I have an old laptop that I use as a Minecraft server as well as running RPG campaigns during game night. I’m getting tired of Windows 10 and I’m looking for a good replacement. I don’t have a lot of experience with Linux lately, the last time I did anything with it was maybe 10 years or so ago and I used Ubuntu, which I’ve read here is maybe not a good choice any longer. Stats of laptop are below. Recommendations are appreciated, thanks.

Processor Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ CPU @ 2.70GHz 2.70 GHz Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable) Graphics Card NVIDIA Quadro K2100M (2 GB), Intel® HD Graphics 4600 (113 MB)

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    142·
    17 hours ago

    Fedora (Gnome or KDE version) is what I recommend to people looking for the stock experience and a large community. I generally point people away from anything Ubuntu because of the Snap fiasco.

    • poinck@lemmy.one
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Or the current Debian testing, which will become stable soon. If you have experience with a Ubuntu from 10 years ago, you might know about apt already. If not, the package manager is already integrated into gnome-software. Additionally you can easily enable Flathub for flatpak and install packages using gnome-software afterwards.

      And yes, I would avoid Ubuntu on the desktop because of snap and other weird choices for defaults.

      On the server however my experiences with Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 were not bad. But if it were my choice I would go Debian stable for servers.

      If you want to do less maintenance, Fedora has good defaults and will have major updates twice a year. But, if you don’t want to get custom to new things on your machine that often, Debian is my recommendation.

      Only if you have too much time, try Gentoo. I’ve used it for more than 15 years on the desktop besides Debian on Raspberries.

    • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
      61·
      15 hours ago

      +1 for fedora kde

      I’ve tried dozens of distros this year. Kept arch for my personal use and fedora for shared. Fedora was the easiest to setup with everything working as they should out of the “box”.

      unless you use a touchscreen, don’t install gnome

      @ImminentOrbit@lemmy.world

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
        51·
        13 hours ago

        Gnome is different and at first I was lost, but after figuring out the basics is amazingly well integrated and just works as expected. KDE is super configurable but always feels a little off in a hard to describe way, like little quirks or lags or other papercuts.

        • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
          1·
          1 hour ago

          Yeah, gnome is built for touchscreen and mouse. People prefer different things and I love gnome for it’s minimalistic style and modular customisability via extensions. KDE is also great, but I tipped my favour towards gnome for something different.