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Fedora also generally has more solid documentation without a bunch of LTS slag threads with outdated answers.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

Fedora

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.

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.

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!!!)

Fedora. Better than Ubuntu in pretty much every regard.

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.

Ubuntu? What is this, 2008?

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.

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.

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.

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 all the way.

fedora > ubuntu

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

The update last month somehow both moved every single file I have back into one drive (I've had to remove them and turn off one drive multiple times now) and then a few hours later delete EVERYTHING. Windows help said there was no options, once it's gone it's gone.

Thankfully I had just backed everything up recently. I had been meaning to dual boot this computer for awhile all I just installed Mint and haven't looked back. Screw windows.

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.

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’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.

It is some years since I ran Fedora. Ubuntu is still predominant at work. But I run Debian on my ThinkPad and all my laptops for many years. I think this ThinkPad is my third laptop that I have installed Debian on: they don't last forever. Before that, I was running Mint. They all run well, so there's not much to choose between them, from my perspective. Neither Fedora nor Ubuntu would be a bad choice.

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.

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.

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

So far I've only tried Pop!_OS and Mint, and I much much much prefer Pop!. I even got my wife to start using it.

Edit: Pop!_OS is also Ubuntu based.

I didn't really like Mint at all.

I mentioned it recently somewhere else, there is rush in plugging a USB with whatever linux and select the option to erase the whole disk when previously installed thing is Windows.

Fedora is great but I did hit some really annoying snags a couple of times. Ubuntu is easiest and generally is most supported. I don't like snaps and some other Ubuntu things so I go Ubuntu-based instead, with pop os. I really like it.

Delete and reinstall your nic. Check your firewall. Test connectivity over port 53 to your dns server.

If you have any 3rd party software that messes with dns, disable or remove it.

I 🎮 on Bazzite

Wait till you learn about Distrobox and Distroshelf.

Make a Fedora and Ubuntu box to install .rpm and .deb apps to your Bazzite host, when you need to install things not available as flatpak or homebrew. Since layering apps with rpm-ostree can get messy/ugly.

Have all three. 🤯

For various ways to install apps on an atomic image based OS:

• https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/software-intro/

Also checkout Project Bluefin and Aurora.

Kubuntu has been pretty nice to me. It has the beginner friendliness of Ubuntu and the modern desktop of KDE

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

I'd recommend Linux Mint Xfce. It's the closest to an "it just works" situation while being open to tinker and quick to respond, this last part as the micro delays from Linux Mint Cinammon for most things being what pushed me away from Windows in the first place.

Both Mint versions are made by the same people and found in the same site.

Echoing everyone else, Mint. Bazzite (which is Fedora based) if you're planning to run more recent games on it. Mint isn't bad at running games by any means, Bazzite is just more fine tuned towards it. With Cinnamon/KDE they basically feel like Windows minus the bloat.

I like a lot of Ubuntu-based distros, and Ubuntu server, but Ubuntu desktop just wasn't for me!

I jumped ship around a year ago after similar update BS frustrations. I had tried Ubuntu a few times over the years but didn't like their shift to Unity or later choices.

When I did make the jump, I ran Bazzite for the first 3-4 months as the immutability let me gain confidence that I wouldn't break something and showed me just how easy Linux gaming has become.

I loved Bazzite but gradually encountered more things that were harder to do because of the immutability and a couple of software packages that didn't play nice with flatpak so I pivoted to KDE Fedora and love it to bits. It still plays all the games I need it to and super stable.

Try either one and see for yourself. I would recommend to partition carefully isolating /home so that you can wipe distro but keep your files and settings. Distro pick is rather personal thing - folks find their groove in various ways. I'm on Fedora and have been with Fedora for ages, never owned Windows machine so I'm not your average user, BUT looking at self-starters today I do see a lot more gravitating towards Fedora whereas previously I saw more Ubuntu jumps. YMMV, but distro-hopping is not a bad thing. Partition wisely and pains of distro-hopping won't be as pronounced 😃

Fuck Ubuntu, move to Linux Mint Debian Edition or Debian.

I’ve just installed Fedora on my older plex server that was previously running a very old version of macOS, I really like it. My past experience has been with Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros, but I really like Fedora. For one, dnf is much friendlier than apt, and I far prefer Flatpak to Snaps. BTRFS has some cool built-in features that you don’t get with EXT4. Overall, I really liking it.