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Choosing a Linux Distro

Hi there. I m changing away from windows. I already tested some stuff. I started with fedora GNOME. But GNOME wasn't for me I felt. So I did go with Linux mint cinnamon. That felt better but not as snappy and fast as fedora. Then I did go with fedora KDE plasma and man I like KDE plasma. That's a thing for me. Then I tried because of recommendations popos with cosmic. I don't know why but it didn't felt right. So another recommendation later I tried cachy is with KDE. KDE was good but catchy gave me some erros and problems so back to fedora with KDE.

Now my real question.

  1. Manjaro Linux is a European distro? Only I often see it with popos and Linux mint and fedora that these are good beginner distros? Is it stable? Customisation in KDE is the same everywhere I guess? Does many people use it? Is it really beginner friendly and snappy? Is it stable?
  2. Opensuse also has KDE but it seems that its not a beginner distro. Also online its not often spoken about. Is it harder to use? Or is it beginner friendly? Customisation KDE again. Is it stable or does it break often? Does many people use it.
  3. Fedora, manjaro, opensuse? Which off these with KDE is most beginner friendly and stable. Is used much so I can find help when something is going on. Customisable. Stable?

Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.

49 comments

  • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty solid and 98% of the refinement of Fedora, that in my opinion, it is the most polished of them all. Now, using Fedora supports companies like Red Hat/IBM so it is a no-no for me.

    The only thing OpenSUSE has is that is independent so does a few things differently than Debian or Fedora based ones, but after a few retouches that you will learn in no time you will be at the level of Fedora. It is perfectly OK for beginners, just that there are a few things differently, sometimes for the better like many utilities from YAST, but will be different from what you find in most non OpenSUSE forums. Again, is minimal, 95% of the staff is the same. Unfortunately, it does not have the costumer base that Ubuntus/Mint/Fedora has, but the supporters are technically highly committed and competent, they just need to improve in their marketing arena that is what is holding them down.

    Another KDE that I like is TuxedoOS. It works perfectly in non Tuxedo devices and very stable in my experience... I even had better stability experience than Kubuntu, and that says a lot.

    Did not play enough with Manjaro and will try in a few days. It had some bad press but I think is more due to diverging a bit from Arch philosophy of instant updates than anything else. CachyOS I recommend only for latest computers or those willing to adjust things a bit once in a while.

    For older devices, MXLinux KDE is the ideal in integrated graphics chips.

    • using Fedora supports companies like Red Hat/IBM so it is a no-no for me.

      How? You go to their site and download the ISO for free. Of course, there is the disclosure from Red Hat that you can't use Fedora in a country that is considered an adversary by the US, but lbh, who gives a shit about that?

      • By using Fedora, one helps Red Hat/IBM in different ways:

        • With more usage of Fedora, Linux enthusiasts cater to that distro more and more, and Red hat benefits from all that feedback and large customer base. Fedora gets better and Red Hat stands out over the competition.
        • With larger customer base, Red Hat's board approve to allocate more resources to the platform, increasing its competitive advantage.
        • With more users of Fedora, Red Hat can find more qualified professionals that grew up using already Fedora, increasing its human capital competitive advantage.

        Customer base, paying or no, is a tremendous competitive advantage... that is why Microsoft winked at piracy across the globe for 2 decades so companies purchased their solutions since millions of users already knew how to use them. Of course, once the competition was out, Microsoft started to hike prices tremendously.

        Of course, the development of Fedora, since it is FOSS, benefits all the community, but it also feeds the monster in the process that, at the moment they want, they pull the rug on the community that, at that stage, won't have any companies that can take the lead anymore.

        The moral here, if behind Fedora is a company that did bad things for FOSS, that it is owned by a company that contributes with the IDF, and both are based in a country that any day may ban Red hat technology to be distributed to any foreign country of their choosing... why choosing Fedora when plenty of alternatives are equally comparable, more ethical and less prone to manipulation.

  • openSUSE and Fedora with Plasma will be fine choices for you, based your post. Tumbleweed will take a bit more work, but usually it's nothing too difficult. You can also go with Leap, which generally won't have the same issues Tumbleweed has. I personally use Tumbleweed and like it a lot.

    Fedora is just an all around solid distro, endorsed by Linus Torvalds himself! In my opinion, since you already have some experience with it, stick with Fedora. It'll be fine.

