Considering switching away from Fedora and to another distribution. Does anyone have any suggestions for distributions I should consider?
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Mint, because it works with a minimum of effort.
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OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it’s more up to date than Mint, it’s a rolling distro, it works, and in the rare event of a problem it’s easy to roll back to a snapshot.
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Arch Linux
Reasons:
- Pacman
- the AUR
- community driven
- bleeding edge
- pragmatic stance regarding closed source software
- sane defaults
- minimalism, build your own without too much compiling
- the wiki
The wiki is what makes it really hard for me to move out. This masterpiece is where I learned 70% of what I know about linux systems 🤷
Arch.
People think it’s really challenging and brittle, but everything seems to always work no matter how often I update (or don’t) and the wiki is top notch.
I actually chose arch initially because when you go to forums to troubleshoot problems there is always an ubuntu answer and an arch answer, and the arch answer is almost always shorter.
Bang on
I only use Arch, it’s really stable and easy to fix if something goes wrong thanks to the excellent arch wiki.
But I recommend PopOS for anyone who just wants something good looking and stable and who doesn’t need the latest packages all the time.
Do you use arch or do you use manjaro or other?
I use Arch default. Stay away from Manjaro… If you want to try arch with a good installer, try https://endeavouros.com/.
Its really just arch with a nice installer and a friendly community where you can ask questions. It’s specifically designed for that purpose.
I’ve used Manjaro a few times and Arch I installed once from their wiki which is a huge pain.
Linux Mint: Debian Edition. After watching a YouTube review I decided to take a break from Arch and give it a try, I’d always like Cinnamon, and I really like this.
Cinnamon, last I tried it, has a bug which causes it to run games with compositing enabled. The setting that’s supposed to disable it for games, only works until the next boot.
I recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed without hesitation.
This is the best answer. It’s the most comparable to Fedora with it’s semi-rolling releases.
Unpopular choice here but Ubuntu LTS with ubuntu-debullshit (vanilla gnome, replace snap with flatpak).
My main factors:
- stability of the LTS
- drivers and HW support
- tons of resources online
- already use Ubuntu for servers and Raspian on my Pi
I’ve had my fun distro hopping in the past but I just want a low maintenance system nowadays.
Ohhh, I’ll have to check this out. I’ve been gradually moving away from Ubuntu toward Debian (w/ GNOME) for a while because Snap is hot garbage and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Were it not for Snap, I still really like Ubuntu.
Drivers are the weak spot of Ubuntu LTS, even with HWE the kernel and Mesa are outdated compared to Fedora.
How does this differ from Debian+GNOME? I’m not familiar enough with exactly what Canonical adds to Debian to know.
Debian only household here …
Pop!_OS. Sensible defaults and it’s based off of Ubuntu, which is the distro I’m most familiar with.
I try so dang hard not to use Linux Mint because I have been using off and on since 2008 but always come crawling back to it when I run into some esoteric issue on another distro. It just hits the sweet spot of what I understand computing to be. I have desperately tried to use various forms of arch. OpenSUSE, fedora, debian, and a whole host of others and eventually get frustrated for some probably solvable reason and go back to my sweet, my love, my wart covered X11 using, 5.15 running, stale boring life mate Mint.
Pop_os for my laptop and desktop. I use these machines for dev work and gaming. I want to spend as little time as possible doing maintenance. Debian for all servers and containers. Very stable, maintenance doesn’t take much effort.
If I was running a pure gaming system I’d probably go with Arch.
I have been running OpenSUSE Leap on my home server for 3 years, and I moved from Fedora after many years to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on both my work and home (gaming) PC. I am super happy!
I’ve been a long time Debian user. Debian 12 has been almost a perfect release so far. Highly recommended.
So were Woody and Potato (memories…).
Woody was my first Linux distro ever! My family only had one PC with dialup at the time, and you could buy the entire repo on CD-ROM. I actually keep the CD images around in case I want to play with a VM and feel nostalgic.
I know the FSF wouldn’t approve, but I am glad that they include the firmware on the regular network install image now. I need it to connect to wi-fi.
I know they always offered one with the firmware, but you had to do some digging on cdimage.debian.org to find it.
EndeavourOS, it just works really well and never breaks. The only time I had an issue was when I was using the Zen kernel and it locked up installing league of legends and watching a YouTube video at the same time. Using the mainline kernel though gives me no issues.
Everyone immediately want you to use their distribution of choice. However no-one can really answer this unless you include more information about yourself and your Linux experience, objectives, what kind of tinkering you’re comfortable with, what you expectations are, etc.
The best answer IMO is always Linux Mint when people ask these kind of questions.
