linuxmemes

WHY DOES NO ONE GET THAT IT DEPENDS?
... srsly tho, how do you want your distro to be?

Shout out to the CachyOS crew. Their Discord is helpful. (Booooo, Discord, I know, I know.) They're friendly and helpful.

Any popular non-specialized version will be perfect.

For a new user, the internal differences will be imperceptible, the same applications will be available, and community support will be there.

If you can, install Virtual Box on your current operating system and test the distributions you are considering to see if there is one whose default interface you like best.

I use Mint/Cinnamon.

If you're new to Linux: Mint. Use Mint, with Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you're hardware is older. It works just how you'd expect.

There's many other distros for other purposes. Bazzite has a lot of people who like it for games. If you really want to control EVERYTHING about your machine there's Arch. If you want bleeding edge software and don't mind/can fix the occasional problem caused by rolling releases then I suggest Manjaro.

But most Windows refugees will be looking for something familiar that works and stays out of their face, and for that the simple answer is Mint.

I dual boot Arch and Arch, and I run an Arch hypervisor as well as an Arch vm in each Arch instance.

Hannah Montana Linux?

According to a survey of the Linux community, the best distro is always not the one that you picked.

i have two moods:

stable (for a server): debian

rolling release (for gaming): arch

Fedora. It's the one Linus uses.

Debian.

The one that makes you happy.

^Or at least overrides the desire to grab a sledgehammer when troubleshooting^

They're almost all the same bar installation and package manager.

TL;DR: Ubuntu + KDE Plasma (=Kubuntu) + X11 (Wayland fucks with my Firefox)

First thing to acknowledge about Linux is that you have 2 choices in front of you about how you want to configure your operating system:

Distro, and desktop environment.

A distro or distribution for short is the part of the operating system that runs programs, updates them, etc. A distro like Ubuntu will incorporate different code syntactically than another distro like Fedora, but will largely perform the same actions. For instance, to update all of your apps/programs in Ubuntu, you would run sudo apt-get update. To do the same thing in Fedora, you would run sudo dnf update. Other than that, different distros might be optimized for some things over others. Bazzite and SteamOS are distros that optimize for gaming, while Debian is optimized for long-term stability for things like servers.

Desktop environment (DE) on the other hand is all about what you see on your screen. It's the visual portion of your operating system. In my opinion, the choice of DE for you comes down to what's comfortable to use and/or what you grew up with previously. So if you grew up using Windows computers, then DEs like KDE Plasma or Cinnamon would work for you. If you grew up on Mac computers instead, Gnome would be your best choice.

For me, I got exposed to Linux with my Steam Deck, so I wanted to mirror the Deck's Desktop Mode on my laptop. The Steam Deck uses ~~Fedora~~ Arch as the distro and KDE Plasma as the DE. I changed the distro for my new Framework laptop to Ubuntu because I'm more familiar with that, having used Ubuntu computers in middle and high school and dabbling with Ubuntu virtual machines on Windows in the past. KDE Plasma is chill because it reminds me of Windows the most.

And of course, distro and DE aren't the only choices you have on Linux... You have your display server engine like X11 or Wayland, and the seemingly limitless assortment of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) alternatives to your favorite apps/programs on Windows/Mac/Android/iOS.

Edit: Steam Deck uses the Arch distro instead of Fedora.

I use Arch by the way

I like fedora because it uses Duke Nukem Forever as its package manager.

If you're new to linux, I would recommend something that would work out of the box and which would be user-friendly, like Bazzite (gaming oriented) or Manjaro (User-friendly arch-based distro, with GUI for app management, drivers management etc). Lots of people will recommend Linux Mint and that is not a bad entry point as well.

Note that linux works generally better with AMD GPUs, but Nvidia hardware is coming around more and more.

Fedora KDE

Mint is pretty much the de facto recommendation for absolute beginners freshly moving away from Windows right now, but LMDE especially will be subject to dealing with older software.

Otoh, any of the Puppy distros are a great option for genuinely old hardware; think AM2+/775 or older, that a lot of heavier distros may or may not struggle on.

So what distro would James May be bringing up the rear and is total rubbish?