Forewarning: I don’t intend to respond to debates that have turned toxic in comments. Knowing how this topic can be, please don’t aim create one.
Context
With the EoL of consumer Windows 10 recently, I have had a fair few friends and family that have moved over or are preparing to move to a Linux distro in the near future, with my guidance. As such, I wanted to gauge some of the community for what distros and editions (default DE’s) that many are actually recommending for others, as well as ones that are recommended to avoid. In additional, I am curious what stipulations are tied to said recommendations (limitations, specific use-cases). In a lot of Lemmy and Reddit threads, Mastodon posts, and YouTube comment sections I have scoured, I have seen many recommendations, some that I currently strongly know why you would or wouldn’t recommend something. If you care to read what I have to say, I also want to know why my choices do or don’t hold up for use cases you’ve encountered. I have definitely not tried every hardware combination, distro, desktop environment, or other component, and want to know if I am missing anything from others’ experience.
My Own Criteria and Top Recommendations
Wayland
I have a few things that I largely see as important for a functional desktop distro that can be recommended for most, if not all use cases. The first is a Wayland-first desktop environment. After using Linux on my own computers for over 10 years, I have suffered through (especially on NVidia) dealing with X.Org and the often severe limitations that can arise. Ten years later on the biggest Wayland environments, we have a pretty firm lack of screen tearing (which leads to an experience that feels much smoother than X.Org or Windows ever did). We also have variable refresh rate support, different refresh rates on different monitors actually working correctly, HDR support, and even cromulent fractional scaling. For all of the faults with the fighting over FreeDesktop protocol specification for Wayland, most of everything that is needed is here, with certain exceptions like some applications missing global hotkeys, some applications sucking at screen capture, and a lack of applications being able to request positioning controls of their windows (primarily for multi-window applications like KiCAD). In which case, having a X.Org fallback environment is still useful for the more deal breaker problems in occasionally needed applications.
KDE
With that in mind, I think by-and-far that KDE’s approach to desktop development has led to a project that is fairly reliable, yet almost completely uncompromising. KDE has made a lot of things work for “standard” desktop users (i.e. not power users that know how to work a terminal). While still being flexible for power users, and not lacking most of every feature that someone could want out of their environment and applications. Most of everything in KDE that at one time required some level of terminal use has been made into a graphical application.
Viewing SystemD journals? There’s an app for that. Viewing hardware utilization, temperatures, and process info? There’s an app for that. Video editing? There’s an app for that. Permission management for Flatpaks? There’s a settings applet for that. Setting permanent mount points for new drives? There’s an app for that. Connecting to your phone for wireless file transfer? There’s an app for that.
I could honestly go on that as far as completeness goes for a variety of the common and less common tasks. KDE covers a lot of different tasks to perform and works well with a wide variety of different applications for more specific tasks (photo editing, 3D modeling, CAD, game design, gaming, screen recording, note taking, office suites, audio editors, VOIP and web chat applications, etc.). KDE is by far an environment that doesn’t assume much of anything about other applications, causing the least amount of issues compared to environments like GNOME or certain window managers. With all of what makes KDE what it is, I tend to lean heavily toward distros that have good support for the environment. Additionally, modern NVidia cards with the NVidia-open drivers seem to work quite well with KDE whereas on other environments may not be as seamless and reliable from what I have seen.
Pipewire
Another big aspect of that leads to my distro choice is what sound server is the default choice. Back when I started using Linux, it was mostly a field of ALSA + PulseAudio, a couple studio distros that ship ALSA + JACK, and some minimalist distros that were plain ALSA. For most use cases, it was easy to argue that PulseAudio added the right features to be usable for standard desktop and laptop PCs. Now we have Pipewire, which while not the default for every desktop-oriented distro, arguably should be the default experience new users are shipped. PulseAudio had and still has a lot of trouble with various audio devices where even plain ALSA would give less problems at the cost of usability. In many devices I have tested, devices that had problems with PulseAudio don’t have these problems with Pipewire. A good portion of these devices include the integrated audio chipsets on various motherboards (RealTek audio mostly), which is a big deal as the motherboard audio outputs and inputs are very commonly used. Pipewire even has the benefit of being able to be interacted with both as PulseAudio and JACK, meaning that PulseAudio utilities and JACK utilities will still work quite well for the power users that want/need them.
