinnamon that make it close enough to windows 10 styling.

Posts like this are why Linux users have a bad rep. I like Linux but a lot of tools I use are developed for windows, not Linux. I use Nvidia gpus (because I have to for CUDA) which are known to bug out on Linux.

I’m going to play around with it soon by installing full Linux onto an external SSD. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve seen some guides and tutorials that mention that it’s possible.