So, I was told you can take any distro, pair it with any desktop environment, and badda bing, badda boom, unique linux in the room!
And a few years ago I tried getting into linux, and it didn't work. I didn't like ubuntu. I want something that's basically like Windows 98.
Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. Well, I had some issue with one program, and I'm an idiot on linux. Have no clue what I'm doing. So the guides tell me to update the thing. So I do that, and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!
I never got it to start working again, and I just said screw it, I'm not dealing with this. Put it in a drawer, and haven't touched it in about a year.
Well, now I'm think I'll just start fresh. Install a new distro, and since Ubuntu seems to be the one with the most support, I'll use that. Then I find out that LXDE visually is more in line with what I want.
So I figure I'll slap on ubuntu, slap on LXDE, and then install retropie. And hopefully the fan will work again. So I start researching this LXDE, and the home page wants you to download the desktop environment already baked into a DIFFERENT distro! Wait, hold on. Am I wrong in thinging you can just download a desktop environment, and slap it on any distro? Because it might be me. I have no clue what I'm doing. And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for "Ubuntu Help", there's no community named that. There's also no community named "Linux help". Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you'd think would have a linux help community! This place loves linux. Does everyone just always know what they're doing at all all times? Or am I just going crazy? I feel like I'm walking blind into a forest and bear traps line the ground. I have no idea how to even start this process....
Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) and Kubuntu are, in my opinion, the two most windows-looking distros out of the box. They use the Cinnamon and KDE desktop environment respectively, you can do a little googling to see if those look like you expect your desktop to work.
Fuck no, lol. I've done more stupid shit on Linux than windows would ever let me get away with. But Linux people tend to be a little more "tinkerers" than other computer users. Not everyone by any means, it's really more of the other way around: if you want to tinker with your computer, Linux gives the most freedom to do so. And when you tinker enough and make enough ~~mistakes~~ learning experiences, you tend to pick up some knowledge along the journey.
But a lot of the modern distros are very plug-and-play, to where it's not necessary to be a tinkerer to get going on Linux anymore.
Linux Mint is so easy of a transition from Windows that I never tried anything else. As cliche as it is, "it just works". Most I had to do was copy and paste a terminal line to open a port for Chromecast.
Mint MATE also looks and works a lot like Windows.