There are two more Iād reccomend as its what my family and friends have been using and have ran into literally, zero issues.
Linux mint (specifically cinnamon edition) is very stable, and customizable if youāre into that sorta thing, you can install custom kernels and get greatly improved performance out of gaming if thats your thing. Itās built off of Ubuntu (but just better) so thereās great support for it, especially with devices such as printers.
Fedora Kinoite is a solid, also well supported, immutable distribution which will either make your life easier, or more difficult.
Immutable means you canāt change anything in your root directory, so basically your āC: Driveā. You still have a regular file system and can install all your apps, but the operating system stays the same as everyone elseās and is something that by design, never breaks and ājust worksā, and is what I personally use.
Pop_OS is definitely another option if you have ānewerā hardware and Linux Mint doesnāt work for you and you donāt like the immutability of Fedora Kinoite (you can always try regular Fedora KDE). But Iād personally reccomend just the first two. But Pop is also built off of Ubuntu, so you still get that great hardware support.
But please, avoid stock Ubuntu. Ubuntu has far gone away from being a beginner, ājust worksā distro.
Hope this helped! Please reply or message me if you have any issues or are confused, or you can always ask for some more help within this community as well!
Iām running a mix of Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch on my servers/VMs. All are fine. Having to set up sudo on Debian was a bit annoying, and having to get rid of snap on Ubuntu too, but after that you get a lot of benefit out of the Debian/Ubuntu defaultisms in many guides (and Docker is there to pick up the rest).
If you can maintain Arch, youāll have a breeze on either Debian or Fedora. There are a few command line tools (apt/dnf and such) that youāll need to get used to, and itās possible that certain directories are in a different place, but thatās about all. With unattended-upgrades and scheduled reboots, your interaction with the server should be minimal.
Donāt do Arch unless you like scheduling maintenance.
Linux Mint is great, I used it as a daily driver in college on an old IBM T42, however, modern Linux on a modern PC ā Debian/Ubuntu with KDE.
Basically, Kubuntu.
Kubuntu gets you off the ground running with Debian core, KDE Plasma, which is familiar to the Windows workflow and all the compatibility of Debian/Ubuntu. Steam and Proton work FLAWLESSLY via Vulkan API. Zero loss of performance.
If you want to spend a ton of time relearning an OS/tinkering however, get some flavor of Arch.
The AUR is crazy, itās like a huge software library and the Wiki is expansive, BUT, you will be relearning absolutely everything.
Sorry other Linux people, Iām a jaded lifelong Windows user, who unironically uses Kubuntu and Artix on seperate machines.
Food for thought: you should start getting familiar with Linux, either with Virtualbox/VMware, or dual booting right now. When the time comes and Win10 reaches EOL, you know you will find reasons to just go with the flow and stay with Microsoft.
As for what flavor? There are a few that come to mind as āwindowyā: Zorin, Mint, and the anything that uses KDE Plasma. Personally, I prefer Pop!_OS because I use MacOS as well and prefer that feel to windows a bit more, and System76 has done a fantastic job of making a polished product.
Thatās what I did, anyway. The mental load of still having windows to fall back on if I couldnāt do something helped make the anxiety lighter and also helped me be motivated to try new things out. I couldnāt imagine having to learn something with a gun to my head!
I was running CentOS then migrated to Rocky. It handles various VMs and containers great and has been trouble free for years. 10 core Haswell-era Xeon with 64 GB RAM and a lot of ZFS storage.
I moved from Arch to Fedora on my desktop/laptop as well. Really helps my mental state not keeping up with the different distro-specific knowledge between hosts.
Did you get bored of dealing with packages dependencies and always relying on AUR when you wanted to download a corpo software? Iām planning to do the Arch to Fedora pill too tbf.
Somewhat but it was more driven on the server-side decision. I wanted something that I could set and forget, that didnāt have a ton of updates but prioritized stability/security patches.
Of course, speaking of packages I do regularly use rpmfusion and epel for the extra stuff the normal repos donāt have, but I understand why.
Also being a heavy user of KVM, PCIe and GPU passthrough I found the experience easier and less likely to break between updates. A lot of Red Hat devs work on these subsystems so I assume itās better QAād.
Ubuntu will work, sticking to Ubuntu based system is good to have stuff just work. For Gnome UI just use Ubuntu, for KDE use Kubuntu.
If you donāt like Ubuntu as a company you can always use these instead: PopOS for Gnome and KDE Neon for KDE. Both are very stable with great support. Iāve been running KDE Neon for years now.
Hi, I tried endeavor, Linux mint, manjaro, mx Linux, and I donāt remember what else. I have a question, is Gnome really popular? For me it doesnāt make sense, it feels it was made for tablets or something like that.
Absolutely, itās very popular. Itās pretty similar to MacOS since it comes with a global menu by default. Itās pretty popular since the design is very consistent and looks good. They also have excellent support for new features (except Wayland). Gnome is popular with people that only want to customise the most important ports and just want a standard OS that is well thought out and accessible.
I do watch a lot of content about Linux distros, but Iām not a Gnome user so I canāt give good examples of customisation and differences between KDE and Gnome.
Btw, can replicate the same layout on KDE because of the high level of customization it provides. It can all done through the UI, as all OS changes should be done.
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