Hello everyone, I need help to decide on a Linux Distribution to settle and finally stop distro hopping. I have quite some experience with Linux(1year Mint, a quarter year Arch, nixos, debian, manjaro, fedora, suse tumbleweed and kalpa…)I have been experimenting for now almost 3 years. Now I finally want to setlle but I just don’t know where. I like Nix’s shell but don’t like installing everything in five steps(with git because my brain can stand neither the dirty tree warning nor leaving out on the git push) and I don’t need the reproducibility. I like rolling so I don’t need to reinstall or do any major update, but even more appealing is low maintenance and stability in the sense of nothing unexpectedly breaking. I’ll use the computer as an daily driver mostly for programming & 3d design, university related work, streaming and also some gaming. Thank you for your answers. #linux #distrohopping. EDIT: I don’t want to have a company behind my distribution. And my specs: Nvidia RTX 4070, Amd Radeon 7 7840HS, 16GB of RAM
Conclusion: Thanks a lot for all of that feedback, I decided to go for Debian 13 Stable and might check out MX once.
I always vote for boredom, which means I vote for Debian. It’s a well rounded, reliable and solid OS. It can be a bit dated on some packages but it rewards with very low maintenance. It works. It does what it is supposed to do, which is allowing us to run and use our computer as we see fit.
You want something a bit more up to date? Move to Mint. If Debian still appeals to you, move to LMDE.
I’d recommend LMDE over Ubuntu Mint. There isn’t much point to ubuntu mint anymore to be honest
I guess they’re very similar overall. The main advantage I see for Mint/Ubuntu over LMDE/Debian is hardware and driver support. On Ubuntu you get much more recent versions for the kernel, Mesa, Nvidia drivers, … from the HWE stack.
I’d say that if you’re using such up to date hardware that you need the latest kernels and drivers, you probably don’t need the handholding of mint, so you might want to prefer fedora or arch or smth, and not Mint/Ubuntu.
Really?
Bias : I use debian for my own machine.
I have two machines on Mint I am responsible for; one craptop with LMDE and one tower for my Mrs with Ubuntu Mint.
I hate fucking about with the tower more than the craptop. The laptop is just as easy to use and was just as easy to install and everything. The only thing I needed to do was to replace cinnamon with XFCE in an attempt to make it run faster since the craptop has like 2gb ram.
Doesn’t Mint just configures Cinnamon as default DE and leaves the rest alone, working from the stable branch? That’s my understanding.
I also run Debian. One desktop and three laptops. I run Mate, normally. The best compromise between useability and DE resource use. But I’ve used XFCE and LXDE.
You do you but…
god I hate Mate. The fucking config preferences never worked properly across “profiles/saves/whatever” for me.
I like LXQT most. I tried out basically every DE under the sun in a VM (and KDE and Gnome on bare metal. Gnome as part of Nyarch to rescue my wife’s old tower and to see wtf it was like. It crashed and fucked up. Not sure if it was due to Ny or arch, but obv not a good fit)
Yes, even Sugar. Please do not try Sugar.
I worked with seriously hardware constricted machines for years and users on a learning curve.
KDE did not make my fancy when I tried it, when first moving from Windows, 20 years ago. Not then, not now. I know it has evolved a great deal but I can’t justify commiting so much hardware resources for the DE alone. And the obcession with the K’s are a bit of a pet peeve. I’m aware I’m getting some packages from it now and then and I have to eventually try it again but tomorrow is not the eve of such day.
I used Gnome until Gnome ceased to be Gnome and reinvented itself under that smartphone aspect. Mate forked and maintained that simple approachable look and feel.
XFCE is good but I missed the dual panel on the file explorer and eventually moved from it. It also tended to force me to mannually configure sound settings, keyboard hotkeys and other small things that otherwise were readily available.
I spent some time with Bunsen Labs installed on a machine and I enjoyed the look and feel. Conky was the jewel for me. But I had other users on that machine that didn’t adapt.
A short stint on Enlightenment. Not my cup of tea. Deepin was a disappointment. And I couldn’t motivate myself to manually configure a tile manager. I want a computer, not another hobby.
I used LXQT for some time but I felt it lacking. Very light and very fast but… Cinnamon is a nope for me, personally, but I have set it up for others and people enjoyed it, even more when coming from Windows.
But isn’t this the beauty of Linux? There is an option for everyone. Like you very well put it: you do you.
I don’t like Cinnamon but want to use KDE, but the user friendliness of LMDE would be really nice, not that i wouldn’t like the terminal.
My understanding is that Mint focus development of LMDE around Cinnamon but the other DEs are there nonetheless, untouched, like Debian releases it.
you can have KDE on LMDE. Cinnamon’s default login manager has an icon to change the DE you’re going to log into.
EDIT : Install gnome-boxes or virtual machine manager to try the process out.