If you want something that looks and behaves much like the Windows desktop environment, use Linux Mint. If you want something closer to the macOS environment, use Pop OS.
It doesn’t really matter much which distro you choose.
Use flatpaks - flatpaks sandbox your apps more than traditional packages. As a side effect, the package manager of the distro won’t matter anymore.
There are thousand of distros, stick to a popular one.
Install packages on distrobox instead of directly onto your system if you use the terminal. Stay as close to the base image as possible. If you want to have access to all packages, install arch/endeavouros on distrobox and use the aur. If a package is not on aur, it’s not published yet. With distrobox there’s no reason to switch to another distribution because of package availability.
Use a distro with which you can roll back to a previous state easily. If things go downhill, youcan always fall back. There are many distros that provide a very easy out of the box experience for that. If you can’t fall back easily, ignore the distro or be prepared for the worst case
Arch is for advanced people because you may set up your system as you like. There are many great distros that choose the base packages for you. You will have a great experience on most big distros. Most of them use GNOME. GNOME is great. KDE is awesome. Tough decision. Watch youtube vidoes about both. Install the other one in a VM to check it out. You may use an immutable distro like fedora silverblue/kinoite. You can switch back and forth by rebasing to the respective desktop environment.
Following is a good source for anyone looking into desktops www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ they focus on an educated distro choice.
Read the arch wiki whenever you want to do something or want to know something. wiki.archlinux.org you want to know more abiut piewire? aw! You want to know about GNOME? KDE? Type !aw KDE into ddg, qwant or brave. Read the respecting documentation of your distro. Follow them on mastodon. Register to the forum. Join a matrix community.
Watch great channels like “the linux experiment” on peertube. Yes peertube, why should you watch it on youtube if it’s on peertube?
The thing with arch is that you have to know a lot of stuff. You have to take care of selinux yourself etc. If you know what you do, everything is fine. At the same time you can be on tumbleweed, kinoite or any other distro and install aur packages with distrobox. For me, there’s no reason to use arch. If you want to tinker with your system, go for arch.
If you kind of know what you do as a beginner, you can go for it as well, steep learning curve but you’ll be more advanced than others in the same time.
I haven’t actually touched selinux at all… It’s not ‘officially supported’ in Arch yet, although there are compatible packages available. I only recently discovered PAM which I have yet to learn too.
Mint is good, unless it’s very new hardware in which case the base (so things like drivers) can be a little dated.
Look up Ventoy. It’s a tool where you can put multiple ISOs onto one USB drive and boot into any of them. You can use that to try out a few distros. Maybe Mint, Fedora, PopOS, Ubuntu.
You can also run many distros “live” from the install media without installing anything, to get a feel for them and to check that mosts things work (network, sound, movies etc.) You can make a bootable stick and choose the live option when it boots.
To break from the trend (because I recommend Mint as well),
Check out the options on distrowatch.com, test out any live distros you can. When you have some understanding of GRUB then dual boot, and then triple.
Inevitably, you’re going to end up using Arch because it’s so easily managed and you get to choose each component. But it’s better if you have experience with the different components first. I completely missed out on learning RPM (package manager), I went from Mint (apt) to Arch (pacman). I did resurrect a lot of old laptops and desktops with various different distros though, and I learned Gnome and xfce, LXDE, MATE, and i3, xmonad…
There’s a lot to learn but it’s all fun, and it’s all different. When you go to a tiling window manager, you’ll understand why Windows adopted (albeit shittily) tiling in it’s latest version.
Hmm I haven’t heard that Nvidia works better than Amd ever actually.
Amd drivers are included on the kernel so it will just work on all distributions. So I would give it a shot, don’t think you will have any problems. :)
So basically nvidia makes their drivers on Linux a pain to install and use and Linux’s creator has called them out on it in the past. So PopOS is known for having tools that make getting them working easier.
AMD on the other hand has open source drivers so they are right in the kernel. So their GPUS are just plug and play like a USB mouse
~20min after the post went up, OP has posted no thoughts…
So I’ll put in my own…
When I run Linux on a laptop, I tend to run Fluxbox, it uses a tiny ammount of screen real estate and is flexible snd nice to work with.
I am a bit sad that fluxbox won’t be updated to wayland (at least not when I checked the last time), and I hope that waybox will be a good replacement.
Fluxbox… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… Back in the days of wintel dialup modems I was trying out Linux as a teenager and trying to get modem support working to get the internet, and at one point I tried out a Linux distro, DSL (Damn small Linux) because it was set up to be installed and run from a USB flash drive with persistent storage on the drive I think. And the window manager of DSL? You guessed it, Fluxbox! Can’t believe its still around.
Have you tried using the Fluxbox implementation version MX Linux makes available? They have put tons of work into their Fluxbox implementation. Perhaps it will provide you with some useful ideas/ help. Their Forums are also quite responsive & helpful. FWIW . I am not a paid announcer ;) …
Haha that’s awesome! These days I’ve pretty much settled on basic defaults to make life easier: Ubuntu and Gnome. Though with snaps getting more invasive, I’m considering jumping ship and moving to the OG, Debian. I settled on Ubuntu years ago when they did a ton to improve driver compatibility and automatic installation for WiFi drivers on laptops back in the Ubuntu 7/8 days (2007/2008). Briefly tried out Linux mint in 2014, and went back to Ubuntu after a few years, gnome worked a bit better for workflow than the traditional windows approach with a taskbar for open windows.
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