Minimal Required Terminal Usage
One thing I look for in a distro + desktop environment is how much of the terminal is expected to be used. I have touched upon in it already in my preferred desktop recommendation, but overall most desktop-oriented distros aren’t completely independent of the user needing to use a terminal. I think that the occasional oddball system setting or some straight-to-the-point diagnostic tool/script is fine, but requiring regular use for common applications is a bad idea. I personally use the terminal a lot, but a year before the Windows 10 EoL I really started getting a feel for how graphical applications are used in place of terminal applications and utilities, so that I have all of the relevant information for how to do common pain point tasks while using minimal to no terminal usage.
In many cases, the stigma around Linux users needing to regularly use the terminal is mostly gone for many mainstream desktop-focused distros, and the only thing really holding that stigma for new users is every tutorial being written as generically as possible, rather than how to do a thing in different desktop environments. Many of the (more well-written) tutorials were written by people who want to quickly and efficiently solve the issue, even if that means using tools many users may not be comfortable with.
Distro Hopping
This is a short one, but I really dislike recommending something that I know that the user will likely want to jump away from in the future. Many distros have all since caught up in usability and ease-of-use to what used to be recommended as ‘training-wheels’ distros to the point where it seems that having to reinstall to a different distro and potentially learning a new desktop environment in a year or two might be doing more harm than good for the user who just wants to use their computer in the way they see fit. The only use case I could see is moreso recommending legacy distros for users on legacy hardware or distros with pre-installed and pre-configured proprietary drivers in the cases where it is too difficult to bootstrap the installation of said proprietary drivers after installing the core distro.
Filesystem
Finally, there is the lesser point of what default filesystem is used during installation. CoW filesystems like btrfs have become quite reliable, have very useful features (differential snapshots, subvolumes, checksumming). Particularly, my own setups for snapshots and checksumming have saved me from particularly bad file edits or from drive pre-failure (gradual failure). While I think ext4, xfs, and other filesystems are still perfectly fine choices currently, this is something that will weigh heavier toward filesystems like btrfs in time. Ext4 in particular isn’t the most resilient to gradual drive failure, and I have in the past ended up with quietly corrupted files without much warning from the drive that ended up having a very short remaining life. If I weren’t proactive in spotting and investigating the problem, I could have very well lost the full contents of that drive as SMART only start failing self-test very shortly before full drive failure. Meanwhile with my experience with pre-failure on BTRFS, a filesystem will happily go read-only if there a checksum failures in the filesystem, which can very easily point out that something has gone wrong and will either need maintenance or a drive swap. As more distros than just OpenSUSE actually implement some sort of competent snapshot feature as a default in installs, CoW filesystems will become more of a game-changer for regressions in updates, restoring mangled or deleted user files, etc.
What I Currently Recommend
I have a few choice picks for my current recommended distros that I personally recommend. For the primary use case of generic computing (light office usage, mostly web browsing, maybe a bit of photo editing) I will generally recommend an LTS distro, namely Debian or OpenSUSE Leap, with the KDE desktop. Both current versions of Debian and Leap include a version of Plasma 6 and have done a good job of being usable with minimal problems on such hardware.
For more avid users (often what would be considered power users on Windows) or target hardware that is too new for a given LTS distro, distros like Fedora KDE Workstation and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE are my prime choices. Fedora can take a bit of extra setup and require a bit of terminal usage in said setup (Appstream data for RPMFusion, future kernel versions installing kernel-devel for out-of-tree modules, setting the nvidia-open flag for proprietary NVidia drivers). Overall, both work quite well. I tend to lean toward Fedora due to the 6-month point release with semi-rolling kernel and mid-cycle DE version refresh versus full-rolling of Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed does utilize btrfs snapshots with selection in the boot loader for easy rollback from any regressions in updates however, making the big downside of a rolling release less painful.
