Hello, I got almost for free a Lenovo laptop: CPU Intel i3 8130, 4Gb RAM. I would like to use It to learn Linux. I saw some people using Arch to learn the inside out of Linux, but I’m afraid It could be to challenging. What do you suggest? What Is the best way to learn? Thank you. Edit: First of all I thank you all for your suggestions, I think that this is what makes this community special. I installed Fedora Xfce for now and I worked all evening to male it work and customize it. I’m learning a lot already. I’ll move to Arch as soon I’ll feel comfortable with Fedora. Thank you all again.
It depends on the way you like to learn.
If you like to play around with things and look things up as you need, go with a beginner-friendly distro (Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS are all good options). This gives a more immediate payoff (in that there are lots of fun things to experiment with right away), but you’ll learn things kinda piecemeal.
If you like to learn by reading first, then starting with the absolute minimum and gradually working your way up, something like Arch might be great for you. It’s a much slower process and has a much steeper learning curve, but if you have the discipline for it, you’ll come out with a really solid understanding of how things work.
Most people start with something simple, and venture into the more intimidating waters when they feel comfortable. If you’re not sure, try Mint and go from there. You can always wipe it and install Arch later (if you don’t have anything important on this laptop, you can try lots of different ones without worrying about migrating or losing anything).
I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it’s very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.
I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.
Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it’s a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is). Your CPU scores 3500 points on the passmark cpu benchmark which is enough for any kind of distro. 15 years ago, the average laptop cpu was 600 points (and Linux still runs fine on these with something like Debian/Xfce).
The lowest ram usage I’ve seen with a full-fledge modern distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).
Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.
I don’t get the people recommending Mint and Ubuntu or atomic distros, those are great for a beginner who just wants their system to work without having to be bothered, but I’m not sure you could find worse if your goal is to learn how your system works…
You need :
- Good documentation, so that could find answers when trying to understand something.
- A large community, so you can ask questions if you need to
- Configuration that’s easy to mess with
- Not a distro filling a very specialized niche (don’t go for one of the distros without systemd, unless you actually know what systemd is and have a reason for not wanting it)
- One of the “base” distros, rather than one that is based on another one with modifications (that will make it easier to understand if you don’t have to deal with what Mint added on top of Debian for ex)
- No weird shit that confuses you when you try to understand what is going on (“Why is my lsblk spammed by fake partitions?.. oh right Snaps”… “Wait why is that a Snap, I installed the package with apt?”)
So I’d say either Arch or Debian (or Debian testing, if you want Debian but with updates more often than once every century). Not sure about Fedora, I’m not familiar with it.
Arch is a great way to learn how your system works, if you know what you are getting into.
The documentation is very extensive and a lot of people use it, so when you do encounter a problem you can usually find the solution easily enough in the docs or in forums.
I’m also not sure that it’s inherently more challenging than other distros, a lot of stuff is pretty much the same no matter your distro, except that with Arch nothing gets in the way so personally I find it easier to understand.
And the reputation Arch has for breaking stuff during updates is either very overblown, or I’ve just had the most terrible luck and missed all of them. I’ve only seen one big breakage, the FUSE regression, which was pretty cool, and that was fixed almost immediately.
There’s also software availability to consider, and Arch is one of the distros with the most packages available (second one after NixOS I think).
Personally I regret having wasted several months on another distro because people kept saying that you absolutely shouldn’t start with Arch, and that if you wanted to try Arch you HAD to do it with a manual install (guess how well that went when I was fresh from Windows 😂 ). So I failed to manually install Arch for a month, then I spend three months on a random other distro before finally installing Arch with the archinstall script. I expected that it’d be insanely complicated and that I’d break everything in a few days but it’s been surprisingly straightforward. The challenging part is understanding how things work when the documentation presupposes prior knowledge that I don’t have. Now after over a year I’m familiar enough with Arch that I’ll try a manual install when I change hard drive and reinstall.
I would say that Arch is not the best distro to learn the ins and outs of Linux. Arch is comparable to Void in that both are rolling-release distributions and require comfort with the command line.
Gentoo goes a step further by allowing you to tweak CPU-specific and software compile-time options before building packages from source. Then you have PLD Linux, whose installation process demands a strong understanding of the system and its internals.
A step further down is CRUX, which leaves you with the bare essentials - essentially just the kernel. You need to manage repositories yourself to a significant extent.
Finally, we arrive at Linux From Scratch (LFS), which is somewhat similar to CRUX, but with an even more hands-on approach. With LFS, you must manually install virtually everything, including the toolchain, libraries, and basic utilities.
So, from Arch to LFS, there’s still a huge gap in terms of how deeply you engage with the system.
