linuxmemes

I dual boot Arch and Arch, and I run an Arch hypervisor as well as an Arch vm in each Arch instance.

Hannah Montana Linux?

The one that makes you happy.

^Or at least overrides the desire to grab a sledgehammer when troubleshooting^

According to a survey of the Linux community, the best distro is always not the one that you picked.

Debian.

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.

i have two moods:

stable (for a server): debian

rolling release (for gaming): arch

NixOS

Fedora. It's the one Linus uses.

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.

Gentoo, everything else is for plebs

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.

Unless its like arch or gentoo does the distro matter that much? Like its mostly just the default settings which you can tweak. I feel like 90% of distrohopping is just wanting to try a new UI which can you just install yourself.

The main difference is package management so rolling release vs LTS vs 6 month cycle.

In practice we really need to stop using dynamic dependencies/package managers for most applications, for desktop usecase its just not a good pattern anymore, honestly I feel its like 99% of the reason the linux desktop never took off, app dev is just a pain. Thankfully stuff like flatpak and appimage exist now

I use Arch by the way

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

TL;DR: Ubuntu + KDE Plasma (=Kubuntu) + X11 (Wayland fucks with my Firefox)

First thing to acknowledge about Linux is that you have 2 choices in front of you about how you want to configure your operating system:

Distro, and desktop environment.

A distro or distribution for short is the part of the operating system that runs programs, updates them, etc. A distro like Ubuntu will incorporate different code syntactically than another distro like Fedora, but will largely perform the same actions. For instance, to update all of your apps/programs in Ubuntu, you would run sudo apt-get update. To do the same thing in Fedora, you would run sudo dnf update. Other than that, different distros might be optimized for some things over others. Bazzite and SteamOS are distros that optimize for gaming, while Debian is optimized for long-term stability for things like servers.

Desktop environment (DE) on the other hand is all about what you see on your screen. It's the visual portion of your operating system. In my opinion, the choice of DE for you comes down to what's comfortable to use and/or what you grew up with previously. So if you grew up using Windows computers, then DEs like KDE Plasma or Cinnamon would work for you. If you grew up on Mac computers instead, Gnome would be your best choice.

For me, I got exposed to Linux with my Steam Deck, so I wanted to mirror the Deck's Desktop Mode on my laptop. The Steam Deck uses ~~Fedora~~ Arch as the distro and KDE Plasma as the DE. I changed the distro for my new Framework laptop to Ubuntu because I'm more familiar with that, having used Ubuntu computers in middle and high school and dabbling with Ubuntu virtual machines on Windows in the past. KDE Plasma is chill because it reminds me of Windows the most.

And of course, distro and DE aren't the only choices you have on Linux... You have your display server engine like X11 or Wayland, and the seemingly limitless assortment of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives to your favorite apps/programs on Windows/Mac/Android/iOS.

Edit: Steam Deck uses the Arch distro instead of Fedora.

CachyOS is my way

WHY DOES NO ONE GET THAT IT DEPENDS?
... srsly tho, how do you want your distro to be?

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.

Debian for my workstation desktops, servers, etc, anything that's stable.

Arch for playing around with new toys/features.

Shout out to the CachyOS crew. Their Discord is helpful. (Booooo, Discord, I know, I know.) They're friendly and helpful.

I like fedora because it uses Duke Nukem Forever as its package manager.

linuxfromscratch.org

Fedora KDE

I have used quite a few, but my longest used ones, in order, are ZorinOS, Linux Mint, KDE Neon, and now Bazzite.

I'd only shoot recommendations once I hear your use case, experience, and willingness to learn