I’m ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I’m looking for advice on which distro I should start with.

About Me

I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I’ve never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I’m generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed.

Planned Usage

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers.

What I’m Looking For

I’d like an OS that’s highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don’t want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Anyone have good suggestions??

Edit

I’m aware of tools like Distro Chooser. They’ve recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I’m not ready to trust them yet. I’m looking for human input.

Edit 2: Hardware Info

I’m running on an ASUS ROG Strix GA15DK. It’s just over 2 years old. The hardware was shiny but not top-tier at the time. It’s not new at this point but also not old by Linux standards.

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Processor
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
  • 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM

Edit 3

It’s official. I installed EndeavourOS! I got it to work without any issues. Yup, first try. It definitely didn’t take me ~10 tries :D

Thanks for all the input all! Wonderful crowd here!!!

  • @danielfgomEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    I would recommend Linux Mint personally. And there are various reasons why:

    1. Whether you use the tuning m Ubuntu base or Debian base, getting hold of software will be much easier because if something is not in the repo chances are there is a deb for it.

    For example I use Vivaldi browser, 1Password and OnlyOffice. Neither is which are in the repos. But they all offer a deb installer on their website. Same goes for TeamViewer and many other non FOSS apps.

    Who wants to waste time on arch or wherever trying to figure out how to get his of binarys?

    1. Mint is free of snaps so you don’t have that headache, and can run Fkatpak.

    2. Mint has sane defaults and doesn’t include unnecessary apps. I think I only removed 3 apps to replace with the apps of my choice. The rest of the selection is perfect.

    3. The Cinnamon desktop looks good, is very fast, works intuitively and gets out of your way. Since The Mint Team make Cinnamon you’ve always got the latest and greatest.

    4. Plenty support. Because Mint is based on Ubuntu and Debian there is TONS of information online to help you solve any issue. Plus Mint have a forum.

    5. Reliability and low system requirements. Unlike Gnome desktop, Cinnamon uses less RAM so right off the bat you win back RAM on your system. It’s very fast, light yet good looking and functional. Plus Mint is generally very reliable because the team focus on that.

    They will take their time to carefully test and consider something and it’s impact on users before releasing it. For example Wayland. They still use X11 because they are assessing Wayland and switching to Wayland only would break some users systems.

    It literally has everything you want in a distro. Where new user or Linux Pro, Mint will suit both and everything in-between