Thinking about making the big switch – recommend me a distro!

Hey all, I’ve been thinking about making the jump from Windows to Linux as my daily-driver and I’ve been struggling on what distro to use.

On my laptop I’ve been using Fedora’s KDE Spin for a bit but I can’t say I really like KDE all that much. I took that Distrochooser test and 9/10 of the suggestions were all Ubuntu-based or Arch-based for some reason lol.

I would prefer a distro that “just works” but I’m not scared of having to troubleshoot or fix things. I guess I’m just looking to see what everyone else uses and what you all recommend. Thanks!

agent_flounder, (edited )
@agent_flounder@lemmy.world avatar

Nothing wrong with Fedora Gnome. I’ve been using it for several months (well ok technically Nobara but I decided to try vanilla Fedora recently and it’s about the same). Prior to that I had been using Mint / Cinnamon for a decade and it’s a good choice too.

But truth be told the Gnome simplicity / minimalism has been growing on me. I wished it were more customizable but whatever.

Fedora is a very very mainstream distro, too, so help is easy to find if anything goes haywire.

PS: nobara is great for gaming but the big gotcha for me was that updating from the shell prompt requires a somewhat involved set of commands. If you use a simple dnf update you’ll break something like I did. Which is why I decided to give Fedora another go. If you choose Nobara, just use the (slow) GUI updater.

The other commenter who mentioned installing and using Gnome tweaks, etc. nailed it. Do that. :)

BlanK0,

You could try fedora sway or gnome spins

joojmachine,

Stick with Fedora, but give a shot to the Atomic variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, etc.) You can always switch DEs back and forth with one command. Even if you don’t stay with Fedora, it will help a lot for you to find the desktop environment that fits your workflow best (although I do recommend sticking with Fedora)

Stillhart,

I swapped last summer and landed on Pop!_OS after trying a few different options. If you game, Nobara is a great choice too. Other ones I considered were Mint, Ubuntu and SUSE Tumbleweed.

I would highly recommend trying them all with the live disk thingy. Mint didn’t even work at all on my computer for some unknown reason, which was rather surprising considering how often it’s recommended. It kept freezing right when the GUI logged in. So yeah, try em out for a little bit just to make sure there aren’t any weird incompatibilities.

Scout,

I just switched from windows to Linux a few months ago. I just picked opensuse tumbleweed KDE at random and it just works. Idk anything about Linux so maybe give that a try and see if it works for you as well.

whaley,

I like Garuda. I use the dragonized theme and it makes it look similar to mac OS. IMO it’s as easy to use as any other justworks distro but is far prettier

Kory,
@Kory@lemmy.ml avatar

Linux Mint and Pop!_OS are the most recommended beginner friendly distros that “just work” in my experience. That being said, before you install, you can try out the look and feel here: distrosea.com

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