Comment by jimmar

Just use Debian. If you have technical skills, run Debian Testing. If not, run Debian Stable, or someone else who repackages Debian Testing such as Mint or (as you mentioned) Ubuntu LTS.

Debian Testing will sometimes break, so technical skills are necessary if you want to always be sure you can be up and running. Otherwise, something may not work for a few days to a week, like CUPS (printing). 99.9% of the time, it won't be your networking or something super-important, but it could be. When you update, read the list of changes and absolutely make sure that you know what the things are that are being uninstalled, and whether you can do without them for a few days. Check the internet for when packages are removed from testing (and why) or will be moved into testing from unstable. Don't forget that you can use LLMs now when you have a problem.

Once you've been able to handle Debian Testing for a while, especially through a couple of breakages, you'll probably be confident enough and knowledgeable enough to know if you want to go to another distro. I personally don't need anything other than testing for my desktops, and stable for my servers.

edit: Debian Testing gets software that has worked smoothly on Debian Unstable for a two-week period. Sometimes things get missed during those two weeks, and sometimes Debian decides to reorganize packages radically in a way that takes more than one update. One thing to remember is that urgent bugfixes to Debian Stable might bypass testing altogether, and might actually arrive later to testing than everywhere else. You'll probably hear about those on the news or on HN, and you might want to manually install those fixes before they actually hit testing.

Don't go for Ubuntu LTS. There are many choices that would work equally well for you. I'd go for Fedora KDE edition (but could easily be EndeavorOS or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

Absolutely don’t use Ubuntu LTS when you’re new (or old) to Linux.

As a beginner, just pick Ubuntu and get on with your life imo. Switching distros isn't that big of a lift later on and pretty much everything you learn carries over from one to the other. It's much more worthwhile to just pick _something_ and learn some basics and become comfortable with the OS imo.

Pick a popular distro, and during installation, put your /home directory on its own partition. This way, you won't have much to reconfigure if you ever have a reason to switch distros. (You might not ever have a reason; they're all pretty capable.)

If using Ubuntu LTS for gaming, you might want to add a newer kernel: https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle

Linux Mint would also be a reasonable pick.

Ubuntu is optimised for corporations, as this is the main source of income for Canonical. Try Debian _testing_.

Ubuntu stopped caring about the desktop experience when the switched to Gnome. Now they have annoying SNAPs. They are a business and they are going to continue enshitifying it.

I haven't tried Bazzite because I'm not into gaming but Linux Mint is working very well for a lot of people coming from Windows. It just works and has great defaults. Windows users seem to pick it up pretty easily.

Also, Linux Mint upgrades very well. I've had a lot of success upgrading to new versions without needing to reinstall everything. Ubuntu and other distros I've tried often have failed during upgrading and I had to reinstall.

I think fragmentation is the wrong way to look at it; they're all basically compatible at the end of the day. It's more like an endless list of people who want to min-max.

Any reasonably popular distro will have enough other users that you can find resources for fixing hitches. The deciding factor that made me go with EndeavourOS was that their website had cool pictures of space on it. If you don't already care then the criteria don't need to be any deeper than that.

Once you use it enough to develop opinions, the huge list of options will thin itself out.