Distros I have used and my thoughts

Mint

Mint is fine. Things just work. It’s not for me though. I get the windows refugees concept and how Cinnamon kind of feels like window 7, but that’s an old and tired sentiment at this point. Windows 7 came out in 2009 and lost support in 2023. That’s 17 years ago. So, I dunno, that’s weird to me. Unless you want a retro late 2000’s look. Whatever. It does work well with NVIDIA drivers and basically just works out of the box. That’s good and nice. It does have a device manager, which is kind of a cool thing as well for those not used to the command line. And it doesn’t do snaps by default even though it is a Ubuntu fork. Good for beginners as many say, so… cool. If you like it, you like it. Nothing really wrong with that, but they don’t support KDE Plasma, so I see no need to be using that.

MX Linux

Basically Debian but a little easier to use. I don’t have much opinion here.

Pop!_OS

Another Ubuntu fork, but they go with their COSMIC desktop. Many people like it, many people think it is still in alpha. Pop!_OS itself was fine. It was the DE that I had an issue with. If you remove COSMIC I think you basically just have Mint or Ubuntu without snaps. They’re still fairly for behind as far as the kernels go, and they are still basically just using the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS system, which is fine, especially if you want to sell hardware and have the system run solidly and stable. But you could just use Debian. I dunno. Back in 2019 I kept hearing it was ‘good for gaming’ and now that doesn’t really mean much anymore. Basically any Linux distro that has access to the repos with Steam in it + ProtonUp-Qt w/ GE-Proton-10.x installed, and has the Mesa drivers for AMD, or akmods/dkms for NVIDIA (or basically the non-free NVIDIA drivers) you’re good. Linus Sebastian apparently managed to completely fuck his install up.

Debian (vanilla - no Sid)

Yeah, it’s stable as hell. Running it headless is the way to go for a server. Super stable, not a ton of updates. Running Debian as a desktop is fine as well. Everything is ‘old’, nothing is bleed edge, but it is all stable. However, you will be well out of date on new stuff. Duh. But it’s Debian. But you can basically have whatever DE you want. I find that getting packages outside the main Debian repos is a bit more of a hassle than it is on Fedora or openSUSE, or Ubuntu. I only ever ran this as a desktop on my old Dell laptop with an NVIDIA 1050, and at the time I didn’t know how to get the drivers working correctly. And, later, I came to find out that the default Debian partitioning wouldn’t have allowed for the drivers anyway. The EFI partition was FAR too small to allow for the 1.4 GB blob from NVIDIA for the drivers. I would find this out later on openSUSE Tumbleweed. So, I got frustrated with Debian and trying to jump through hoops, trying to get QGIS on there. In reality, it probably wouldn’t be nearly the pain and hassle it was back in October/November of 2025 when I first gave it a shot. IT was the first time I had actually gotten Debian to install, and that was probably because secure boot was still on before, and I needed to get set to AHCI so it would boot nicely.

Zorin

Pretty sure I used this one. I found the paid option kind of confusing and weird. I no longer have the ISO and that was some 7-8m years ago anyway. I hear good things about their default DE which is better than what you usually hear about Pop!_OS. Apparently it is more ‘windows’ like. I dunno.

EndeavourOS

Ah, Arch without the hassle. EndeavourOS is actually a pretty good and solid distro. It’s just Arch with some themeing and a much easier installer. The EOS Welcome app/program that comes up on boot is actually really helpful and useful. You can do all your updates directly from there if you want. Another great thing I hadn’t realized early on is the ‘get more software’ or whatever the name of that tab is. Basically make a list, and just go through that on the install and you can get a ton of stuff right there super fast with out having to go through Discover or the command line and install each and every program one by one. Yay is great as well, but that’s Arch in general. I do like the Purple theme of EndeavourOS and they’re Dutch which is cool. I like that they are not in the US. Being it is Arch, you can use the AUR, which does sometimes mean you will end up downloading the source code and compiling from source. Welp. But, it also does mean you really are on the bleeding edge. They had QGIS 4.0 pretty much immediately after release. Here, on the desktop, on Ultramarine (Fedora 43) the Fedora/Ultramarine repos are only on 3.44.9. That’s really good, but still a little behind. Depends on what you wanna do I guess. Being on the bleeding edge does come with it’s downsides. However! Contrary to what some people say, I have never had EndeavourOS break thanks to an update. I may well replace Ultramarine with it because it just works well. I originally daily drove this for a while until I found that Brave wasn’t using the NVIDIA graphics to decode video on YouTube or whatever. Turns out it is really supposed to be using the Intel integrated graphics (on a laptop with a dGPU and iGPU) instead of the dedicated card. Whoops. Oh well, I switched to Vivaldi and like it better.