Finally, for more gaming-focused use-cases, I have started recommending Bazzite recently. A Wayland-first immutable distro based on Fedora Kinoite with ready-made downloads for pre-installed proprietary drivers genuinely provides a painless experience for a gaming-focused environment. Installing any software that doesn’t come packaged as a Flatpak can start to show the cracks in ease-of-install compared to a non-immutable distro. As such, the user’s focus in primarily gaming and what can be done with applications with flatpak distribution is something that should be verified before recommending.
What I Currently Recommend New Users Avoid
- Manjaro (extensive track record for poor maintenance, cannot deliver what it aims to promise)
- Ubuntu (poor 6 month point release QA, lower LTS release quality than its parent distro, Snap, Canonical’s wasted efforts in canned projects)
- Arch Linux (distro explicitly intended for tinkerers, explicitly expects reading release notes every update)
- SteamOS (distro not intended for general usage, explicit hardware targets)
- Pop! OS (one major incident of poor packaging, poor management of LTS release schedule, not Wayland-first (yet), no KDE default)
- Linux Mint (not Wayland-first (yet), dropped KDE default)
- Kali Linux, Parrot OS (pentest-focused niche distros even if there is a desktop installer variant)
I’ve tried a few distros recently in my efforts to migrate away from Windows. I landed on Solus https://getso.us/ for my own personal use and I’ve been very happy with it. I’m a power user of course, but Solus just feels solid to me. No stability issues, no significant driver issues (details below), very easy to work with / low learning curve, no real need for terminal commands or tinkering, and all of the apps that I use on a regular basis are available and easy to install.
They’ve implemented the KDE Discover app in a recent release to manage packages (they used to only have their own package manager by default). Discover combines their own curated repository of apps that are known/designed to work well with Solus along with Flathub so users have options to install other apps, all from one place. I like the approach since it seems to offer increased stability.
The default Budgie DE is just okay. It’s fine, functional, and easy to use, but there are some quirks that I don’t love that make it feel a little incomplete in some small ways (i.e. you can’t really customize the start menu). I’m personally willing to make the tradeoff for the simplicity that it offers overall. That said, they do offer Plasma, Gnome, and Xfce builds. Plasma was my second favorite and I think it might be a better choice for a newbie.
The only problem I’ve had with drivers/compatibility on my modern Dell laptop is jumping through some hoops to get the fingerprint reader working and enabling hibernation which really wasn’t necessary, just a personal preference.
Another distro that caught my eye that I haven’t tested personally yet is ArduinOS https://www.anduinos.com/ . It’s another distro that touts a default DE layout reminiscent of Windows to make it easy to switch. However, it is Ubuntu + Gnome based, so take that as you will.
For the general “W10 is EOL but I don’t want W11” user, I would suggest Linux Mint Debian Edition. Much more solid IMO, being based directly on Debian, doesn’t fuss really at all (even when tinkered with, like mine), and can handle pretty much everything Windows can. It also fully supports my 7900XTX GPU out of the box.
I fully agree with you. I have converted a few “regular user” Windows desktops to LMDE in recent months. They are all quite happy and the “tech support” required has been almost zero.
The OP made “Wayland first” a criteria which disqualifies LMDE as it will default to X11 for perhaps another year.
While I agree with their Wayland comments, I think LMDE (and Mint in general) are great new user distros. Both offer “comfortable” UX for Windows users. A new user probably does not care about Wayland vs X11. Mint has made it clear that the future is Wayland and may even go Wayland by default in 2026 and they will auto migrate users when they do. They are just being conservative in terms of declaring it ready. Is that a bad thing?