  • Pop!_OS' Cosmic DE is a recent fork of Gnome. It's the fourth "No, I'd rather put up with being a FOSS project manager for the rest of my life than keep using Gnome" DE I'm aware of, after:

    • MATE is basically "No, we like how Gnome 2 was, so we're keeping it."
    • Cinnamon is basically "GTK3 is cool but we're not doing all this "almost nothing works because you HAVE to use it EXACTLY like this" crap. Linux Mint is basically a grievance distro; it's defuckulated Ubuntu with defuckulated Gnome.
    • Unity. Because Canonical was reinventing the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever, human speech, electromagnetism, fire, antiperspirant, package management, the display service and the init system, so why not the DE as well?
    • Cosmic. I'm not sure why System76 bothered, other than Gnome wasn't sparkly enough.

    Onto your actual questions:

    1. I don't know if Manjaro is European or not, but I have given up on them. They've made a lot of rookie mistakes like letting security certificates expire, they dropped the ball pretty hard with the PinePhone IIRC, and every time I've attempted to use Manjaro it just didn't work that well.

    Pop!_OS is the in-house distro of System76, a for-profit computer vendor based in Colorado. It's meant to work well on their hardware out of the box; the big claim to fame that I saw when they were the trendy distro of the week is they had a version that had Nvidia drivers baked into the install, so to the end user "If you have an Nvidia card, click the link on the website that says Nvidia and it works."

    Linux Mint, as previously mentioned, is mostly concerned with distancing itself from questionable decisions made by Ubuntu and Gnome. It maintains compatibility with Ubuntu, so Ubuntu install instructions for software pretty much always work with Mint, and yet the DE is more easily understood by Windows users.

    Fedora is Decommercialized Red Hat, honestly I don't really see them making much effort towards beginners besides maybe their immutable/atomic versions.

    Customization of KDE is going to be pretty similar if you stick to things you can change via the settings menu, at some point during "customization" you'll find the boundary between DE and distro. Yes, many people use KDE. Unlike Gnome, they haven't pissed off four different groups over the ages resulting in forks. KDE is mighty popular.

    "Is it really beginner friendly, snappy, stable?" Lots of things "it" could be, if you mean KDE...yeah? I personally prefer Cinnamon as a "give to grandma" OS because KDE tends to slop more crap on the screen, especially in that One Settings Menu To Rule Them All they have. This is a subjective experience but, if I ever found myself thinking "Is there a setting to change this?" I felt more able to find that setting in Cinnamon than in KDE.

    1. I know very little about OpenSuSe, I've never once tried a SuSe-based distro.
    2. Out of the three you listed, I'd go with Fedora. I'm typing this on a machine running Fedora KDE. I would personally recommend KDE Neon or Kubuntu before Manjaro or OpenSuSe. Manjaro because I've had bad luck with Manjaro, and I have no experience with SuSe. I might also steer you to EndeavourOS or vanilla Arch over Manjaro.

    You've used the word "stable" a lot. Users typically mean "is it going to crash?" None of these are going to crash, you're not going to crash Linux. What you might find, depending on the distro, is someone will push an update to a software package that breaks your workflow. Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, distros like those do point-in-time feature freezes to avoid that possibility. You might not get the newest features but your system will continue to work like it always has. Rolling release distros like Arch push updates as soon as their developers release them, so you get all the cutting edge features, bugs and breakages.

    Of the three you listed, Manjaro will be the least "stable" by that definition; it's a fork of Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSe are both forks of commercial distros so you get that less, but I can attest on Fedora it does happen, they broke the lock screen last month. You want to never reboot your computer to find something suddenly doesn't work, go with Debian Stable.

    • Fedora and OpenSuSe are both forks of commercial distros

      It's a bit more complicated than that with openSUSE. Tumbleweed is a snapshot of the Factory repo that's put through automated testing, and if it passes, it is released straight away. Suse Enterprise Linux is also a snapshot of the Factory repo that's put through a polishing process and when it's ready, released. Leap is a community fork of Suse Enterprise Linux.

      Both Tumbleweed and Leap are good, the former if you want bang up to date software and the latter if you prefer older software in a more stable, as in unchanging, distro.

  • Why not Pop!_OS with vanilla Gnome3 and Wayland? It runs snappy and you don't need the experimental Cosmic desktop.

49 comments