Fedora

This distro I originally hated. It felt restrictive and boring. It’s still boring, but my first attempt was either on Fedora 33 or Fedora 40. I don’t remember which. What I do remember what I couldn’t get Steam and I hated it as a distro, not realizing at the time that the real complaint was towards GNOME. And I later found out that all I actually had to do was enable a few RPM’s like the non-free and bam. We’re good. Suddenly the akmods-nvidia drivers are easy, Steam and ProtonUp-QT install just fine. In fact, a lot of things work super good. And it’s really stable. The repos are pretty up to date, leading edge over bleeding edge. It’s got nearly the newest kernels and packages, but not so new you’re getting buggy or alpha releases. Some say Arch has this problem, but my EndeavourOS experience wasn’t like this. Fedora doesn’t have the AUR, they have COPR which I haven’t used and really haven’t needed. It’s been running on the Lenovo laptop for a good while now and it has been really good. Updates have yet to break anything. I partitioned my drive so that the EFI would have plenty of room for the NVIDIA drivers (I gave it 2 Gb) and a full 1 Gb for the boot partition. I’ve had no issues with boot or EFI getting full like I did on openSUSE. It just seem to maintain itself, holding back the two previous kernel versions for the rollback. Snapper is great but I haven’t needed it, except for when I had some funny issues when I put Endeavour on the secondary SSD on the laptop. QGIS is really up to date, and I just have everything working well. Stuff like Python, Perl, Go, etc., are all close to the very newest versions. You can do updates live but it does prefer to do a restart when major updates have been applied. I actually like this. It has, however, gotten stuck in this process. I’ve seen it mentioned it could be a RAM issue where it uses to much and gets stuck in a loop or something. I dunno. I’ve just hard restarted and it came right back and worked fine. Never had a problem with the NVIDIA drivers on Fedora. The Lenovo laptop has a 1050 Ti which is no longer officially supported, but the akmod-nvidia drivers have kept up and nothing has broken. I have never had a kernel-driver sync mismatch either like I think I did with openSUSE.

Manjaro

I haven’t used this since ~2019. IT was okay. They’re KDE was green themed. I didn’t know as much then as I do now, but it was fine. However, their team has had some serious issues. And other folks complain about them holding stuff back for extra testing since Arch, which it’s based on is so bleeding edge. EndeavourOS filled this niche much better. So, if you want vanilla arch, archinstall, or read the wiki. You want Arch without an all day exercise, Endeavour. I can’t really see any real reason to go with Manjaro unless you just like it, or the theme, or green. I dunno.

Ubuntu

It’s Debian but easier! It’s the true beginners first start. Works well with NVIDIA, the latest version, two years late, will finally have GNOME 50, kernel version 7.0, wayland only, etc. But it is easier and more ubiquitous than so of the other distros. And basically a lot of docs and tutorials default to Ubuntu. If you use Arch, Fedora, openSUSE, or something else, I guess they figure you’re on your own or you can figure it out. Which, I mean, it kind of true. Their version of GNOME is better in my opinion. The ppa repos are kind of annoying and I’d rather just use the AUR/yay or the RPM’s from Fedora. But hey… however. Fuck snaps. Little shitty RAMpires. Snaps are awful if you have limited RAM. I had incidents where things just quit, quietly, but they quit because it ran out of RAM because the Snaps act like mounted drives and are allocated RAM all the time. Ubuntu does also do a thing where it pre-loads into memory data needed to speed up start up times and stuff for frequently used programs. That would be fine if I was working with a shit ton of RAM, but on my old Dell which only has 8 Gb, that’s utterly terrible.

Arch

I mean, it’s Arch. It’s bleeding edge. “It’s simple”. And by it’s simple, they deceptively don’t mean it is easy to install, everything just works. It’s simple like having a car that everything is manual. It was simple to make. You have to decide everything. Basically nearly nothing just works without configuring it yourself. Now, that does have it’s benefits if you have a super niche system or are just really picky. But, as far as plug and play goes, not so much. It’s not Gentoo, but whether you use the archinstall script or you do it fully manual, it’s gonna be a thing. Some claim that the ‘reason’ arch is like this is so you’ll know how to trouble shoot. That’s bullshit. The idea that if you don’t do the manual install, you won’t know how to fix things later is just stupid. Unless you’re some kind of savant that just recalls everything perfectly, I very much doubt many people are going to run into a problem that is completely solvable because they did something similar in the install. And even if you did, how are you supposed to magically just make these connections? It’s bullshit and I think most folks who aren’t just repeating the bullshit that’s been repeated to them, that they read off a forum, that was repeated to that poster who had it repeated to them…. know that’s bullshit. It’s like complaining that Python is slow so you should do everything in C. Sure, okay. Practice what ya preach dipshit. But, Arch really isn’t so bad or that difficult to use once you get past the manual install. EndeavourOS is a good example of that.

openSUSE (Tumbleweed and Leap)

