MATE is the first of four “Screw that we’re forking GNOME” distros.

I’ve got a Lenovo tablet with an Intel Pentium processor that runs Fedora okay. Everything works, but especially remembering/detecting orientation with the keyboard attached is about as polished as stucco.

Apparently the hardware defaults to a portrait layout; it’s a 1080x1920 monitor, not a common 1920x1080, and by god and all his rapey little clergy if it CAN wake up in portrait mode, it will. Waking the thing up means turning it on, ripping it in half, waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to rotate back to the way it was when you put it to sleep, and then clicking the keyboard back on.

I cannot report anything of the sort out of a GTX-1080. Using Linux Mint, X11 and the proprietary drivers handled by Mint’s driver manager, I got reliable service in video editing, CAD and gaming. I will note, my main computer is now a Radeon system running Wayland.

It is fairly easy to upgrade between minor and even major versions of Linux Mint. I did it continuously from 17 to 20.3 on my Dell laptop.

Also, the changes especially between minor versions tend to be fairly minor. Mint follows Ubuntu’s LTS strategy, they’ll support a version with security updates for 5 years. Don’t succumb to FOMO.

I gamed on Linux with a 1080 for a few years there and it was alright, I have gone AMD though just so I don’t have to bother.

Bazzite’s growth is not because it is immutable, Bazzite’s growth is because it offers gamers a straightforward onboarding process.

I will hypothesize why:

Bazzite is the Trendy Distro Of The Month, like Peppermint or Endeavor or Nobara or a frillion others. CachyOS is apparently next. Nearly constantly, you’ll hear about some trendy new distro which is a fork of Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch that has a feature or two targeted at newcomers or gamers, and for awhile it gets heavily recommended on Reddit or Lemmy, then you stop hearing about it forever as the rest of the ecosystem adopts that feature or fixes the thing that feature was meant to be worked around, and then the cycle repeats.

Bazzite is targeted toward gamers, it emphasizes a solid onboarding experience with a configurator to choose/build your install media based on what you want to do with it, do you want a handheld or home theater experience or a keyboard and mouse desktop? Do you want it to boot to SteamOS or to a DE? Which DE? What hardware do you have? So their gimmick is to steer users through the initital config and setup process. Which as gimmicks go, that one is pretty solid.

MEANWHILE

Fedora’s Atomic editions have no gimmicks at all. You have to independently learn that immutable distros exist, independently decide you want that, and then go hunting on their website through their godforsaken marketing wank to find it.

Fedora likes their bullshit branding. You go to their website, and there are big buttons for Fedora Workstation right next to Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. “Workstation” does not mention that it’s just the Gnome version. You have to stroll further down, past server, IoT and “Core” versions, to a section that looks visually different labeled “More Fedora Options” including Atomic and Spins. You’re a new Linux user, you’ve just used the OS that came with your computer your whole life, explain to me what the difference between Core and Atomic is and why you should choose one over the other?

The Atomic versions, which is kind of a synonym for “immutable”, you click on that, and you’re presented with five options: Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway Atomic, Fedora Budgie Atomic, and Fedora Cosmic Atomic Nowhere in its name or description does Silverblue mention that it’s the Gnome desktop one. Kinoite starts with a K and also mentions in the description it’s the KDE atomic version. Also, “kinoite” is a godawful word, they should have gone with Kyanite instead, which is a different blue crystal. Or they should have just called it KDE Atomic or Plasma Atomic. The others just put the DE’s name in the title LIKE A NORMAL PERSON, ROWAN.

Arch Linux’s whole claim to fame is Some Assembly Required. Go with something like Mint or Fedora (the latter of which is available with the KDE desktop, source: am typing this on a gaming computer running Fedora KDE) and they’re much more complete out of the box.

now thats just ignorance.

Explain the permanent state of GIMP’s UI without deliberate sabotage.

does the average Korean citizen have a PC of their own?

I’m reminded of a video I saw of a woman talking about her dating prospects using M&Ms. She poured a bunch on the table as a metaphor for her dating pool, and slid away M&Ms as she ruled the people they represent out. “8 million people in the city. But half are women slides half of the M&Ms away of the remaining 4 million men, 20% are under 25, slides more M&Ms away” until she got to a point where she had one candy left, and then she shattered it with a meat tenderizer and continued sliding pieces of it away.

