My personal recommendation is Fedora, but the community recommendation will likely be Linux Mint, which is also a perfectly good recommendation. Either of them are “just works” distros. I prefer the update cycle of Fedora, and would certainly want to distance myself from Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives (even Mint), and Debian’s update cycle is painfully slow. Fedora manages what is seemingly a perfect balance of quick and stable updates.
Fedora comes with Gnome by default, but it has spins for other DEs like KDE Plasma if that’s more of your thing (I’ll be switching to Plasma when Fedora 40 releases with Plasma 6).
Like some have mentioned, if you want to try different distros setup a VM (I would recommend KVM for better performance, but virtualbox is easier for beginners in VMing) with the iso of the distro you want to test out.
Like this you can keep a functional system without the hassle of having to setup on baremetal just for testing and having to go back again if doesn’t pay-out.
Also would suggest messing around with more tech-savy setups like debian and fedora (specially minimal ones) if you want to delve deeper into the Linux nerdiness.
When distros make it the default DE, that’s forcing it on them. No different then Microsoft bundling a specific browser. I also disagree that it works well on desktops. It lacks features, and tweaking it to resemble and behave like a more common desktop design is cumbersome.
And? Who’s making you use them? Use one of the other distros that doesn’t use Gnome, or install a different DE after installation.
“It’s like Microsoft forcing Edge!!”
No it isn’t. For almost all PCs, Windows is installed by default with no other option.
If you’re using Gnome, it’s because you went out of your way to install it, or you went out of your way to purchase a Linux laptop and chose one with Gnome, which is far from the only option even in that space.
And you can disagree that it works on desktops all you like. All the people who use it on desktop would disagree with your opinion.
Just because something doesn’t work like Windows does, doesn’t mean it’s not for desktops.
You’re missing out on watching a lot of progress bars while you reinstall all the time. If you like what you have, keep using it. All you get from switching is a different package manager, a few slightly different package names, maybe faster updates and a new default desktop background. You’ll still be using all the same apps, probably similar versions, probably systemd. It’s a bigger difference logging into a new desktop environment than a new distro.
If you’re comfortable with Mint and don’t see a reason to switch, I don’t see anything wrong with staying with Mint. If you do want to try new distros, just use a VM.
Go with EndeavourOS. It won’t “just work”, but it will be the best compromise between confusing abstraction and low level frustrations.
Fedora is good but it abstracts a little too much away, this is great when you understand how software works, but it’s very confusing when you’re new to Linux and programming.
Arch is good, but you won’t be able to hid the ground running, you’d have to sacrifice a weekend to learn.
Go:
[Optional] Fedora
Endeavour
Arch
Learning
Ghost BSD
Void
Gentoo
Tinkering with those in that order, after about 6 months, you’ll start to feel at home.
I’m a fan of Arch and derivatives but I need better odds of shit just working. Been running Mankato on desktop for some time to get both stable ish packages and also AUR as/where needed.
For servers, it’s Debian all the way for me. Ubuntu does some things I don’t personally love - no offense to the distro, it’s well constructed - and the recent ish changes in the RPM world didn’t sit well with me - strictly personal opinion.
Anything in a container generally runs on whatever the image was built with. It’s only a minimal pain to port simple dockerfiles, but when you get into multiple linked containers, that risks edge case bugs down the road.
Honestly, between the lot of it, I use a pretty representative sample - I think alpine on desktop would be kind of pointless to say the least, doesn’t mean I’m going to forego any container built on it.
Use case is a huge factor here, as is ability to grok multiple distros concurrently. I find that easy, but plenty of people don’t. For them, maybe rebuilding that image makes more sense.
Linux is all about doing what works for you and your use case.
FWIW, pacman doesn’t resonate nearly as well as pamac does with me. Probably because I haven’t had to dive deep into it. All about what works for an individual. If that’s stability on an Ubuntu derivative, great - Linux is Linux, in that context.
I can’t stand using Gnome, but it is the only one that’s vaguely touch friendly. If you pile enough extensions in there, it becomes usable. Plasma has always been a disaster for me on tablets. Maybe 6 will be better, but I’m not holding my breath.
Ooh, I might actually be able to help here. Try disabling screen sleep in your power options and see if that fixes it. It took me a long time to narrow my issues down to that. I still don’t know why it happens.
And definitely let me know if that fixes the issue for you. I’d love to know it’s not just me and my laptop.
Honestly. I don’t think you’re missing much. It’s not like if you go to a different distro suddenly you’re going to have all these new applications you can’t get on mint or anything.
I started with mint and played around with other distros (mostly Debian/Ubuntu & Arch based ones) and I ended up settling on an Ubuntu based distro with kde desktop.
Using something like Arch might make sense if your PC is super new as they tend to have support for the newest hardware.
At most you might want to try a different desktop environment but if you have no reason to hop I would say don’t waste your time unless you’re bored and want to experiment just for the hell of it.
there’s a site that will let you play around with different distros/desktop environments over the Web (it’s going to be slow and you can’t use a VPN when connecting) but that might be a good choice before going through the trouble of downloading a distro, flashing to USB and possibly installing it on your PC/laptop just to find out you hate it.
Btw I’d still use mint…I only switched away because I wasn’t a big fan of how much it looked like windows and how green everything was. Lol. But I was still a noob at the time and hadn’t fully comprehended how customizable Linux distros are. I could’ve changed a lot with the appearance if I knew what I was doing
What I tend to do that scratches the distro-hopping itch is I keep an external drive with a bunch of virtual machines on it that I can spin up and tinker around with as needed, like little specimen jars lol. I think I have about 5-6 on the go at the moment. So like my actual computer runs Arch (btw), but I have VMs for NixOS, OpenSUSE, Mint and so on, as well as another one that’s as close to my main system as possible so if I want to try a weird experiment I can try it on there first to see what breaks. Just today I tried upgrading it to Plasma 6 to see what broke and the answer was everything lol.
I used to keep ones for Mac and Windows on the go too, but they tend to eat up a lot of drive space.
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.