Linux

I am a Debian man myself for servers. I don't want any Canonical bullshit to break mid LTS.

While I am still running win 10 I am undecided which desktop to switch to. CachyOS and Fedora are the front runners but man do I hate Gnome.

Fedora is wonderful. I would not recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Fuck Canonical, who fancy themselves the next Microsoft.

For an easy version of Arch, try Cachy.

Highly recommend Fedora over Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Server and Desktop has some dumb defaults that look measly next to Windows, but still annoying next to Fedora.

Fedora also generally has more solid documentation without a bunch of LTS slag threads with outdated answers.

and sorry for the ragebait. I'm just a little bit frustrated and had to write it down

Not Ubuntu. Mint or Fedora.

You like Gnome (how everything looks in Ubuntu)? Use Fedroa Workstation, or use Mint and install Gnome yourself.

This is only my opinion. After all, this is your computer; do what you want.

Ubuntu? What is this, 2008?

Fedora

Don't settle immediately. If you can spare the time, distro hop for a few weeks / months. On the shorter run of things, give each OS you try a good week before moving on to the next. All distros do essentially the same thing, they just flavor it diffetently. Do you like typing apt, or dnf, pacman or yum? Do you prefer being deep in CLI or prefer using an application store? How do you like your userspace to look? Shiny? Bubbly? Classic? Retro? GNOME, Plasma, Xfce, Mate, Cosmic?

There's enough options out there to make your head spin. Without touching arch, you should at least visit the following -

Little Champs

• Mint
• Zorin
• Endeavour
• Pop OS

Big Champs

• Fedora KDE (or any of its "spins" https://fedoraproject.org/spins/)
• Ubuntu (and its corresponding "flavors" https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors)
• Debian
• Arch (just one of the four main pillars)

Gaming focus

• Bazzite (fedora)
• Nobara (fedora)
• Cachy (arch)

Give each or those that pique your interest a fair shake. A week at the minimum. Some you may not need a week, some you'll find yourself in a natural swing of things. You'll know when you know.

I didn’t want to program shit; I don’t care about command line; I love a good gui and didn’t want to fuck with finicky drivers. Moving to Ubuntu from Windows allowed me to continue to use my mostly browser-based computing existence without having to learn to use a new tool. I may not use Arch but one less Windows victim must be a step in a better direction.

Thank you all for the many replies!

I'll summarize it as followed:

• Ubumtu: one does not use Ubuntu any more
• Linux Mint: always a good start
• Fedora: also always good and would be good for a Thinkpad
• Bazzite for gaming
• Gnome really is not for everyone

Since I already tried Fedora, I'm going with Linux Mint for the moment.

(In fact, the installation of Mint is running right now and I'm using the whole SSD, no windows boot manager partition will survive!!!)

Bazzite on my gaming machine, Bluefin on my other machines. Both are Fedora Atomic based (meaning read-only kernel). Secure, stable, amazing. Apps are installed via Flatpak, and cli tools using Homebrew.

I've been a full time Linux user for 25ish years now. I'm currently happy here, but have tried most of them

Fedora. Better than Ubuntu in pretty much every regard.

Give mint a try just to start. It's ubu-based, super polished and great for a first distro. That being said, don't think Linux doesn't have those update/dependency hell horror stories. If you go into it with realistic expectations, you'll have a great time with it.

I had a great experience with Fedora on my thinkpad, it's almost as if they're made for each other. It's basically the testing version for Redhat. If you want something more stable and still enterprisey, Rocky Linux or Almalinux are both basically RHEL rebranded.

I've abandoned Ubuntu, even though it was what I started on and used for over a decade. Canonical is kind of like the Microsoft of linux right now, a bit hostile toward the rest of the community, but still an acceptable choice. I would recommend Linux Mint instead, though.

Keep in mind that the look and feel you'll experience is all the desktop environment, so if you don't like it, trying using a different one instead of looking at a new distro. I highly recommend using a few live USBs of what you want you try before installing to get a feel for what you like.