Finally, what does it really mean to “learn Linux”? You can learn Linux with any distro, but when you are using a distro, you are mostly just learning that particular distro.
you don’t need to settle on a distro straight away, try them out and switch off you don’t like them
Sounds like OP might be at a point where they could use a little more information.
OP, what you could do is get yourself a small USB memory stick - 8 GB should be fine - and flash different distributions on it, boot into them without installing, and find one you like and install that one. There’s a tool called Ventoy that will make it really easy: especially if you have a larger USB stick, you could put several different distributions on the stick and choose which one you boot into at boot time.
My only suggestion when you do the install is to partition the hard drive and put /home on its own partition. If you decide later you want to use a different distribution, you don’t have to backup and restore your user data.
Wild that you chose my exact distro + desktop combo (Fedora + XFCE). I love it but I wouldn’t expect others to in 2025. Nice pick dude.
Arch is NOT for beginners. Immutable distros are NOT for beginners. Do not let anyone suggest otherwise.
Go with Fedora for the smoothest and least polluted experience of any beginner distro and work from there.
The best way to learn is just by getting started 👍
as a recent linux “convert” running fedora workstation, it works fantastic :D
Why wouldn’t an atomic distro not be for beginners?
There’s no reason why a beginner wouldn’t be able to use one. Maybe i’s overwhelming for a power user that doesn’t know linux well but for a beginner who doesn’t use too much functionality it’s perfect. You just use flatpak which you should also do on non atomic distros.
OP wants to LEARN Linux. Immutable distros are not lock and stock built to learn Linux at all. They are built to operate one specific way that is confusing for beginners. Some really basic reasons it’s not for newcomers:
- everything is an edge-case BECAUSE it’s an immutable distro
- vanilla docs (Arch Wiki for example) don’t cover immutable distros
- learning package management isn’t possible
- altering the system as docs or projects would describe isn’t available
- learning to build and install things from source is not stock available
Just because YOU like something, doesn’t mean everyone needs to subscribe to your idea of it.
You said arch is not for beginners, OP is asking for a distro to learn. I asked why atomic is not for beginners, not for someone to learn. Op also didn’t say what she wants to learn about linux. Maybe she is no software dev and doesn’t want to learn how to package software. But even then, distrobox is only a few clicks away. Learning how to tweak the system before learning about firewall and other stuff is beyond beginner level in my opinion.
They said they want to “learn Linux”. Immutable distros are not how Linux runs in its native form, but a utilitarian way of running it for a specific purpose. You must understand the thing before you speak on the thing.
I’d second this, but also add that you probably want to use something like XFCE for your desktop environment due to the amount of RAM you have: https://fedoraproject.org/spins
I never suggest this for brand new beginners because of the smaller user base and less “vanilla” docs when searching for stuff. The available customization can also be a bit overwhelming for some people that aren’t expecting it, though yes, the memory footprint will be lower as you mentioned.
I really agree with you about immutables. Not only are they awkward to use as far as managing and installing software, I feel like they prevent people from learning how a traditional Linux system works by keeping them in the padded cell of read only root.
As far as arch, it only really took me a year of fiddling and learning on Fedora and mint before I managed to get arch running. Yes there were hurdles and growing pain, but it made me a better user.
Hi, so what version of Fedora, if there is more than one, you suggest? Thank you for you reply.
Also, what is the model of this laptop if you don’t mind sharing?
The different spins are just different default desktop environments with the same underlying system otherwise.
Gnome or KDE are the two most popular desktop environments. Gnome is more like MacOS (simplified, smooth, and minimal), while KDE is a bit more like Windows (verbose, menus laid out how you’d expect).
You choose whichever and just run it. You can just run a LiveUSB of whatever to try out for a few days and get a feel for both, or just dive in and install something. If you find you don’t like something, just switch to a different distro spin. Either way works.
What do you mean by “least polluted”?
I’m not baiting you, I don’t grok what you mean.
Meaning as vanilla/neutral as you can get from the stock packages and configurations.
- Ubuntu has become a slop of Canonical choices and ads for services everywhere.
- Mint does a lot of non-standard stuff, which is fine if you want to use Cinnamon.
- PopOS has a bunch of custom tooling
And so on.
If OP just wants to get on board at a base level without a HUGE amount of edge-cases or one-off customizations, Fedora is the way to go.
I get your meaning, but there are other “unpolluted” distros where the theming and arbitrary package selection is kept at a minimum. Debian comes to mind.
In fact, Fedora does take liberties with non-free drivers and configs for the sake of a sane and usable quality of life.
I’m not trying to start a pissing contest here, just highlighting that there’s a Linux for everyone, and that is the great thing about Linux.
Debian is intentionally built for LTS, so a bit behind on modern Desktop updates and such.
Great for a stable server/dev system, but not great if you’re expecting modern DE features.
One vote for Debian.
