Arch. Rolling release is too much maintenance and AUR can be a pain. I do like the minimalist approach though.
For those of a similar opinion and aren’t familiar with it, check out Void. Also a minimalist rolling release, but aims for more stable packages so less updating. Decent package selection in their repos as well.
Ubuntu is a tough one. I don’t like it. I don’t like snaps, but more than that I don’t like their direction in general.
But I have some respect for them too. I think they played a pretty significant role in Linux being as popular (relatively speaking) as it is, and I don’t feel like they have any ill intent.
So I don’t personally care for it but I’m glad it’s around I guess is my point?
I’m not personally familiar with PopOS, but in reading up real quick it looks like it’s selling point is baked in proprietary drivers.
If you want a “just works with my hardware” distro, that sounds like a solid choice. But, since you’re technically inclined I might suggest avoiding it. Proprietary drivers come with their own problems and I think there’s value in having to consciously choosing to use them, which will make you more able to handle/remove them if needed. There is some personal bias in this I admit. I don’t care for proprietary anything if I have a choice.
I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, and there’s a good number of responses so maybe I’m up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro’s philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch’s. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to “keep it simple” from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch’s approach being less than amenable to that.
But that’s not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro’s approach appeals to you, use it.
I appreciate the not your office OS commentary. I have the use Windows for work. I do this mostly via RDP to a work provided laptop, as well as a win10 VM for MS Teams. And I take great pleasure in shutting those down at the end of the work day.
The last tolerable version of Windows for me was XP. I find myself fond of Windows 98, but that’s probably just nostalgia speaking.
I don’t doubt this this is generally the case, but most of the games I enjoy playing with friends offer their own servers. Which got me thinking about it, and they tend to be indie games.
Puppy Linux: It’s a solid live boot environment but it’s not really ideal in comparison to the major distros on a permanent install.
Alpine Linux: Since it uses musl instead of glibc, you’re likely to run into problems
Linux from scratch: Going through LFS is a great way to get a solid understanding of Linux, but unless you want to spend more time maintaining your system than using it, it’s going to be a frustrating experience.
Try one of the distros others have suggested.
Edit: I checked the specs on that hardware and yeah that’s going to struggle. Maybe Alpine would be ok. It’s fairly easy to spin up and might be fun to play with on that hardware. You’ll probably want a fairly large swap if you’re planning on using a desktop environment.
I symlink the AppImage. It’s still a manual process in that you have to recreate the symlink but feels like less of a hassle than updating the desktop file.