Ah, good ol openSUSE. I do like this and they’re little Geeko. It was basically ‘my first’ Linux distro. Yes, I dabbled a bit with Ubuntu before it around 2014, but I didn’t use it a ton. I prolly had Unity on it instead of GNOME. Anyway, the first distro I actually used for more than just a few minutes; I used this in the computer lab in the CS dept. taking Python (Computational Problem Solving or whatever it was called) at W&M. It was probably Leap, and I have no idea the DE at the time. Could have been KDE. Could have been GNOME. I have no idea. But I did like it. I tried a few times in the 2019-2020 time frame to get Leap or Tumbleweed to install on the Dell. In hindsight, it probably didn’t work because secure boot or something was still on, or it wasn’t switched to AHCI. I did manage to get Leap on the Dell after I finally said goodbye to KDE Neon. I ran Leap for a while but wasn’t really paying attention. I wasn’t trying to actually run much more than the browser. That laptop was basically just my work room browsing and music/podcast machine. I wasn’t actually doing much of anything on it. I know the NVIDIA drivers definitely weren’t installed. I’d find that out later. Leap never really gave me any trouble, but I didn’t really have a whole of anything so updates were meh.

Then I put Tumbleweed on the Lenovo and that is when things got different. I moved to Tumbleweed from Debian. Debian felt too restrictive, so I went to Tumbleweed. Rolling Release. It really is a pretty great rolling release, until it isn’t. I do like it, but I had issues with what seemed like the NVIDIA drivers on the Lenovo getting out of sync with the kernel. Basically, it seemed like the NVIDIA drivers would update ahead of the kernel and thus cause problems. It very well could have been my fault: too much tinkering, too much asking the dum dum ai. I dunno. At the same time, I had a trifecta of issues on that laptop I didn’t know about at the time. Firstly, the EFI partition was too small. The default always is too small. So, even when I did try to get the right drivers on there, they couldn’t install because they couldn’t unpack because they were too big. I would run out of space and it would quietly crash. This is where my making the EFI 2 Gb comes from. At the same time KDE was also running baloo6 or whatever which was constantly trysting to index things. So, when I would transfer over lots of files, from my back up thumb drive, I would get these stutters because the indexing was fairly CPU intense. Then! On top of that, I was still running the old mechanical drive. The drive in that Lenovo, originally, was a mechanical drive that was supposed to be supplemented with a 16 Gb optane memory stick. The idea there being that the optane could hold and transfer stuff really fast to basically get ahead of the mechanical drive and make things faster. It didn’t. That drive kind of sucked and optane doesn’t work on Linux. I’m not sure it ever really worked on Windows either. That laptop was terribly slow on Windows 11 before I finally killed off windows. I was getting lots of micro stutters for a while. I didn’t know what it really was, though really, some combination of all three. I wouldn’t get the mechanical out for a while, and the micro stutters kept on when I moved to EndeavourOS after openSUSE, though turning off baloo really helped. Later outright replacing the mechanic with a Samsung EVO 990 Pro made a stupidly huge difference. But I wouldn’t experience that until later on Fedora. Another issue plaguing that system was on the Lenovo I had set it up with a BTRFS Snapper combo. Btrfs is good for nvme and SSD drives but not for mechanical. I didn’t know that at the time and should have been using Ext4 instead. Ext4 is much better for a mechanical drive.

I ran openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few months as the daily driver for the desktop. Here it was a lot different. Being it’s an all AMD system, I had none of the NVIDIA driver issues. Everything actually ran really well. Except for 3 incidents. First, I once formatted a 4 Gb thumb drive and the boot record thought that that thumb drive was now a boot able drive and added it to the record. Then it wouldn’t startup because it was looking for it. But since it was a thumb drive, it wasn’t there. That was dumb. Then one two occasions I had update issues where the kernel updates did weird stuff and put the entire system into a read only state. I couldn’t update anything. The first time I was able to restore the read-write capability and through some rolling back get things back in order. But it happened again, and I couldn’t get it to behave, so after much thinking, I said goodbye to the little Geeko and hopped to Ultramarine on the desktop.

Nobara

I played with this for all of a day or two. This preceded me running vanilla Fedora. One of the reasons I didn’t run Fedora before was GNOME and it wasn’t until something like Fedora 42 that there was an official KDE spin. I did like the device manager and Glorious Eggroll has done a good job on the gaming side of things. But I do more than just gaming. I feel like the gaming centric element of some of these distros feels a little immature. Yes, PC’s run games. But they do lots of other things too. Cars can race but they are good for many other things too.. So, that basically just convinced me to try Vanilla Fedora, which by then had its own official KDE spin. Sold. And so, I never really gave Nobara much more than a test drive.

