Help me choose a distro, please!

Lodra@programming.dev to Linux@lemmy.ml – 93 points –

I'm ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I'm looking for advice on which distro I should start with.

About Me

I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I've never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I'm generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed.

Planned Usage

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers.

What I'm Looking For

I'd like an OS that's highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don't want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Anyone have good suggestions??

Edit

I'm aware of tools like Distro Chooser. They've recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I'm not ready to trust them yet. I'm looking for human input.

Edit 2: Hardware Info

I'm running on an ASUS ROG Strix GA15DK. It's just over 2 years old. The hardware was shiny but not top-tier at the time. It’s not new at this point but also not old by Linux standards.

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Processor
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
  • 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM

Edit 3

It's official. I installed EndeavourOS! I got it to work without any issues. Yup, first try. It definitely didn't take me ~10 tries :D

Thanks for all the input all! Wonderful crowd here!!!

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I like the video by Chris Titus Tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyADkmRVe0U

He puts about 40 Distros into a tier list and I completly agree with him. Spoiler:

Supreme: Debian, Arch

Amazing for new users: Kubuntu, Mint, Zorin, Nobara

Devil: RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS

But it is a nice short introduction to the goal of each distro.

What makes fedora to the devil?

I think it is summarized by "because it is backed by a big company", like Ubuntu. Compared to Debian or Arch, which are community based distros, many people think (me included) that it is a bad thing, that one company has so much control over one distro. They tend to make decisions that benefit them, not the user.

In theory that's correct. But if you look at the list of progressive changes and contribution. RHEL created a lot of common standards. And we don't talk about stuff like snap here, we talk about systemd, pipewire etc.

You are right of course, the advantages of big money and great engineers are obviously there. But using a system means also supporting the system and I want to support the debian devs more than Redhat. And it has no downside, Debian is awesome.

Common standards can be devolped by big companys, they also can be developed by communities. GNU utils and the Linux kernel came out of a community. I like this way much more. And if companies decide to back those projects, it is fine by me. As long as they don't overtake the project and become too dominant.

Don't get me wrong I support Debian, too. I decide to use it at work and we have actually more than 40 systems running on Debian.

Fedora is mostly my choose for client desktop. And I prefer to advice new people to it, just because installing fedora is easier than Debian.

I understand Fedora user completely, it is a great distro and great for beginner. But so is Mint, especially now that there is a Debian based version. So for me it comes down to the question, who do I want to support, RedHat or the community? So I go with Mint most of the time. But no hate for Fedora or Fedora-recommendations.