Give Zorin a try. It’s based on Ubuntu but even more user friendly - so much so that my elderly mother has no issues using it, she even prints and scans (a Brother MFD) and has no issues.
Gentoo for the documentation, but for a modern comp with bad bootloader implementation, Fedora’s anaconda system for the secure boot shim is irreplaceable and my daily. I won’t consider any distro without a shim and clear guide for UEFI secure boot keys. In that vain, Gentoo is the only doc source I know of that walks the user through booting into UEFI directly with Keytool.
Was scrolling through to see if anyone had mentioned void. I use Fedora these days but Void is great because of how easy it is to contribute to with its GitHub-based package management workflow - anyone can update a package or introduce a new one, it just needs to be approved. It doesn’t get any easier than that
I really enjoyed Solus Linux but the last I checked, it didn’t support something I need for my job. So, I do use Arch, but was completely smitten and impressed with their impressive boot speed. From pushing POST screen to desktop, it was something like 5 seconds. With Arch, after POST, maybe 10-15 seconds.
With their recent drama, it’s been a bit hard to see them struggle. They just did release a fresh build I read online, so they are still alive. :)
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It’s very up to date, yet it’s somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven’t had any problems finding software, yet it’s not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.
Naah I think it’s super useful to know a bit about all popular distros. This makes you able to actually take part in conversations about what distro to pick for example.
I’ve ran them all at some point in my life, which makes me able to understand that it’s not just “different package manager” as some people say.
I mean, people say that, but for me it wasn’t a problem, I just picked one when I got started. Didn’t feel like a major decision since you can just switch again if you are unhappy.
I feel ya. I was the same way. They said don’t distro hop so that was the first thing I did 🤣 I guess the thing with a lot other people is they are used to the thing that “just works” (whatever the fuck that means).
For them, I just tell them use PopOS. Good distro. Little fuss. Maintained by a company with interest in keeping it going.
That said, I’m teaching a class this afternoon to CS majors and the first thing I’m having them do is install Arch in a vm 😉
VMs are a way, but Live USB sticks are better because you will see how it actually runs on your bare metal machine, and if there see any hardware quirks, without comitting to an install
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