@ekZepp For me, it's Debian. It always just works.
i might try various other distros for my desktop usage. But for my home server it will always be Debian. Rock solid.
Same. EndeavourOs on the desktop but the rest of the Homeland is Debian.
For me it’s Mint Debian Edition.
Unless you need nvidia drivers from this century
That's okay. Thanks to their insane pricing caused by covid, followed by more insane pricing caused by the AI bubble, many people are still running cards not getting any new drivers anyway.
1080ti still works great
Don't forget NFTs!
Fuck nvidia
Amen
I changed one of my PCs over to Debian this month, and I was surprised at how smooth it is. I guess I was expecting it to be way more barebones. I don't know if I need more than this!
Went back to Mint a few times but ultimately I like Plasma over Cinnamon, so Debian it is!
You do know that you don't have to change distros to change DE right?
Mint has been glazed since the beginning of time. Not a single laptop or computer I have ever owned has worked out of the box with it. As opposed to alternatives like Ubuntu or Fedora. I must be the single most unlucky person in the history of Linux.
I’ve had the opposite experience. Mint has just worked on literally every piece of hardware I’ve ever owned.
I've had the exact same experience.
Is it always a new laptop/computer?
I'd be suspicious of Mint on anything brand new (and hence only recently fixed in a lot of packages).
Fedora
From the bottom of my heart fuck rolling releases. Never worked for me (nobody get worked up please, ymmv).
Yup, I do regular distrofuckery on my spare pc but Mint is just a rock solid option for me, great distro, feels good.
An OS should GTFO and let you get on with the business of doing shit on your computer, Linux Mint does that nicely. 🐧
except it doesn't. Fixed release model quite easily gets in a way of doing shit. Need to add a PPA into config for each separate package you need the latest release of, or simply because the package itself is absent in the normal repo doesn't help either. And don't get me started on troubleshooting after "doing shit".
Something like fedora does a much better job if you prefer fixed release, but if you like to experiment and "do shit", arch derivatives like Endeavor or Cachy are just better suited for you. All of the above also have a much nicer documentation than Mint.
+1 for Fedora being the best distro for getitng out of your way so you can get on with doing stuff.
Why bother with distro hopping when you can desktop hop?
I never left!
I think I'm just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think "that's a youngster's game."
Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn't broken!
Man... I just fucking love CachyOS. I switched from Win11 a few weeks ago and up until now it is just a great experience.
Neckbeard here. I run Arch btw.
The second sentence was superfluous.
There is no one reliable distro. Mint, itself is based off Ubuntu and also releases LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
If reliablility is measured in terms of how stable a distro is, then likely Debian with it's conservative approach to packaging updates comes to mind (No wonder large number of distros are based off Debian only).
I would even argue as long as someone isn't messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon( meant to showcase KDE packages) or Linuxfx (or whatever it has renamed itself to, one of the few shady ones IMO ) or Trisquel OS (a GNU certified distro where running into dependency hell isn't new); it will suit user's case.
Debian, Slackware, Void, Zorin, even rolling release like Arch (basically any one that meets the user's use case is reliable)
I would even argue as long as someone isn’t messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon
KDE Neon is dead because its developers found out that putting an add-on repository on top of Ubuntu is not reliable at all. That's why KDE Linux is now in development.
Fedora for me tbh
Mint is decent too though
I feel like I’m missing out on the mint hype train tbh. I’ve never tried it before but there’s an ignorant part of me that’s like “how much better could it possibly be than Ubuntu with Cinnamon?”. I know it must be because so many people default to it and rave about it, even after using Ubuntu.
My default ol reliable used to be Solus Linux. God I loved that distro. I had an install that lasted 4 years straight, no issues whatsoever.
But in recent years I’ve taken a major liking to Bazzite. Oh my god it’s incredible: immutable OSs are fucking amazing. I shouldn’t be trusted with accessing system files, it never ends well. So this really helps.
Limewire?
Linux Mint
/j
Tumbleweed
I'm a relative basic bitch, I don't want to spend forever in terminal. Mint has been a god send and I'm so happy I left windows for it. A special shout out to steam for being the goat and making what little gaming I do easy.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don't like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Here is my distrohopping journey: Mint -> Arco -> Debian -> KDE Neon -> Artix -> Void -> NixOS -> Fedora -> Void
Just switched from Mint to CachyOS due to some upgraded hardware and it's been pretty nice so far. Mint will stay on all my other devices though.
Hint: :q!
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