Currently running Kali on my laptop as that’s all it was used for. Looking for something more general purpose. Mainly steam for light gaming and being able to install the tools from Kali for stuff like tryhackme. Mostly familiar with Debian, as that’s what Kali is based on, but willing to try something else. Laptop is this Acer.
Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.
I doubt my experience was the same as everyone else but I tried to install Debian on my gaming pc a week ago and I could not get Nvidia drivers to work for anything, there were no relevant search results and no one on any message board had any ideas. I gave up and installed Arch and Nvidia drivers without making any hardware changes and it was so unexpectedly easy I still can’t believe it.
I use Debian on my server so I was shocked that it was basically impossible to get Nvidia drivers working, at least on my chipset.
there were no relevant search results>
Not sure if you were only looking for debian specific posts, but most arch or ubuntu tutorials work just fine most of the time.
Not sure how new your card is, but i got a 3080 working… I’m on sid though. Maybe thats the difference
Fedora 38 is awesome. Yeah, Red Hat drama I know, but I think Fedora will be fine.
Fedora is a fine distro. Red Hat is still a huge contributor to the open source community, despite the decisions made by IBM managers to restrict RHEL source code. It just means that it’ll be a little more difficult to make RHEL clones going forward, but I doubt it’ll have any lasting impact. Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and other RHEL based distros have all announced that they intend to continue their operations, with little to no change in how they do things. Really, the controversy is overblown.
Kinda yes, overblown. Will see where it goes.
Mint Cinnamon
You could do straight Debian or anything else Debian-based like Mint Debian Edition or MX.
Otherwise Fedora is very recommended for general purpose desktop Linux. But, that isn’t Debian.
I don’t know if Kali is really recommended for general purpose.
I’m interested in seeing the other recommendations here, it is always fun to see what other users recommend or use. I use Alpine but it isn’t always perfect as a desktop for people who don’t like things breaking.
Second fedora, it looks modern, has up to date packages and is hardened. (selinux)
Debian.
your computer can pretty much run every single distribution in any desktop environment without a problem so go wild and try lots of them, pick anything a let yourself have a good week with it and it’s online documentation to do your thing every of them have good and bad parts. when asked the filesystem pick btrfs and set-up snapshots, that will save your ass when needed and it’s so quick you could break your system every week without being bothered
You should try Pop! OS. It’s pretty much Ubuntu without the weird snap garbage, so has a direct Debian heritage.
Personally love PopOS! It’s super easy and convient, has a super smart window tiling manager worth trying out!
Fedora 38 is great. Debian 12 is also good if you prefer apt. But with Fedora just use dnf instead of apt and its basically exactly the same.
Since you’re more familiar with Debian, I recommend Linux Mint. Ubuntu if you don’t care about snap. These are generally good and pretty friendly. If you know your way around Linux and want something else that also has up-to-date stuff (Debian is always a little behind on updates) and you don’t mind reading on some documentation to get started, you could also try Fedora. Kali Linux tools are available to most distributions.
Thanks for all the suggestions. Think I’m currently leaning towards Debian 12 for now, and depending on how that feels might try mint next.
Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.
Linux mint if you are new.
ZorinOS if your mom will use your PC.
Arch linux if you are sane.
Gentoo if you are insane.
Ubloatu, Fedora, Slackware and friends if you want to be a “different” user.
Linux Mint and then don’t worry about it. It just works.
Just installed this recently. Both monitors worked out the gate, my new headset worked, haven’t had any issues with it yet
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great choice for a robust rolling distribution. Automated testing of packages rules out most of regressions and its KDE implementation is top notch. If you were considering Fedora or Arch, look no further.
Hear me out, grab ventoy, a decent USB drive (32-64 gb), download debian, kubuntu (maybe), fedora/mojara, any live arch derivative (endeavour, arco, artix. Stay away of Manjaro) and anything else you found appealing. Put all of them there and go nuts. At the end of the day, it’s always night.