I moved to Fedora a few years ago. Spent a week or two orienting myself, like going to a new town and not knowing how to get around. So glad I did. I choose when and what to update.

Not perfect though, it lost keyboard connection yesterday. Reboot fixed it.

If those are the only two options, I'd go Fedora.

But honestly I'm trying really hard not to distro shame anyone - whatever gets you off windows is a win imo. I don't want to end up like that grounds keeper willy meme about the scottish.

Debian for the overwhelming majority of everything. With KDE, I don't do gnome.

My thinkpads both run arch, you may want to look at endeavouros for a simple approach to arch.

Over the decades, I've tried Ubuntu, mint, arch, fedora in that order. I would rate my experiences arch > fedora > mint > Ubuntu.

Endeavor os would be my first recommendation, Cachyos then fedora. If you want that classic windows 7 experience and very solid support, I recommend mint. If you need the latest drivers endeavor.

Im using linux Mint. no issues so far, except maybe dropbox integration. never going back to microslop

Mint all the way for me. Mint's based on Ubuntu unless you're adventurous and choose LMDE which is based on Debian instead (Ubuntu is also based on Debian, so it cuts out the middleman.)

And the Cinnamon desktop, which is the default, is very Windows-like and native to Mint. Perfect for refugees. I was one when my Win 7 SSD died and I thought that that was a perfect time to switch.

I can't speak to Fedora (I still haven't forgiven Red Hat for what they did to CentOS), but Mint has honest-to-goodness old-school forums where you can ask for help if you get stuck.

Edit: typo

Fedora, mainly because ubuntu is putting ai into it's release in the coming months. Which is fine if you're visually impaired, but afaict that's not why they're putting it in.

I'll be switching to Cachy once I'm forced to switch.

I’ve generally found that while there is almost always package equality between deb and rpm distros, when there isn’t I’m more likely to find a deb. I’d recommend Mint for you, followed by Debian Stable.

Any distro > Ubuntu > Qubes (not for beginners haha)

Tried Fedora, tried Ubuntu, tried Mint, tried Debian, tried flavors of Arch that don’t make the install process take an hour.

They all suck compared to openSUSE Tumbleweed. Rolling release with good hardware support out of the box and snapshots/easy rollback coupled with extensive testing before each release? It’s the winner for beginners, and it’s not even close.

The first time a user gets the itch to learn Linux and go deeper and borks their install, they will hate any distro without snapshotting.

The first time an immutable distro user needs to install OEM drivers, they will hate their distro.

I used to recommend Linux Mint, and I still would maybe to those I know will never ever open the console.

For everyone else, openSUSE Tumbleweed all day everyday and twice on Sunday.

Fedora all the way.

fedora > ubuntu

personally, i like the ublue images, at least for general desktop and gaming - bluefin and bazzite.

For a new user - Ubuntu LTS. In a few years move to Debian.

Ubuntu and Fedora are both great choices.

I will also recommend OpenSUSE Leap (NOT tumbleweed as it's a rolling release vs long term support model) and Linux Mint.

Obviously, the best solution is to just move to Linux, yes.

But...

Today, lovely Windows 11 installed an update. And since then I don’t have internet access because Microslop Wincrap 11 can somehow magically no longer connect to the DNS server - to any DNS server. No other device in my network has the same issue. I’ve been bugfixing for over an hour and haven’t found a solution. setting the DNS manually, resetting the network adapter, flushed all DNS entries (I used the commandline tool on Windows!). nothing works.

I have the exact same issue occasionally on my Windows gaming PC. The only way to resolve it is to restart the computer and restart the internet router at the same time. Restarting either one alone isn't enough.

(Yes, it's mind-boggling that the router needs to be restarted, given that all my other devices (phones, Linux PC) can still access the internet through that same router just fine. But that's what works.)