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!
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Linux Mint is my daily driver. I enjoy tinkering, but I also want a distro that doesn’t need it when I get home from work and just want a vodka tonic and some memes.
I’m also a big fan of Mint for this, but also Fedora Kinoite. I can’t say I used Kinoite extensively, but I can say the bit I used it was far more stable than any other distro I used (and the backups-for-free approach really helped my anxiety lol)
Endeavor OS. Its an excellent arch based system and people REALLY over emphasize how tricky arch is. Its not difficult, its not just for power users, and the rolling release means you have access to updates faster than other distros…this is particularly nice for gaming as you’ll also get updates to graphics drivers sooner.
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: https://distrosea.com/
Linux Mint. Works well and it’s friendly.
Hanna Montana Linux
Obvious answer, everyone should start here!
Can’t even get the ISO anymore. 😭
What? Nooooooooo!
To be fair, you can probably find it on Archive.org. Would be kinda neat if somebody made MaymayOS that just had theme packs for the other meme distros to keep them alive.
Imo Mint is the gold standard for a Distro that just works and meets the needs of most people.
Compared to other debian based distros, right?
I mean, just in general.
Besides Fedora (maybe) I’m not sure other non-deb distros really are recommended for new users.
Besides that, like it or not, nowadays most software is distributed as deb files (until Flatpak fixes it). Using something not debian based requires learning how to port .deb files or use manual dependency resolution for tarballs.
In times of distrobox, package manager and repositories do not matter anymore.
These posts are beyond repetitive at this point.
Stop reading them, then. You’re doing this to yourself.
As someone on the edge of making the change myself, I have been enjoying these posts because I have been getting to learn some of the different distros and there pros and cons. Lemmy isn’t insanely active right now, so you get a different group of perspectives with each iteration of the question.
Maybe once lemmy gets bigger we can break off these sorts of questions into their own catalog but for now I think they are doing more good than harm here.
Just my two cents tho, obviously you have the right to disagree :)
Mint Cinamon.
«Everybody» gave me the same advice.
Good luck!
openSUSE Tumbleweed. Or EndeavorOS if you want to join the Arch side.
I like fedora but I’m really loving opensuse tumbleweed on both my desktop and laptop. I have Nvidia rtx cards and support is just a few mouse clicks post-image. I get better FPS now than I did in Windows 11.
Adding that zorin was great as well but it’s Debian-based so driver support was behind enough that some games wouldn’t launch for me.
EndeavourOS is an arch-based distro that “just works”. I put it on a new machine recently, and the installer manages to let you pick a desktop environment, and still manages to be user friendly.
Pop OS is the best, from System 76.
MX Linux, Linux Mint, Endeavour OS
I second EndeavourOS. My first distro and it’s been a great experience. I’ve felt no desire to switch.
Steam/games have worked great.
Yeah but its a rolling release distro so I wouldn’t recommend it to a user that is not conscious of updating the system regularly
Fair enough… It’s been nearly a month since I commented here so I don’t remember the exact situation, but if having a lot of updates was an issue, then yeah maybe not EndeavourOS. There may be LTS versions, but since it’s based on Arch, I’m not sure. I personally don’t mind it, and have yet to have a single issue with an update “breaking” something (though I have Timeshift set up to take a snapshot before updating just in case), but I guess
I could see someone being annoyed by having the little thing pop-up to tell you how many things you could update, but I kind of like it I think. It kinda feels like I’m very slowly, incrementally, making my laptop better, albeit usually in ways I can’t even perceive at the time.
But hey, everyone has their preferences. That’s why there’s a billion distros to choose from.
Mx linux is cool.
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)
@Canadian_Cabinet www.tromjaro.com/ - you can try our distro. Based on Manjaro it has all you need to just use it. Enabled the Chaotic AUR repos, flatpaks, and our repo, thus you can find any linux app via one single place. Click and install. Plus we have a list of some 700 curated apps on our website www.tromjaro.com/apps/ - apps that are trade-free. Meaning no BS, no freemiums, no limitations, purely free apps.
We made TROMjaro back in 2018 and kept it up to date since, plus developed our own tools like a Layout and Theme Switcher. See the homepage to get a more detailed idea about it.
That’s all! :)