KDE Neon

I ran this for a good while. In grad school I was running Kubuntu because I wasn’t a fan of Ubuntu and GNOME. Then I found KDE Neon which was basically Kubuntu but closer to the source. It was pretty good for a while. Again, see above on the Dell laptop and Leap, but it was just basically my workroom laptop for videos, music, and podcasts. During the pandemic I tried folding at home and I just didn’t get why that laptop didn’t use the GPU at all. Well, I didn’t have the drivers installed. And if I had to guess, the easy guess would be that even if I tried to install the right ones, I wouldn’t have been able to because the default partitions sizes wouldn’t have allowed it. Oh, and when the upgrade came around, probably to 24.04, it couldn’t. It wouldn’t. I don’t remember why; I never wrote it down. I tried a couple of times, but the upgrade just failed. It wasn’t worth fighting for, so I moved to Leap. I’ve really not seen much of any talk about KDE Neon these days. It’s currently at #23 on Distrowatch, but that is really just hits on the website. It’s a lot higher up than TUXEDO, but I think TUXEDO is better. Maybe it’s the German start that scares a lot of normies away.

Void

No luck getting this to work. I tried three times. It just wouldn’t take. I don’t know why, but it just didn’t work. Oh well. It wasn’t worth the fight.

TUXEDO

Basically what Kubuntu should be. Ubuntu/Debian with KDE and no snaps. Good support for NVIDIA. A bit behind but not any worse than Ubuntu or Pop!_OS. It doesn’t really seem to get the same attention as other distros, maybe because it is German over other more English forward distros (regardless of whether they are American or not). I don’t have much to say because it basically just does what it should. It’s like running Fedora KDE but with apt instead of DNF and less up to date. Debian with KDE without snaps. That’s it.

Kubuntu

I ran this for a while. It was good in grad school. I definitely liked it over Ubuntu. It was essentially my second distro after openSUSE. It was good. If it wasn’t Ubuntu and did snaps, I’d like it a lot more. But Tuxedo exists, so there is not need. But basically, as I said above, I hopped to KDE Neon from this to get a little more away from the Ubuntu itself. And yes, I know, Neon is just a Ubuntu fork. Meh. So it Tuxedo; well. Debian.

Ultramarine

Fedora but with some tweaks. First off, I like the Ultramarine blue and the logo better. It uses zsh and starship over the vanilla bash. Is it better? Yeah, a bit. Not massively, but I do like it. It’s basically Fedora KDE but just a little tweaked. There isn’t really any downside. Could I enact those changes to vanilla Fedora? Yes. I did on the Lenovo. At this point I kind of don’t really remember what is really different between Fedora and Ultramarine. It doesn’t get a lot of attention, maybe because the team behind it are Thai. I think that’s cool, so whatever.

Desktop Environments

GNOME

I generally do not like GNOME. Especially in it’s purest, most vanilla form. The version that comes on Fedora is why I hated Fedora for a long time. The lack of minimize and maximize and expand buttons on the windows is just stupid. You only get an X to close, otherwise, you’re supposed to use the tray… Because apparently have windows that can minimize is distracting and confusing, so no one should have them. Use the tray or command bar or whatever. But that excuse sounds rather stupid to me. Very apple, very much the user is stupid so we’ll hold their hand and tell them the one and only way, and that is our way, and if you don’t like it, you’re a stupid user. The end.

I did actually kind of like/tolerate the flavor of GNOME on Ubuntu 25.10. The bar on the left side, once it could auto-retract itself; the Yaru dark theme; I could handle that. I kind of liked it. But the fucking snaps are what did it for me. Rampires they are (ram-vampires).

KDE Plasma

This is the goat. There is, so far, in my opinion, not a better DE to use. You can go way down a rabbit hole of customization, you can do literally nothing at all and keep it vanilla. It just works, and unless you are easily distracted, it gets out of your way. It doesn’t tell you how to do things, or more importantly, what you can’t do. It just let’s you do whatever it is you want. Simple as that.

Budgie

I kind of hated this. The tablet like default behavior is pretty annoying on a desktop/laptop.

Mate

IT was a long time ago and I don’t really remember it. IT wasn’t terrible and it wasn’t good enough to memorable enough to stick with.

Cinnamon

Feels like ‘baby’s first distro’. It just feels rather Fisher Price to me. It’s fine, it works, it’s not as customizable as Plasma, but it’s better than GNOME. But it’s not as good as KDE Plasma, so, what’s the point? Mint doesn’t even support Plasma, so…..

COSMIC

A neat Wayland-only hybrid between a traditional desk top and a window tiler. It’s fine, but still rough around the edges. It still has some aesthetic inconsistencies and needs work. I think it very well could be really good one day.

IceWM

IT was ugly. That’s all I really have to say here.

i3

I really didn’t get this enough time. I don’t really get window tilers yet, and I don’t know if I will.

Hyprland

Nope. Just haven’t

Xmonad

One day. I haven’t gotten there yet.