I personally don’t like LTS Linux distros because Linux is always changing, and unlike Windows, overwhelming for better. Plus security patches are not always backported because the threat severity of fixed bugs isn’t always properly categorized. I don’t like the following LTS distros: Ubuntu/Mint, Debian, Leap. I also don’t like distros which don’t have good defaults in respect to security hardening. Fedora and openSUSE are my ideal distros.
For example, I recently installed Mint for an older family member and it has been alright. X.Org kinda sucks and she has encountered buggy behavior with apps crashing or desktop freezing. I personally used the desktop I gave them with openSUSE Tumbleweed and encountered no such issues. I just went with Mint, against my best judgment because it is so widely recommended.
Since GNOME and KDE Plasma have first-class Wayland support, I basically only recommend those two DEs. I personally like the look of GTK4 apps more than Qt, and GNOME apps over KDE, but the freedom of KDE Plasma is superior.
The distros I recommend are as follows:
General Use: Criteria: general purpose, SELinux, modern technologies (Pipewire, Wayland, close to upstream kernel)
- Fedora Workstation/KDE
- openSUSE Slowroll/Tumbleweed
Gaming: Criteria: gaming focus, baby easy install process, modern version of Mesa and kernel, first class Nvidia support
- PikaOS (rolling-Debian)
- Bazzite (Fedora atomic)
- Nobara (Fedora traditional)
- CachyOS (Arch Linux)
LTS ≠ insecure. Important security patches are part of what makes an LTS distro, well, LTS.
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is…ok. I’m not a fan of the direction Canonical has chosen to take. I run Linux Mint Debian Edition on both of my machines, and - outside of some oddball tinkering I tend to do that’s not applicable in any way to normal users - it’s been rock solid. Even considering the tinkering… I’ve killed a few Ubuntu installs with less tinkering.
Fedora gets version updates pretty often. I didn’t like that. Packages for various 3rd party software, like games and whatnot, wouldn’t always be ready for whatever new version rolled out. I wouldn’t recommend that to any “normal” user.
The kind of security issues you are worried about doesn’t really apply to normal users. For anyone who wants their machine to “just work”, IMO, Linux Mint Debian Edition is the way to go.
I’m currently OS shopping, and saw a video of a PikaOS install that looked extremely easy and painless. The fact that it prompts you to install the “gaming meta” packages right up front is clutch. I think I might give that a go as my first install.
I definitely forgot about it when writing but was definitely criteria for me when choosing my current desktop distro and the lineage of server distros was having some sort of MAC component (SELinux or AppArmor) with configured policies available in the distro repos. While it could be argued that a MAC component isn’t that necessary for desktop, I do believe for the rising marketshare of the Linux desktop that having the second stage of exploit protection will help mitigate some more severe malware attacks.
I do wonder about PikaOS and CachyOS as recommendations for specifically how the packaging and rollback availability is done on them. I’ll be taking a look at both later in VMs to see how they function to an end-user. CachyOS seems to rebuild the Arch packages for newer x86 architecture and other optimizations specifically among other tweaks such as the modified kernel. Then there is PikaOS which is based on Debian Sid but apparently has patches on top of. I am not currently sure to what extent the patching is and if the project is attempting to catch breakages and regressions that make it into Sid.
There is the other point I have of more ‘niche’ distros like PikaOS, CachyOS, and Nobara, Bazzite to a lesser extent. I do wonder of the longevity of many of them. If not from developer burnout, financials, or the other standard culprits but from much of what makes the distros currently unique being absorbed by more mainstream distros. The work that projects like CachyOS, Nobara, and PikaOS are certainly important, but I feel that things like the higher x86 build targets, kernel patches, etc. will eventually make it into the upstream projects as well. PikaOS will probably have a longer lifespan than say CachyOS due to Debian likely will be among the last distros to drop support for older x86_64 processors, but I think the point does stand. Will the current ‘testbed’ distros still remain in say 5-10 years?
