Alternatively, don’t use Pop_OS. I installed it on an ex’s laptop because it was easy but it’d have all the same problems as Ubuntu without the helpful diagnostic tools and extensive documentation. Hers messed up far more than my Arch install
If the only thing you need to do is test out the different DEs, you should be able to just install each one and use something like lightdm to easily switch between them upon logging out.
Most distros are running the same software. The biggest difference is your package manager & community. Personal preference is NixOS but that ain’t beginner-friendly even if the rollbacks from bad states would help. Arch isn’t as difficult to set up as it used to be & has been more stable than a lot of distros in my experience so I wouldn’t discount it but .pacnew files can bite you if modifying in /etc instead of in the home folder (when possible). Of the things folks normally suggest as a first go, Fedora would probably be my pick (not yet had a problem) as everything Ubuntu-based still rubs me wrong for support & leadership.
I actually disagree on what the biggest difference is. For the average everyday user, the biggest difference is the desktop environment. Having a desktop environment that the user finds intuitive, easy, and is stable is by far the most important thing.
I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).
I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it’s not there.
I’d recommend Zorin. It has a UI similar to windows, easy to get into, great defaults, and being based on Ubuntu, most help on the internet will work just fine
Before Chromebooks, my towns school system had netbooks which were pitifully slow on Windows. They installed Ubuntu instead. The netbooks still sucked, but probably sucked a lot less.
Get a cheap 1-2 tb drive and start dual-booting with whatever system you’re running now. This way you can play around with different distros while retaining your current settup to fall back on!
It wouldn’t be the most ideal, but you can dual-boot with an external drive. There are external SSDs that are meant for running programs/games off of them, and would look into those for best performance.
Alternatively, if you have plenty of unused storage on the laptop you can partition some of that for use, but a second drive is usually preferred.
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