Only reasons I moved off of Mint was that it had minor issues with NVidia gaming performance, and I ended up liking KDE Plasma better than Cinnamon. Was plenty stable, otherwise.
Can't really recommend bazzite, that I moved to, since there's several issues that have proven unsolvable for me, due to the filesystem veing immutable.
Headless: debian
Gui: mint
Been on Bazzite for a while now. Have never been happier in Linux. I'm a software engineer and occasional gamer for context
Fedora worked for me out of the box. The only software I had to install npmfusion (Nvidia driver) for a higher refresh rate and that was easy. But even without that, I had full resolution
Besides Debian?
Debian is also my answer.
Anything "immutable"
Any other answer is outdated and wrong.
Edit: holy shit the amount of mint recommendations is crazy. Stay away from mint, it sucks. It's just a less reliable version of Ubuntu. If all you like its desktop environment, that's called "Cinnamon", and it can be installed in other distros.
LMDE isn't Ubuntu redux. It's what i'm using because it was what i used from the get go 3 years ago and can't be ass'd changing because it works and has never crashed.
90% of what I do is use FF, Joplin, Darktable, Inkscape, Caliber and QBTorrent. A little gaming on Steam and Heroic and messaging on Singal Desktop is the other 10% of my use, so clicking an icon on a dock is about as easy as it gets.
My only minor annoyance is the PrtScr button on my Logitech KB doesn't work (have sollar Installed) but I just use Flameshot anyway.
Mint works perfectly for me, for that same use case
Of the 10~20 distros I tested in these past ~4 years, Mint is the only one I needed to go way out of my way to break anything. Also most of what you'd need is orderly laid out in the "Start menu" (don't remember if it has a specific name on Linux), including there being a GUI-based "app store", so it's also pretty straight forward to install most day-to-day stuff.
I thought you were going to say you had to go way out of your way to fix it at first 😂 I was like wait what?
The only downside of Mint is outdated packages.
Mint Debian Edition
What's different between LMDE and choosing cinnamon when installing debian? Do they change anything under the hood on the debian base?
It's the same Debian base under the hood, but has:
The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the "cinnamon" edition uses Ubuntu as a base. I believe they both actually use cinnamon as the DE.
It's more of a just in case because a lot of the linux community isn't like Conical lately.
Definitely mint for "just works", personally used it on loads of computers and haven't encountered any issues
Nobara for gaming. I've had issues with multiple other distros but Nobara just works. It's based on Fedora but is preconfigured with everything needed to game right away. Every other distro I've had to fix some random issue from Steam not running (latest Fedora) to game controllers needing to be remapped. Nobara sorts this all for you. Fedora for a laptop. It seems to have the best support for a variety of weird hardware. Bazzite for TV gaming. That's basically what it's built for.
Debian.
I think I'm a newcomer to linux even if I did use Ubuntu for many years. But generally I have no idea what I'm doing at any given time.
About a month ago I switched to Debian. No issues. Everything works. I should have changed years ago.
I can imagine a good NixOS config working pretty well. Just need to find someone's repo that has all you need already set up.
Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:
~~Shortlist of~~ Only^[Technically, any of uBlue's distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you'll have an easier time finding resources for it.] recommendation for atomic distros:
As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I'd personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you're not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —^[I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing.] be it through their Discord, Discourse or sub~~reddit~~ — then simply pivot to the traditional distros.
what is wayland and how important is it?
If you have HDR monitors or high resolution screens, that need fractional scaling you’re better off with Wayland and KDE.
what is wayland
Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to 'the system' with all the necessary details. After which 'the system' does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.
how important is it?
Very. Basically, either it or its 'predecessor'^[The term is used loosely here, because there's a very big difference between the two.] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything^[Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don't go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*.] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment^[Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet.] of the surrounding ecosystem.
Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
If you want to focus primarily on gaming that can also do basic office work, check out Bazzite. If you want to do primarily basic office work that can also do gaming, check out either Bluefin or Aurora depending on whether you prefer Gnome or KDE, respectively.