I’m not a big fan of recommending neither Fedora nor openSUSE for first-time Linux users. Both of these require you to use terminal to add third-party repository (which is also a topic of discussion in itself) and swap your ffmpeg/mesa/video player to a 3rd-party repo one. That gives users a pretty bad first time experience.
Actually, you don’t have to via terminal! For OpenSUSE, you can use YaST to enable Packman and RPMFusion provides instructions to download the primary repo packages in a browser. Additionally, there is a more generic and slightly more technical way of providing repo URLs and managing additional repos from within PackageKit frontends like Discover. There is currently the point against RPMFusion that the Appstream data isn’t automatically configured upon update after adding the repos due to a bug in dnf5. Supposedly this is fixed now, but I haven’t verified the functionality again in a fresh setup. I’ll update this post later if it is indeed fixed.
Edit:
Tested Fedora 43 and Tumbleweed in VMs for quirk updates.
Tumbleweed’s third-party repos (NVidia, Packman at least) still don’t have Appstream data, meaning packages have to be installed through YaST, but can be updated through PackageKit frontends.
The particular DNF5 bug is fixed and functional, but PackageKit frontends don’t actually pull the appropriate packages in (perform group updates). This does mean that unfortunately there is at least one terminal command needed (
dnf update @core) before jumping back to GUI and going from there.So, mostly terminal-free on Fedora and still terminal-free on OpenSUSE, just with little freedom of installer choice.
Thanks for writing this down. That’s pretty comprehensive and looks like solid advice. I’d add “good documentation” and help readily available to the list. It’s really nice for new users if they’re able to find information on common woes, so they’re enabled to figure things out by themselves, instead of using some more obscure distribution.
Pop!_OS is Wayland first if you use the new COSMIC DE. I know you’re not recommending that over KDE but I think it’s a valid option for power users.
In general I’ve been recommending Bazzite to noobs. Most average users will strictly benefit from using an immutable distro in general. If they brick it they can almost always simply rollback to their previous image, no backup necessary.
I definitely think COSMIC will be quite good, based on the progress I’ve seen. We’ll have to see how many of the relevant Wayland protocols are implemented in the stable releases, but it could be a good recommendation given that System76 seem to care about not breaking desktop applications for reasons. I just don’t recommend it now because it is still in beta.
Yeah, agreed. I use it on my laptop that runs Arch. For those comfortable on the bleeding edge it’s great, but it’s probably gonna be like a year before it’s fully ready
I generally point the direction you do, few of these are hard and fast rules for me.
Wayland
This problem is taking care of itself. It was kind of rough there for a bit but except for certain “we focus on legacy devices” distros most either have or are working on Wayland support.
PipeWire
Yeah audio is still a sore spot in Linux, and frankly in PCs in general. Why do I need some janky piece of software called ALSAJackRetask to plug a 5.1 surround sound system into a Linux PC? Why can’t I select that from the DE’s audio manager dialog? Audio is too brittle, it needs annealing.
Desktop Environment
Most of what I do is steer folks around Gnome. I have a particularly loud impatience for Gnome’s Not Like The Other Girls energy. Unless you’ve got weird hardware limits that require a lightweight DE like LXDE, I’m going to install KDE or Cinnamon. Cinnamon, as far as I know, is lagging a bit with Wayland adoption, so on newer hardware for the moment I’m aiming folks at KDE, though I think Cinnamon is comfier for those transitioning existing hardware.
What I Recommend
Fedora KDE or Mint Cinnamon, maybe Fedora Kinote or Bazzite for a mostly entertainment box.
What I Recommend Against
- Any GNOME based distro.
- Ubuntu, they’ve sketched me out more than once.
- Arch or any Arch-based distro, because if you’re going Arch you’re your own problem.
- SteamOS for the moment, because it’s kind of hacky how you have to go about it.
- Kali, TAILS, anything that is designed for weird edge cases, because they’re for weird edge cases.