You can do that for potential adoptees of Linux, because there are a bunch of filters in series you have to pass through before successfully adopting Linux.

8 billion people on the planet.

Subtract the Sentinelese and Amish and North Koreans and everyone else who just outright doesn’t have access to computers. Nothing we can really do about them and in some cases it would be unethical to try.

Now subtract out the people who only use a mobile device like a cell phone or tablet, which are locked to their OSes. Android or iOS is as much a part of the hardware as a microwave oven’s firmware is to them. Linux on mobile devices (excluding Android) is in a severely rough state, there’s basically no hardware and software combo that is ready for daily driving.

Now subtract out the people who do use a PC or other device, that won’t ever install an operating system on a computer themselves. You’ll get some of these folks by selling computers with Linux installed in stores and such, though I think you’ll have to address a few other points later. I think SteamOS is demonstrating this.

Now subtract the people who might install Linux themselves, say PC builders who would have to install an OS anyway, but bounce off the process of choosing a distro and then installing. The big distributors like Canonical and Fedora tend toward marketing wankshit instead of human language. You can’t tell their goddamn websites “I just want the normal end-user desktop version with KDE please.” Does “Core” mean our main, central product, or the IoT embedded system version? You kind of have to know Fedora calls their Gnome edition “Workstation” and if you want “normal Fedora but with KDE” that’s a “Spin.” Then you get the Trendy Fork Of The Month, things like Bazzite and Nobara that pretty much are Fedora or Ubuntu with a theme applied, maybe some actual features in the OS, but often just a redone onboarding process, like I think it’s Bazzite that offers a configurator on their website that lets you pick your desktop and such. Defuckulating the onboarding process of major distros might allow us to do away with the Trendy Fork Of The Month.

Now subtract the folks who get a Linux machine up and running and then bounce off of the unfamiliar UI. I’m pretty sure this is Gnome’s fault more often than not, Gnome is deliberately hostile to both distro maintainers and end users to the point there are now four DEs that are “We can’t do this anymore” forks of Gnome: MATE, Cinnamon, Unity and Cosmic. You’d probably see more people stick with Linux if it was less easy to stumble dick first into Gnome.

Now subtract the people who got this far and then said “My CAD/art/music/office/finance/whatever software doesn’t run on this.” and had to switch back. In a lot of cases, software like that exists in the FOSS ecosystem but it’s significantly inferior, like FreeCAD or GIMP. These are often kept in a deliberately shitty state because some opinionated programmer likes how the code they wrote in 2004 looks in their IDE, so open software continues to be unadoptable and people continue to pay subscriptions to the Captain Planet villains in charge of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Adobe.

It CAN be configured, but you have to go hunting for the tools to do so.

I’ve got an old 5.1 surround sound speaker setup attached to my main rig, and in both Cinnamon and KDE (the only two I’ve tried), you can’t use the normal DE’s audio control panel to put the thing in 5.1 mode without first installing an old, probably unmaintained tool called ALSAJackRetask. Once you’ve retasked the jacks, several options for surround appear in the DE’s audio control panel. It knows but it can’t do.

Get a Fractal Pop. It’s got a drive bay.

I have built a computer in a Fractal Meshify before, and I prefer that case, but the Pop is alright.

Funnily enough my main computer does have a 5 1/4" bay. I wanted a Fractal meshify but there weren’t any in the world when I went to build my computer so I bought a Fractal Pop, and it has an optical bay down in the PSU basement.

Mine is an old XPS box, and it’s kind of cool to have because it’s got a lot of obsolete hardware. A PCI slot, external SATA, it might even have Firewire. So it’s a relatively modern box I can run modern software on with old IO.

I’ve got an old Dell that has a blu-ray burner built in. Thing is OLD, it’s got a Core i7 processor with a 3 digit model number. But it runs Mint just fine. I beat the hell out of the poor thing ripping my whole DVD collection, and basically it’s my optical media authoring box now. I rarely crank it up but if I truly need optical media made it’s what I turn to.