All three are sister distros and are part of the immutable distros collection. Unless you actively want to tinker with your system level files, immutable distros keep everything that you need to run your computer read only. The only things you can mess up are your own files, so as long as you reboot from time to time, your computer will always be up to date and working. The result is you spend less time trying to get your computer working and more time doing whatever it is you want to be doing on it.
A lot of people will recommend Mint or Ubuntu. They're… fine, but they're not what they once were and you can do better. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to run Arch unless you are into mining your own silicon.
I will say the major stability improvement on immutables is just running apps in flatpaks. You take any of the stock systems (debian, opensuse, fedora) pick a popular desktop env like kde or gnome, and install nothing but updates to the baseos and flatpaks and you will be very stable.
I do love my bazite, bluefin, and kinote though.
I've layered a bunch of packages and have never had stability issues because of it
I mean that it just as stable as the base system plus a snapshot on update shrug
which yeah, is generally alright
Mint. It’s just good out of the box.
If you tell us what hardware you’re on, we might have other suggestions… but probably still Mint.
All the popular distros are more reliable than Windows 🤷
I really hate to be that person but that is unfortunately not always been my experience 😅
I've been using linux for like 10 years and aside from when I was doing really weird customization shit windows isnt supposed to even be able to do, I had pretty much zero issues. I've definitely experienced my fair share of jank on linux. I love it anyway, but as a less technical person I'm not entirely convinced thats always the case woth any popular distro
Depends on your hardware. I have had lots of issues with Linux regarding audio quality over Bluetooth, sound quality over laptop speakers, wifi driver reliability (had to disable power save), wake from sleep. For older NVDIA cards you can choose either the unsupported old binary drivers on an old kernel version or terrible performance and bugs with the free nouveau drivers. Wayland doesn’t work with the old binary drivers either.
Getting consistent theming between different versions of Qt and GTK working feels like an impossible task.
Mint, debian, fedora, Ubuntu, freebsd, tails have all been pretty simple experiences imo
Pretty much just stay away from cutting edge, rolling release, build from source, beta, testing branch etc and you'll be fine, look for something with LTS in the versions name
Freebsd? That one surprises me.
TempleOS
Depends, how new is your hardware? Bleeding edge hardware is probably going to do better on a bleeding edge distro. Or at least a rolling release.
Old and crusty? Anything Debian or Ubuntu based should be more than stable.
I should probably change to Debian. Ubuntu has become a bit of a dumpster fire from its former glory as Debian for noobs. Also avoid Nvidia if you want it just works. (Nvidia can work... probably better than it used to but if you don't want to screw with things)
I've been very happy with CachyOS but would probably recommend Fedora.
I installed catchyos last week and it's almost creepy how everything "just works"
No issues with bazzite or kubuntu.
I don’t use them myself but Debian or Ubuntu are probably what you’re looking for.
If you have an Nvidia GPU, it's hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.
If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.
No one ever seems to recommend PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) despite it being around since 2003 and created by Bill Reynolds. It is my go-to distro when someone asks me to choose and install Linux for them for the first time. I get the fewest follow-up phone calls of all the "beginner" (not bleeding edge) distros I've tried.
For gaming, Bazzite. It has been enough of an improvement that it has changed my opinion on immutable OS'. In my office, I use Ubuntu on Desktop/ Debian on server. But, I'm not sure those are the right answers in 2026. Ubuntu hasn't exactly made the best decisions over the last 10 years or so, I keep using them mostly out of momentum.
@PlzGivHugs not quite "just works" entirely, but I've grown more accustomed with MX Linux. Everything is pretty much just one click away tucked into the MX Tools app and you don't need lots of skills to use it. Some of the said apps might open inside a terminal, but their options are pretty well explained.
Ehhh, I'd recommend against MX if only because they don't ship with a more approachable app-store like Linux mint does.
MX's app installer tool is more similar to Aptitude, which is to say, completely functional, but entirely text based (no screenshots, reviews of apps, etc) which isn't to say it's wrong or bad, but I'd wager it'd be offputting to the average person compared to the more image-heavy and user-friendly design of app-store that Mint or Gnome-based distros have.
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