- Bazzite, for your only or main computer. I’ve been playing with it, and…I’m not so sure about it, but for a gaming rig or HTPC or something its worth a look.
My first distro was Bazzite, and I switched to Garuda to get away from immutability.
Maybe it’s silly, but it pissed me off to not be able to change my login screen background.
I have never had problems with Nvidia drivers with these distros, and Arch on Garuda has been easy. Honestly, I don’t know what all the fuss is about over these. Maybe I just got lucky with my choices.
Also I use xfce, it just looked straightforward. It has some quirks regarding the application bar, but had otherwise been pretty straightforward.
My big thing with recommending Arch and ‘direct’ derivatives (those that don’t repackage the Arch repositories with their own package versions). Is that Arch explicitly recommends for users to always read the latest release notes on the archwiki homepage before any upgrade, due to breakages sometimes being let in. This either means that every user will need to be their own system maintainer and input their judgement into each update or will need snapshots to restore to and the hope that breaking changes will eventually fix themselves out, if they don’t want to reconfigure parts of their OS themselves. If direct derivatives implement automatic btrfs system snapshots that can be selected from like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed does, I think such a derivative could be recommended to more experienced computers users in lieu of other distros like Fedora or Tumbleweed.
Maybe you are right. I can only say I have been using it for a couple of years and haven’t had any trouble.
I use zorin and hope to get off my but and play with bazzite. quite simply zorin is the lazy distribution. its an ubuntu respin that has a windows feel and is out of the box. so comes with all the software some could generically expect to use. play and edit video and audio, burn disks, make documents, browse the web, get more software in the gui, wine with play on linux allowing for a lot of windows stuff to be run. That being said its gnome based. I did finally install kde to have easy snap to and such. Its great for having something that once you install is fully functional for 99% of what the average person does on a computer. Again its lazy. Its linux so you can add stuff and configure as you want but if you don’t the average user will find it more capable than a fresh windows or osx install. The two big downsides is as an out of the box it installs a bunch of stuff by default. So it is by no means a lean distro. The other is its not a gaming distro with proton. So I am guessing if someone wants gaming they should go with a gaming distro (thus my long term intent to play with bazzite) and if they want to have a minimal amount of sofware install it would be good to go with a lean distro. But for install and go super lazy I just want my computer to do the things anyone would expect it to do. Its great. Oh one last bad part from your post. Its based on ubuntu lts and its usually behind so its in no way bleeding edge. quite the opposite.
I mostly agree with you, except for section of (un)/recommending distros.
(my personal bias is for arch and debian, i love them)
for example, I do not think debian is a great recommendation for new users. And imo ubuntu is a good recommendation. Debian does not update often enough, and this can be problematic for users who do not know what packages/package managers are. so if they have a browser version insitalled which is 10 versions behind the current latest, they may lack features or fixes (but security should still be be good as debian does backport security stuff). a new user does not know of backports repo, or using flatpak to install it. also, ubuntu is very famous online, and all problems have been asked for ubuntu. and ubuntu and debian are almost compatible, but in case the end in a gui guide, where they use ubuntu, and have “ubuntu-isms” in their guides, debian user may feel confused.
and between fedora and suse, i would generally recommend fedora more as there are more fedora users so it is more likely to be able to find solutions to problems. as others have recommended, for fedora, one of the better ideas today is to recommend immutable stuff like aurora or kionite or ublue or all other siblings.
and I would also not put mint and pop_os in non recommends. Mint is very famous, and it is a good thing a lot of people recommend it. so many people starting out have a strong option being advertised. I understand your wayland ready worries, but for now, there is no immediate issue to use X if you are not gnome. mint is working hard on wayland, and ypu can experimentally enable wayland, and it partially works. I can easily see them making wayland the default or atleast feature compatible within a year or so. Where as for pop os, you could already use cosmic shell in gnome wayland afaik. and now with actual cosmic de, which is made wayland only, and a major beta release in a month or so means it wayland ready imo. and most likely a stable release by april next year hopefully.
imo ubuntu is a good recommendation.
