cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/52686006

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)