60
Yeah I installed that one you're thinking of.
I dual boot Arch and Arch, and I run an Arch hypervisor as well as an Arch vm in each Arch instance.
Yo dawg...
So what I'm hearing is that you're a big fan of Windows 11....
I am vaguely aware of Arch.
Do you use arch containers in the arch VMs?
Hannah Montana Linux?
The only correct answer in this thread.
I've heard good things
The one that makes you happy.
^Or at least overrides the desire to grab a sledgehammer when troubleshooting^
Happiness is achieved through compiling rust
WHY DOES NO ONE GET THAT IT DEPENDS?
...
srsly tho, how do you want your distro to be?
NixOS
Username... almost checks out. It's missing the leading /nix/store/.
Lmao, that had not actually occurred to me before.
If you want to emulate the meme, LFS.
I am a big fan of OpenSuse personally. You have a lot of different options between stable 2-year releases, a rolling release that pairs nicely with a Slowroll monthly snapshot release model if tumbleweed updates too quickly for you, and finally immutable options.
Just installed this on my laptop, been years since I used Linux but I'm looking forward to learning it. Recently also set up proxmox on a new home server so I'm getting right into it this year!
Good analogy by using cars. You can test drive a car. Since a lot (all?) distros have a way to run off a USB, so you can get the general "feel" of it. Then you can go from there. Or if you have room to work with, setting up dual boot isn't that hard (outside of how Windows acts sometimes about it). Asking a lot of people what flavor ice cream they prefer isn't going to help you decide your own.
Mint is pretty much the de facto recommendation for absolute beginners freshly moving away from Windows right now, but LMDE especially will be subject to dealing with older software.
Otoh, any of the Puppy distros are a great option for genuinely old hardware; think AM2+/775 or older, that a lot of heavier distros may or may not struggle on.
Having Socket 775, Puppy Linux and genuinely old hardware in the sentence shook me.
I still remember being in high school playing Minecraft on those Optiplexes, and even before that playing Poptropica and CoolMathGames..
Anything that's not Windows.
My favorite is NixOS, but for the love of GOD do NOT try to install and use it. It's like one of those puzzles you buy in a store, it makes you happy every time you solve it, but it pisses you off every time it breaks and you can't figure out how to fit it.
I'm running kubuntu which I find runs well with no issues (Intel with an NVIDIA card) and plays every game Ive tried to play. I chose kubuntu because I'm more experienced with debian based distros and I like KDE, but I do feel like maybe I should have gone with fedora and KDE instead. Can't really be bothered to distro hop right now though.
So I put kubuntu on my bf's laptop (intel/nvidia), and it's been a painfully bad experience.
Interesting, what hasn't worked? Im running a desktop so might be having less issues due to less bespoke hardware.
I ran it on an Intel/NVIDIA laptop about 10 years ago and had a lot of trouble getting the graphics to work well, particularly the Optimus switching. It never felt like it was working properly and graphics were always sub par to what I got running windows. It was a long time ago in computing terms though.
Kde is laggy in general, taking a full second or longer to do things like open the start menu or other menus.
Graphical glitches on the secondary display, especially in 2d things like steam or various kde menus. displays are mirrored, btw.
Volume slider appears randomly in the middle of both screens, no apparant cause.
Some games that worked fine under windows don't work anymore, like cyberpunk 2077 (which is known to be better under proton than native windows).
Sound sometimes doesn't work, don't know why.
To resolve this, I tried to switch him over to Mint, because that's what I use and it's great on my machine so I should have tried that first. Laptop won't boot that live usb.
edit: another one, cannot open the driver control menu (I forget what it's called) at all.
My 2012 MBP has Intel/ Nvidia graphics and every distribution I’ve ever tried has struggled with that, it seems to just be the way of things.
Have it working perfectly now (disabling Nvidia altogether) but involved both an NVRAM tweak and VGA Switcheroo.
Many distros have failed to even boot to the live USB on that Mac.
Gentoo, everything else is for plebs
I started my first Gentoo install in 2002.
It's almost finished compiling.
I used this for a few months but I just don't really see the upside in compiling my own code lol
CentOS 3.6
I just want it to work and not spy on me. It's not part of my self-image, I don't even own a Tux shirt. It's just a tool.
I run Mint. It works. I'm happy.
Assuming you're a hobbyist who wants to play games, CatxhyOS or Mint would be my suggestion
I like Ubuntu too, but Snaps can be annoying with permission weirdness and odd errors that usually stem from their sandboxing system. To be clear the sandboxing is good in theory, but I tried using the Blender to edit a file I got from a friend and I ran into permissions issues. I ended up deleting the snaps and installing from command line and it was so much better.
Installing blender without the app store is still super easy...
sudo apt install blender
Fedora for sure, generally pretty up to date, lots of users so you can find articles pretty easily, and it’s a lot more stable than Arch BTW
OK but not if you use Fedora
Debian for my workstation desktops, servers, etc, anything that's stable.
Arch for playing around with new toys/features.
If you're new to Linux: Mint. Use Mint, with Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you're hardware is older. It works just how you'd expect.
There's many other distros for other purposes. Bazzite has a lot of people who like it for games. If you really want to control EVERYTHING about your machine there's Arch. If you want bleeding edge software and don't mind/can fix the occasional problem caused by rolling releases then I suggest Manjaro.
But most Windows refugees will be looking for something familiar that works and stays out of their face, and for that the simple answer is Mint.
I've never used Linux, but I'm interested in trying it. Is Mint easy to install?
They're almost all easy to install. Linux isn't hard, it's just different.
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i have two moods:
stable (for a server): debian
rolling release (for gaming): arch
Shout out to the CachyOS crew. Their Discord is helpful. (Booooo, Discord, I know, I know.) They're friendly and helpful.
Can't agree more. I posted about some strange performance issues last summer and Peter talked with me about it privately for a few hours until it was resolved. Ended up needing some kernel patches for my setup that went on to help with the next release
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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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