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…

  • drone509@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    I haven’t used Ubuntu in a bit, but I’m decently familiar with linux overall. Looked up a guide. It indicated you could install LXDE with sudo apt install lxde and then reboot. The guide said that LXDE should be the default Desktop Environment now, because it’s the most recently installed one. If for whatever reason LXDE isn’t the new default, on the Login screen, in the upper left corner there should be a dialogue box to select whichever Desktop Environment you want as the new default.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
      5·
      2 months ago

      :D

      I wish the Lemmy search could search inside your brain. When I get home, I’m going to try this. And assuming it doesn’t give me 50 million errors (or…even 1 error, as I don’t know what I’m doing), then this seems like a really easy thing to do. Now if something goes wrong…then I’m screwed. Most other people who use linux would be like “Oh, yeah, error 5227. Simple error. You just have to configure the combobulator, and process the hexagonal diagrams!”

      And I would be like “…do what now?”

      But as long as it’s just one simple copy/paste line in terminal…I SHOULD be fine…unless I’m not.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
        7·
        2 months ago

        Do you not realize that search engines exist? Probably 75% of people who resolve Linux errors by googling them had no clue before doing so

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOP
          9·
          2 months ago

          I’ve been trying to understand linux that way for 10 years. The problem is the tutorials will say “do this and this, and this, and this”. I’ll get maybe 30% through the tutorial, and get an error. But the tutorial didn’t account for an error. So I google the error, and find 10 different pages all telling me to do 10 different things.

          But in doing 7 of those things, I screw 3 more things up because I don’t know what those things did. Or I did them wrong. And now I have 8 problems instead of 1.

          Sometimes you just need a human teacher who knows what they’re doing. It’s like learning to cook, but not having taste buds. You can be told to add salt, but if you don’t know what salt does, or why you’re adding it, you might add too much, or not enough, or at the wrong time. But if a human teacher can explain what you’re doing, and what it does, and why it does that, THEN you might learn.

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
            4·
            2 months ago

            I would empathize with this issue, but it’s just not been my experience. Most of the time if I’ve done something reasonable I either get no error or a pretty easily google-able one. I’ve been using Linux pretty exclusively for a couple of years. I admit I had help from a guru for the first couple months but then again most of his help came into play with more advanced developer kinds of issues.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        You can also get different varieties of Ubuntu with different default desktop environments, named as portmanteaus of [DE name] + “Ubuntu.” Specifically, there’s Kubuntu (with KDE), Xubuntu (with XFCE), and most relevantly, Lubuntu (with LXQT).

        Note that LXQT isn’t the same thing as LXDE, but is sort of a successor to it (even though LXDE is also still maintained).

        sudo apt install lxde (or sudo apt install lxqt, for that matter) is definitely simpler than starting over installing a Lubuntu image though, so try that first.