I never got into Pokemon despite being the absolute target demographic when it came out, and most of what I’ve heard from fans of the series since the Switch was how lazy and low effort the games felt compared to other major Nintendo properties. So…

I’m done with Nintendo and all their IPs. Brain surgery with a backhoe, and all that.

And it’s getting harder to find decent optical drives. USB external ones are utter buttgarbage.

Pop!_OS’ Cosmic DE is a recent fork of Gnome. It’s the fourth “No, I’d rather put up with being a FOSS project manager for the rest of my life than keep using Gnome” DE I’m aware of, after:

• MATE is basically “No, we like how Gnome 2 was, so we’re keeping it.”
• Cinnamon is basically "GTK3 is cool but we’re not doing all this “almost nothing works because you HAVE to use it EXACTLY like this” crap. Linux Mint is basically a grievance distro; it’s defuckulated Ubuntu with defuckulated Gnome.
• Unity. Because Canonical was reinventing the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever, human speech, electromagnetism, fire, antiperspirant, package management, the display service and the init system, so why not the DE as well?
• Cosmic. I’m not sure why System76 bothered, other than Gnome wasn’t sparkly enough.

Onto your actual questions:

1. I don’t know if Manjaro is European or not, but I have given up on them. They’ve made a lot of rookie mistakes like letting security certificates expire, they dropped the ball pretty hard with the PinePhone IIRC, and every time I’ve attempted to use Manjaro it just didn’t work that well.

Pop!_OS is the in-house distro of System76, a for-profit computer vendor based in Colorado. It’s meant to work well on their hardware out of the box; the big claim to fame that I saw when they were the trendy distro of the week is they had a version that had Nvidia drivers baked into the install, so to the end user “If you have an Nvidia card, click the link on the website that says Nvidia and it works.”

Linux Mint, as previously mentioned, is mostly concerned with distancing itself from questionable decisions made by Ubuntu and Gnome. It maintains compatibility with Ubuntu, so Ubuntu install instructions for software pretty much always work with Mint, and yet the DE is more easily understood by Windows users.

Fedora is Decommercialized Red Hat, honestly I don’t really see them making much effort towards beginners besides maybe their immutable/atomic versions.

Customization of KDE is going to be pretty similar if you stick to things you can change via the settings menu, at some point during “customization” you’ll find the boundary between DE and distro. Yes, many people use KDE. Unlike Gnome, they haven’t pissed off four different groups over the ages resulting in forks. KDE is mighty popular.

“Is it really beginner friendly, snappy, stable?” Lots of things “it” could be, if you mean KDE…yeah? I personally prefer Cinnamon as a “give to grandma” OS because KDE tends to slop more crap on the screen, especially in that One Settings Menu To Rule Them All they have. This is a subjective experience but, if I ever found myself thinking “Is there a setting to change this?” I felt more able to find that setting in Cinnamon than in KDE.

2. I know very little about OpenSuSe, I’ve never once tried a SuSe-based distro.

3. Out of the three you listed, I’d go with Fedora. I’m typing this on a machine running Fedora KDE. I would personally recommend KDE Neon or Kubuntu before Manjaro or OpenSuSe. Manjaro because I’ve had bad luck with Manjaro, and I have no experience with SuSe. I might also steer you to EndeavourOS or vanilla Arch over Manjaro.

You’ve used the word “stable” a lot. Users typically mean “is it going to crash?” None of these are going to crash, you’re not going to crash Linux. What you might find, depending on the distro, is someone will push an update to a software package that breaks your workflow. Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, distros like those do point-in-time feature freezes to avoid that possibility. You might not get the newest features but your system will continue to work like it always has. Rolling release distros like Arch push updates as soon as their developers release them, so you get all the cutting edge features, bugs and breakages.

Of the three you listed, Manjaro will be the least “stable” by that definition; it’s a fork of Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSe are both forks of commercial distros so you get that less, but I can attest on Fedora it does happen, they broke the lock screen last month. You want to never reboot your computer to find something suddenly doesn’t work, go with Debian Stable.