Comment by 0xperke

Fedora.

Best Linux experience I've ever had. Using it for a few years now, but wish I switched sooner (been using various distros since Ubuntu 8.04). Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit, moderately up-to-date, but not bleeding-edge, vanilla Gnome, no bloat, full systemd commitment, btrfs, few idiosyncrasies, RPMs are widely available, flatpak for the rest. (Don't have a printer tho...)

However, due to e.g. the need to install the Fusion repo for non-free software, I don't think it's suitable for total non-tech beginners, who don't want to touch the terminal at all. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is extremely hands-off, default is bliss experience, but because of their software license policies you likely have to install the Fusion repo at some point and that's not the most straight-forward thing to do.

Only negative for me: The GUI updater wants to install updates during shutdown frequently, which is mighty annoying with full-disk encryption. I live dangerously and do my updates live with dnf, which by the way can be configured to fetch packages in the background, making updating super fast, no need for permanent internet connection.

If you are annoyed by Ubuntu, not old enough for Debian, but already fed up with Arch, please, do try Fedora!

Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished. Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0

Debian Stable is my distro of choice these days, mainly because it respects my time by avoiding frivolous changes, without getting in my way when I want to change specific things.

Setting it up for modern gaming hardware required a couple of extra steps, which I found to be worthwhile. I now have a system that has proved dependable whenever I need to get work done immediately, and very capable whenever I just want to have fun. (The Backports repository makes bridging that gap easy in most cases.)

Linux Mint is what I suggest to new users. It's based on the widely supported Ubuntu distro, has a good sized community, and seems aimed at people who don't already know unix. It also makes a point of stripping out problematic Ubuntu-isms, and has a Debian-based edition waiting in the wings in case that ever becomes unmanageable.

My desktop environment is KDE Plasma, which you can install on just about any distro even if it's not the default. It has a wealth of useful features, lets me tweak or disable them as I see fit, and avoids trying to turn my desktop into a mobile phone interface. (I used Xfce in the past, but its adoption of Gtk 3 transformed it into something that I found frustrating.)

Nobara 43 with KDE Plasma, which is a Fedora variant. I switched in October as a lifelong Windows user and was looking for some distro that would make my transition smooth, I didn't want to start my Linux experience with double pain: learn new OS and have to deal with various kinks. It was more than smooth: Nvidia 5090 with no hitch except a new driver - no prob. My old Kyocera printer worked on first try (never did with Windows). Nobara has a really competent and supportive Discord Community where you can get instant help - which I needed for the upgrade from 42 to 43. It's a small community of 30K people but there's always someone online to help. I appreciate that very much. Best decision ever. Next step: degoogle.

NixOS. Had prior Linux experience, so wasn't too worried about learning multiple new major paradigms in parallel. Also had been running a lil' NixOS server for half a year before that, so I could carry over most of my configuration.nix from there, and also the safe feeling of knowing that if I do mess up stuff, I could with very high probability just reboot to a previous generation and have everything back to working exactly the same as before.

Edit: the two configuration.nixen has since been merged in a single dotfiles repo, which also covers my Macbook via https://nix-darwin.org.

I switched fully to Linux about four years ago. I chose Kubuntu. I had previously used Linux Mint for quite a while, but on a computer that wasn't my main one. I downloaded some ISOs and tried out a few distros in VMs.

I definitely find KDE the most appealing. I'm one of these people who feels like desktop UI pretty much peaked around Win98 or Win2000, and KDE more or less lets me have that experience. It's customizable and works well. It has occasional problems and annoyances, but over time I find they're comparable in magnitude to what I had with Windows.

It always seems like Ubuntu has the best compatibility with stuff overall, in the sense that anything that has a Linux version will almost always explicitly say they support Ubuntu. I looked at some other KDE-based distros but Kubuntu seemed like the safest choice. I had used Linux Mint KDE in the past and was bummed to see it go away; if that still existed I might well have chosen it.

Notably, I had attempted to switch to Linux several years before (around 2014), but wound up going back to Windows because I just encountered too many gotchas. But things were much smoother this time. The main reason I switched was because I felt Windows 10 was getting too intrusive and user-hostile, and also no longer made it easy for me to get the "Windows classic" look and feel that I wanted. I'm glad I switched when I did, because since then those trends have become even more pronounced; I'd probably be pulling my hair out if I were using Windows now. I still have a Win10 VM for situations where I need Windows, but I rarely use it.

