cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/42673820
Looking for suggestions besides Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Debian, Arch Linux, or Kali. I have previous experience with XFCE, Ratpoison, Openbox, KDE Plasma. Recently started trying out LXQT.
Would be on a modest Dell Latitude with i5, 14" 1080p display with intel graphics, and maybe 16gb ram.
This is blog post is several years old now, but the points to consider when choosing a distro are still quite relevant.
Choosing Your Desktop Linux Distribution
TL;DR - Probably Fedora Workstation
Personally, I can’t stand using anything but GNOME on a laptop (the touchpad experience on GNOME is much better than KDE), so my personal recommend would have to be something like Fedora Workstation. I find the ~6 month version release cycle very nice, it’s a good balance between rolling and stable.
I specifically listed Debian as a no, just because I have tons of experiences with Debian XFCE. Spoiler, it is great. Haha.
Oh, I didn’t see the cross post thingy. I guess then something like slackware would be fun. All of those stable distros make the most sense in my opinion, because you can always grab new software for them, while with something rolling everything gets update no matter if you want it or not.
Devuan if you want something solid and boring. Gentoo if you feel adventures and want something that’s fun and solid!
I use Aurora, done by the same guys who make Bazzite (de facto PC gaming distro) Aurora is immutable, a flavor of Fedora, meant as a general purpose workstation.
I had tried Manjaro before that, but I kept messing up the network drivers somehow. Thus, I looked for immutable distros that are harder for me to break. If you’re not as reckless as me, Manjaro might do you good?
i almost went with aurora here. in fact it’s still on the other pc i was also testing on, sitting on a shelf unused the last several months. but after trying out pretty much everything i could get my hands on… i ended up back ‘home’, on debian. where i started ~ 30 years ago.
solus os (independent ‘semi rolling’) and ultramarine (fedora based) were two other non-debian based ones on my short list. i already have a manjaro desktop so it wasn’t on my list at all… i already knew i didn’t want it on this box.
I ran Manjaro over a few years and found it just fine. I appreciate that approach to Arch. Would you recommend Aurora when the system specs listed are i5, 8 - 16gb ram and old intel integrated graphics?
The only thing I’d hesitate on is the integrated graphics. Tbh I have no idea how that will behave. Aurora’s system requirements lead me to conclude that if your laptop is later than ~2014, you should be okay.
My Aurora desktop starts using ~2GB memory at boot, so your 16 should be fine.
Before I forget, their GNOME workstation distro: https://projectbluefin.io/ if you’re into that.
I recommend Aurora because I already use it, and think it’s cool. I’ve only ever used it on one machine, so if you go that route, I hope your experience is good, too. I like KDE, and Aurora is immutable so it’s harder to mess up critical components. Works for me.
I use Aurora daily on a second hand Ideapad with 8GB RAM and it’s great. Flawless, to be honest. It comes with lots of great little quality of life features here and there and it just works.
alma and rocky are the new ‘clones’ of rhel that were spawned from the death of centos when redhat radically changed its mission in ~ 2020-21. they have most the pros and cons of running rhel itself.
I just installed it on a workstation. I’m mostly used to seeing it. Headless but it looks pretty nice with KDE. Alma is a fedora branch and RHEL is generally stable and just works.
Why not base Fedora? A lot of people are saying that with default gnome. I’ve never even tried yum, so either would be something new.
Yum/dnf is easy it works just like apt get
Ie: yum install htop
As for why Alma, it’s what I’m most familiar with coming from a Centos background. And from what I remember and can tell Alma seems much more stable than centos. While still not constantly changing things every 6months like fedora does
once you pass the 4 gig of ram mark, all of the distros become usable for you, so – in your shoes – i would decide what’s the most important things you need.
for me, it’s a distro that doesn’t require to me to upgrade beyond the using package/kernel updates and that’s something like debian where i can stick is a release for a really long time w/o having to reinstall when the next version is released.
most distros seem to a have a migration path, but it’s rare to find one that doesn’t have any hiccups.
I’ve been on kubuntu many years, with plenty more before that. So, open to trying something new. Otherwise, I’d not change anything.
yes, their LTS trims mimic the same behavior that debian has with their releases and that cachyos recommendation is probably as different as you can get without going into bsd. lol
Not a recommendation but this is currently a Linux Mint Debian Edition household for the most part. Just never had a reason to swap yet, I’m sure there will be. Careful with the wifi cards look up your specific model. As long as it has an ethernet cable you shouldn’t have to worry tho
All of them. Put home in a separate partition and just rename /home/kiol to /home/kiol2 before installing the next one and be careful not to format that partition. Also keep a space separated text list of all of your needed programs to paste into whatever package manager command in a file somewhere in your home dir. Go into distrowatch and try the most niche ones nobody has ever heard about too. Become THE distro hopper.
Do you want to actually have a rock solid (albeit, boring) computing experience? Mint or Debian (I know you said no Debian but everyone always come back to the big D eventually)
Do you want a neat flavor-of-the month distro that you’ll tinker with for a while and ultimately move on from? Void is pretty cool
Honorable mention: NixOS. It’s different but when it clicks for people, they never use anything else
Someone else asked for it as well. Been curious about it since trying AntiX
I haven’t tried anything other than KDE plasma, but Niri looked interesting. CachyOS has Limine as a boot manager option, and I liked it
The distro has a lot of desktop environment options in general
Okay, added as an option. Another person requesting using Sway with Void.
Then Sway might be a better fit for you. Though I definitely recommend Niri, since it’s a fresh look for tiling WMs.
It is on the list… someone asked for it with Void, and another with MXlinux
I bought an old laptop to install libreboot on and I’ve been messing with Gentoo. I see the appeal now that I’ve tried it. It took me a couple days to compile librewolf but assuming your laptop isnt from 2013 I imagine things would build a lot faster for you
Well… alright, added it on the wiki. So far I’ve heard Gentoo, or Fedora w/ Gnome
