Title basically.
One of my windows computers, which happens to be the one I happen to do the most CAD work on, can’t upgrade to windows 11 due to having an Ivy Bridge era Xenon (it’s an E5-1680 v2 for the curious, older used workstations are fantastic bang for the buck computers).
Switching to Linux on this computer has been in the cards for a while, but I hadn’t been in a hurry to do it. Looks like my hand might be getting forced…
Sure thing. Probably you’ll (most people) want a Stable Release or Long Term Service distribution to start with instead of rolling releases or bleeding edge distributions. I threw myself into the deep end to learn faster but not everyone wants that. I’m willing to risk breaking things beyond repair to learn, and have done so lol. You know yourself so that’s up to you.
I’ll give you my personal shit list if you like:
Pop_OS! I view System76 as incompetent after unfortunately owning a laptop sold by them. Long story, bad developers. Big regret.
Canonical is pretty notoriously awful now. So avoid Ubuntu and IMO stuff downwind (forks) of them. People really like Mint however, you can decide for yourself.
RedHat - Fedora is also making worrying decisions lately. Sad because I really loved Fedora. Second best repository to Arch/AUR. Again you can look up their controversies and decide for yourself.
Manjaro is infamously incompetent. Some diehard defenders, I don’t get it. Lots of needless breakage in updates and AUR incompatibility. I looked this up to make sure my opinion was still current. It still is.
My gold list:
I like Debian or OpenSUSE for stable releases.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for rolling release.
CachyOS for gaming optimisations and as a bleeding edge Arch fork. I also love Pacman and the Octopi repository front end using Paru.
Just to add to this:
Liux Mint is popular, because they are what Ubuntu could have been. They give you Ubuntu without all of Canonical’s anti-user decisions. They also have a version based on Debian if you really want to avoid Ubuntu completely.
Bazzite is also a very popular recommendation for gaming.
Aw, I had completely forgotten about the Debian based version of Mint. That’s an excellent choice too of course.