I’m thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I’m wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I’ve heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don’t like Cinnamon all too much.

What’s a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?

edit: Woah, it seems that you’re able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?

edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences…

On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I’m open to using either.

I’m running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It’s one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.

I would say I’m open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don’t want to do anything too out of my scope. I don’t want to spend too many hours setting it up, I’d rather have something that works mostly out of the box :D

I want a stable distro as in I don’t want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I’m open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.

edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)

My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?

edit 4:

Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD

now I’m slowly installing my programs again…

  • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.br
    1·
    14 hours ago

    some nuisances are not so ignorable

    that’s subjective, so i’m not going to question your preferences

    however, i have both gnome and plasma installed in all my systems and there are some things i’d like to point out from my experience

    having duplicate apps all over the place, each with their own settings, so if you forget which one you are using, you might find yourself spending more time in settings than desire

    the defaults are DE-specific, so usually you won’t need to think about this, as gnome defaults to gnome apps and plasma defaults to kde apps. it’s not common for something like gnome’s file browser to open pdfs in okular or vice-versa – though it can happen sometimes

    the one time this was a problem to me was when, for a while, opening the directory containing a downloaded file in firefox while running plasma would open nautilus instead of dolphin. but then it got fixed on its own

    i’m not saying problems can’t happen with that system, just that they don’t happen all the time for everything

    switching DE’s can cause browsers to log you out of everything

    i have never seen that happen. the closest i got to this was getting kicked from slack because i forgot the keyring password

    then there’s the fact that some use gtk and some use qt so title bar buttons and program menu’s can become confusing and ununified

    but that doesn’t have much to do with different DEs being installed, does it? the toolkit choice is entirely up to the application

    can these things be ignored? sure, some people can. some cannot, such as people with ADHD for example

    not to invalidate anyone’s experience with adhd, but, for the record, i have adhd and this has never been an issue to me

    my point is: having multiple DEs installed is pretty common and fully well supported. nearly every single session manager supports it (the only one i can think of that doesn’t support that is xdm). there are some small issues that crop up from time to time which might put you off from doing it (which is fine), but this is not some crazy kind of fringe unsupported configuration

    and you can uninstall everything from the other DE anyway, so there’s literally no problem about trying it out