The reality is that SteamOS shaped the majority of developments for home users.
They expect to just get the stuff that’s on Flathub even if they don’t even know what Flathub is. Facts are:
- Out of the box Flatpak support has been banned by Canonical.
- Ubuntu 25.10 shipped with broken Flatpak support. That was known before release but Flapak is in the unsupported Universe repository and bugs in Universe software are not release blocking.
- Juggling PPAs is complicated.
Fact is also: Because software in Universe is not supported, whether or not a community member backports bugfixes is a coin toss. Mint, pop_OS, Zorin, etc. are just as affected by this and as such software used may contain severe security issues.
It is entirely possible this is just because of when I switched to using Linux but I found Ubuntu really hard to use as a new user. I unironically think arch is easier for someone switching from windows simply because of the freedom offered especially with all of the new more user friendly distros like endeavourOS and cachyOS.
thing with endeavour os or cahy os is that, imo, arch is not a good distro to base upon. I consider them as arch installers with extra features. what you end up with is essentially arch linux (with some additional repositories). often you can get community support from endeavour/cachy os, but a majority of the time, problem is either better reported in arch forums or wiki. and they expect you to know more/better.
I wanted to learn, so i started with arch, but a person who wants a just works distro, i do not recommend arch much.
I agree about endeavour but I do think that cachy offers enough that I daily it for my gaming system. It’s v reposities have a noticeable if slight impact on performance in some cases and I like their kernel and proton version too.
Also I know I’m the exception but I genuinely have had significantly less issues with arch and arch based distros than any other flavour of linux. I genuinely find arch easier to use and more reliable then than Debian. I also only run 3 machines though so I understand that other people have very different experiences.
I genuinely find arch easier to use and more reliable
I know partner, I am a fellow arch btw user.
Only major problem with arch is one of it’s biggest strengths - new packages.
If you have relatively newer hardware, you are likely better using arch than debian, that is possibly what you have encountered
Fedora Kinoite (the immutable KDE spin) checks all your boxes, I think. I’ve been daily-driving Silverblue for … wow, going on 3 years, I think? It’s been really solid.
I don’t think Immutable distros are a good choice for people just switching over from windows honestly. Most people first installing Linux will dual boot to try it out first before fully committing and any extra friction can be a point towards just not using Linux. When someone is so used to windows method of software instilation not having that option available is a large amount of friction.
Most people first installing Linux will dual boot to try it out first before fully committing
Good look having a newbie set up a dual boot system in times of BitLocker. Chances are they end up with single boot Linux because they cannot downsize the encrypted Windows partitions.
Dual boot is not for beginners. There are so many problems that can arise. I’d never recommend that to a newbie.
Besides, theres no linux distro with an exe. Only appimages if you want to count that as exe.
On traditional and atomic fedora, you can use the software gui for installing apps. What are you missing?
I 99% agree with you, but it depends. For Wayland, Xfce or LXQt (both with labwc as the WM) should also be great.
If you are not considering streamlined support or inital ease of use, Void Linux does its job very well. It has 3 DE editions on the live ISOs: GNOME, KDE, and Xfce.
As for the KDE tools, you can use them in any DE; GNOME specifically will clash with the KDE look, but I don’t see how that would be a problem with Cinnamon, Xfce, or LXQt. Do note that, at least on my laptop, KDE is very slow (it makes Windows 10 feel instant, in comparison); haven’t had trouble with Xfce.
I have a box that uses XFCE on Wayland via Labwc. I would not recommend it for a new user. XFCE is only 100% when in x11 at this point. Probably one more release and they will be ready for regular users to go Wayland.
I am a massive Wayland fan by the way and would normally say go Wayland all the way. But if you want to run XFCE or Cinnamon, Xorg is still the way to go (for now).
