i might try various other distros for my desktop usage. But for my home server it will always be Debian. Rock solid.

I’ve been running sid on my personal laptops for more than a decade. Can’t imagine doing anything else

Unless you need nvidia drivers from this century

I use arch btw

Arch is on my gaming pc and is alot of fun, but I must admit my old reliable is straight Debian, after hopping through a couple of Debian based distros, I tried straight deb and agree it just works. So it’s installed on anything I don’t wanna tinker with

For me it’s Mint Debian Edition.

Thats what LMDE is for, Linux Mint Debian Edition. Been my fairly driver for years. Otherwise I use vanilla Debian for all my server and headless stuff.

Same. It’s like coming home.
Switched my gaming PC over to Arch a little while back but the server’s always going to be Debian.

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I changed one of my PCs over to Debian this month, and I was surprised at how smooth it is. I guess I was expecting it to be way more barebones. I don’t know if I need more than this!

I would even argue as long as someone isn’t messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon

KDE Neon is dead because its developers found out that putting an add-on repository on top of Ubuntu is not reliable at all. That’s why KDE Linux is now in development.

Kinoite Ride or die

FOR ME it does the things I need it to do; and it works; and hasn’t blown up my house yet so 🤞

From the bottom of my heart fuck rolling releases. Never worked for me (nobody get worked up please, ymmv).

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I’ve been living with fedora (ultramarine) kde for a while now because people praised fedora so much, but i think mint still wins. and i chose ultramarine because am a noob, don’t sue me.

there are many little things that just don’t work and i seriously can’t figure out. here’s a few: discover fails to update the system and i always have to do it manually from the terminal. wine is broken, it literally can’t run anything i throw at it that worked on mint. plasma theme customization is somewhat broken (also custom themes prevent updating…). using alt key in games run with wine causes some annoying notification sound (not in system keyboard shortcuts). often keyboard leds stay on when system suspended, system can’t be woken up from keyboard. can’t use flameshot with kb shortcut.

this isn’t a hate comment though, a lot of things are better than i had with mint cinnamon. i do like how it’s a lot faster than mint when under heavy load, autosuspend actually works, no issues with screen not waking up. currently my media pc with mint can’t update because all sources are unavailable and it has some conflict with python3 which it won’t let me uninstall (which i suspect would be unwise, idk)

Have you tried Garuda Linux yet? Another dragon themed distro with tons of dragon themes.

can you explain a few of those weird things?

I moved to Cachy (Arch-based OS) in 2024, and it’s been perfect for me. I’ve used Linux since around 2012, and tried to move to it as a daily driver several times over the 2010s, but I wasn’t able to stick with it due to drivers/software compatibility. Cachy is the first time it really clicked, and offered everything I wanted without needing to dual-boot.

People always talk about how complicated Arch is, but learning it was almost completely frictionless. It stays out of the way when I want it to, and I can go down a tinkering rabbit hole whenever I want. I can update stuff three times a day, or forget about updates for several weeks and just run the command whenever it springs to mind. I found it way easier to pick up than Ubuntu too due to the Arch wiki.

What desktop env

Ancient NVidia should be supported by Nouveau by now, no?

Agree Mint is not the best option, in a big part because of their refusal to embrace QT and KDE, but I don’t think every newbie needs immutability.

We often assume Linux newbies to be a bit of a grandma-style user - just browse, work with docs and play games from time to time.

But people coming to Linux are no average demographic - they are often enthusiastic about their computers and advanced use cases, and that’s when they will get stuck with immutables because things work different there. Some things are different, some are harder, and some are pretty much impossible to do. Tinkering is complicated compared to traditional distros. Besides, it will always feel limiting, even if it directs you towards the best practices.

I like the way things are organized in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it’s a regular mutable rolling release distribution, yet, thanks to snapper being beautifully configured out of the box, you can be sure you can revert nearly everything. Big changes, like initiating an update, automatically trigger snapshots of all system and program files, and they are available from GRUB, so you can always revert with ease. To me, it’s a very healthy compromise between ability to tinker and safety of the system.

Unfortunately, however, Tumbleweed does little to appeal to newbie users. Sure, it has some graphical tools (take YaST), but they are severely outdated and don’t explain much to the user, some updates require nuances Discover cannot work with, prompting the user to go with command-line tools, etc. I would love for something to emerge that would be similar in philosophy to Tumbleweed, but more newbie-friendly.

Also, love Flatpaks and install them whenever I can. Saves so much trouble.

My experience with KDE is that it is a frustrating new user experience. I also doubt that the devs have tried setting up their desktop from defaults recently.

Kwallet (one of the two reasons I stopped using KDE): Kwallets defaults are bad. They encourage you down an opaque path that requires CLI intervention. If you stubbornly take that path the performance of kwallet is painfully bad. Any electron app (discord, etc.) will now hang unresponsive on the main UI thread for 1 to 3 minutes if kwallet was not already open. None of these apps need kwallet. Chromium stalls in the same way on startup except that if you don’t want to open the wallet it will keep asking 3-4 times taking minutes to reach the prompt each time and won’t unblock the main UI thread until you either enter the password or it crashes with an error that too many wallet requests were issued. Protonvpn won’t open on KDE unless a wallet is configured and unlocked. The password prompt has a time out for no cryptographically good reason which means if you try to open the wallet and then wind up distracted by something else you may time out and need to restart the waiting game from square one. Bugs have been open against kwallet for years. Allegedly they have been fixed and I have updated but the speed is still awful on my computer.

Fractional scaling: Nominally KDE does this the “right” way but practically application support seems somewhat absent. The flagship Linux office product, Libre Office, displays microscopically on one monitor with fractional scaling on. It just works on other DEs

Borderless fullscreen with mouse capture on multiple monitors is broken and results in the mouse wandering off and going MIA in FPS style games. KDE killed me in Helldivers several times before I switched windowing modes. Honestly minor except that it seems to be the default in gaming distros where this matters

Other DE issues:

• Cinnamon freezes on haswell age Intel iGPs
• XFCE handles cheap Chinese graphics tablets badly
• XFCE fractional scaling is confusing and requires updating too many settings. The flip side of this is it can run fractional scaling much more performantly than other DEs under x11 on lousy iGPs. The problem here is not that the scaling controls are inverted but that the graphics scale settings are scattered all over the place.

All in all I would say that Cinnamon is a lot less frustrating at an entry level than KDE on recent hardware.

The thing is you are actually thinking about it and stating facts instead of just repeating what everybody is saying.

I’ll uh, I’ll take you up on that matrix add. My system is solid right now, but it’d be nice to have that option in my back pocket should I get stuck on something 😬

Edit: additionally, I agree wholeheartedly that immutable is the way forward for newbies in Linux, and honestly maybe even a power users workstation that needs maximum uptime/reliability.

I’ve been fiddling with Linux for over 20 years myself, but never INTENSELY, if that makes sense. I’d tinker with it on an old PC, dual boot my main PC, break it, go back to Windows for a year or two, tinker again, go fully Linux for a year, break it, back to Windows, etc etc.

I’ve been running Bluefin for almost a year, and I guarantee you it’s gonna stick this time. It’s so good, covers almost all my needs, and now I can’t break it!

except it doesn’t. Fixed release model quite easily gets in a way of doing shit. Need to add a PPA into config for each separate package you need the latest release of, or simply because the package itself is absent in the normal repo doesn’t help either. And don’t get me started on troubleshooting after “doing shit”.

Something like fedora does a much better job if you prefer fixed release, but if you like to experiment and “do shit”, arch derivatives like Endeavor or Cachy are just better suited for you. All of the above also have a much nicer documentation than Mint.