Originally started with Xubuntu 22.04, but switched to Mint at the start of March last year since it (Xubuntu) was going to EoL.

Mint does everything I need it to, so there's no need for me to hop.

EndeavourOS with KDE. For some reason, I always seem to have issues with non-Arch distros, even back when I ran Linux on a netbook. After my Fedora install on my Framework 13 broke, I had switched to Manjaro, but after doing a bit of research when I decided to jump in with my desktop 1.5 year ago I went with EndeavourOS and have been quite happy with it.

I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).

Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.

This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.

I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.

Gentoo with KDE plasma, because I can :)

I don't really recommend this route, but I will say that the experience has been pretty great. Once setup the regular maintenance is just boring update commands. Most days, it's a less than 1 minute affair to get everything compiled and up to date.

Arch would be a pretty equivalent experience as would be using bin packages with gentoo.

The printer also was my reason I picked Ubuntu over Arch / Endeavour OS :)

I don't want to tweak hours and Ubuntu was so far always a no brainer. At some point, probably 5 years ago after they switched to GNOME Shell, I even stopped switching the desktop manager and kept using the default one.

I guess i've never really "switched" - I've always used Linux desktops together with Windows desktops - each to the strengths that they are good at it. And this goes back to the late 1990's. There are times I've used more than the other.

But yes Fedora - I have traditionally worked on "Enterprise" Linux where RHEL is the standard, so I track Fedora for bleeding edge development work and target EL for "production".

Don't get me wrong I'm just as comfortable on Debian systems or even building Linux-from-scratch type systems but I really don't have a day to day use case for Linux distributions outside of Fedora/Redhat, they cover all my needs.

PopOS is what I've picked (using it ~6 years). Their new distribution is called Cosmic (Wayland). They've moved away from Gnome to a rust based Iced.

Switched back in 2009 and back then Ubuntu was the easiest to get running.

And I've stuck with it ever since while trying Fedora, Arch and a few others along the way.

I guess it just works for me, know my way around the tooling and can use that knowledge on my Debian servers.

Started with Debian 10 GNOME, switched to KDE 5 for its features, went back because of the design issues(KDE 6 is much better). After a few years I switched and settled on Fedora Silverblue.

With rpm-ostree automatic updates are so reliable it's a set and forget experience.

Debian. Rock solid, dependable. If you need new features, use backports.

I also use Fedora only because it seems like Debian's nvidia driver installation is a big pain, Fedora made it as easy as Ubuntu.

Kubuntu. I wanted the compatibility of Ubuntu, but not the horrible UI.

It's not without its problems, though:

Snaps completely bork the system, so you need to remove snap entirely on Kubuntu (good riddance anyway - snaps are a plague).

Idle suspend is flaky. Sometimes it won't come back. Better to just disable it.

Sometimes the machine just freezes up. Either it completely freezes, or the mouse slows down to 1fps with the entire movement queued up (move the mouse and it'll go exactly where you told it to, over 2-3 minutes).

WIFI was a nightmare, but I switched to ethernet so it's not an issue for me anymore (desktop machine).

Bluetooth is iffy. I just switched to wired speakers.

On the plus side, AI works great!

Pop!OS (22.04) nearly 2 years ago, after having read generally favorable reviews on HN and getting a sense of "monernity/stability/mainstream'ness of Ubuntu without snap and with closer-to-leading-edge kernels" on an Asus Vivobook 17 (my daily personal/WFH driver).

Later (on repurposed low-spec Chromebooks, then on newer deployments just because I came to like it) Crunchbang++ (12, then 13) which is Debian-based.

I avoid printing like the plague, and keep a long-remaining-AUE Chromebook around almost solely for its ability to WiFi-print to our aging Brother laser printer.

Fedora 43 with KDE. It's almost perfect.

Mint because I am a filthy casual. I love Mint. It has been smooth sailing for the past 4 years running it on a 2019 Dell X5. Part of why I lack any motivation to get a new machine is because it still runs very smooth with Mint.

I plan on getting a new machine in the near future. Then I'll use my old Dell as a testing ground for other Distros. Was thinking of testing Tumbleweed first.

CachyOS KDE. My first time using Arch family after meant years of Debian and some Fedora. Honestly fedora is great, and I wanted to try something new.

You know what's fun? Being able to change system fonts, which you can't do on Windows.

I'm using the IBM Plex fonts and they are so good looking.

Linux Mint because it works and doesn't get in my way.