I would assume so, but there are no live ISOs with Xfce Wayland, though.
Aurora https://getaurora.dev/
That looks like Bazzite Desktop with a different name. Even the contributors overlap.
FAQ says: “Bazzite, Bluefin, and Aurora all came in at different times, the result of organic growth. Don’t overthink it” … Very helpful.
That looks really good.
Rules of thumb I use:
- Good upstream support, so not a hobby distribution by guy or two
- No reliance on add-on repositories that can mess the OS up like RPMFusion, PackMan, EPEL,…
- App store-like software management. Users shouldn’t have to see traditional package management if they don’t explicitly look for it. Default repo and Flathub is enough for the vast majority of people.
- Good internationalization. Languages other than English shouldn’t be an afterthought (even SteamOS falls into this trap in desktop mode)
- Plasma Desktop because that’s what regular users are most likely to know or at least heard of or seen in videos about SteamOS
- No Ubuntu or derivatives (bad support by Canonical and derivatives fighting an uphill battle)
Currently that means Fedora KDE. I did not yet try Kinoite or Bazzite myself but I do like the download assistant on the Bazzite website that guides users through picking the correct ISO.
To keep it simple, I will agree with most of your post. But two things I think are misleading enough to be inaccurate.
It is incorrect to say that “PopOS is not Wayland first”. COSMIC (the PopOS DE) is Wayland only and is shipping on System76 laptops already. It comes out of beta for the rest of us on December 11th. PopOS is “the most” Wayland desktop at this point. I also disagree with your LTS comments as it all relates to the COSMIC transition (completed) which is totally irrelevant for new users at this point. PopOS has an LTS release next month and will follow the Ubuntu LTS schedule after that. COSMIC is a great option for new users and a bit less complex than KDE. So, maybe even the best option.
The other one is recommending a Debian desktop if you do not want people to switch away. Most people are going to find the aging packages on Debian a problem for desktop use. Plasma 6 on Wayland has already improved quite a bit from the version shipping in Debian 13 and the difference will be significant a year from now. At least that is my experience.
An acceptable Debian desktop might be LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). It is still X11 first for another year though. So, by your criteria, Debian is a poor recommendation.
Disclosure: I use Debian sometimes. I do not use PopOS. I like Cinnamon, Plasma, and COSMIC.
I do believe I wasn’t specific enough in what I mean in some places. I did add the ‘(yet)’ portion for Pop! OS and Linux Mint because I am fairly aware of and tracking the efforts of COSMIC and Cinnamon (Wayland). While in the grand scheme it’s not going to be a major point, I do think System76 missed the mark on providing a 24.04 release in a timely manner. The current stable release target is still earlier than I would have expected, but will release much closer to upstream 26.04 than upstream 24.04, that some effort in porting Pop! Shell to 24.04’s GNOME version without any feature changes (essentially maintenance mode) would have been better than what will be ~1 year gap for LTS users to upgrade to the latest LTS release. Linux Mint by comparison still having regular releases while their Wayland version of the Cinnamon desktop is arguably a better route for their active userbase. By all means, when Pop! OS and Linux Mint get their Wayland releases out, I will be adding them possibly not as top recommendations depending on Wayland protocol inclusion, but decently high (and probably above straight GNOME).
Also, for my LTS recommendations I should probably clarify that I do intend to recommend LTS specifically for those that aren’t going to care about the latest features, will probably have the install done by myself anyways, and won’t want to be hassled by regular feature upgrades. A lot of my older family members that would have originally happily kept using Windows XP if I didn’t have them stop connecting those systems to the internet for security reasons are the target audience of ‘basic computing’ that an LTS distro. When recommending for gamers, creatives, developers, and other more involved users that need more out of their computers, and likely have newer hardware is where I swing heavily toward Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because their needs and desires will genuinely get hindered by the older packages of most LTS unless they can rely solely on Flatpaks, which means they could get away with using Aurora or Bazzite even.
