this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and (to a lesser extent) Fedora are basically THE best "desktop" distros. They support a range of desktop evnironments but are mostly built around "just working". If you are coming from windows, you can't really do wrong with KDE Plasma or (Linux Mint) Cinnamon as both of those are "more Windows than Windows" as they heavily crib from the vista/7 era. But even whatever the current default Ubuntu desktop environment is called at this point is fine.
So it mostly boils down to what GPU you have.
Personally? I use Fedora with KDE Plasma for my desktop OS. While I am not huge on either, I vastly prefer flatpaks to snaps for app delivery. And I have a lot of concerns with how Canonical/Ubuntu is handling update cadences as a way to promote their enterprise OS.
But also? The beauty of Linux is that it is trivial to reformat. And the best thing you can do is just distro hop a bit for the first month or so. Install Mint. If you find something bothering you, look at what distro does that better and install that. New distro a piece of shit? Embrace Fedora. And so forth.
The reason so many of us get rather tribal about our distro or desktop environment is because we chose them. In the Windows space, you get cranky and hope Microsoft undo something you hate in the next five years (or you install sketchy third party plugins that never work). In the Linux space? You find out that a bunch of people also hate that clippy went away and built an entire distro around support for clippy like behavior. Or whatever.
If you put a bit of effort in you can even re-use your home directory and lose zero data. Although, personally, I have never had the patience for that. Games go on dedicated drives that migrate between installs. And personal documents get backed up to my NAS. So a reformat is just wiping the OS drive, installing the new distro, and then spending a minute or two to figure out what weird ass name an app I like is in the package manager.
I guess that depends on what your goal is. If you want to learn Linux, distro hopping won't help much and can even be counter-productive since you're just looking at different sets of configurations instead of making them yourself. Try a few, but at a certain point, you'll get better outcomes by digging in and figuring out how to get what you want. Most things can be done with any distro because Linux is Linux.
I personally use openSUSE Tumbleweed (been about 4 years now), and that's only because I needed to reinstall anyway because I wanted BTRFS on / for snapshotting. Before that I used Arch (about 5 years), before that was Fedora (1-2 years; switched because release upgrades took forever), and before that was Ubuntu (2-ish years; switched because a release upgrade broke stuff). I tried multiple desktop environments and Window Managers on each, which was really easy to do by just installing and configuring.
If you don't want to learn Linux and just want to accomplish some task (say, playing games), get a distro focused on that task and be happy. But if you want to learn Linux, pick a popular one and get your hands dirty until there's something you want to do that your current distro just doesn't handle well.
I guess it depends on how you define "learn Linux". I "distro hop" repeatedly every day since we use a mix of ubuntu and rhel "at work" and I use a mix of debian and fedora "at home". Except for that one vendor's server that runs (REDACTED).
And the vast majority is the same regardless of distro. Sure I might never be able to remember the package manager flags for each distro and need to figure out where config files are stored but all of that is a quick google away. Because I "learn(ed) Linux" in terms of how to read an error message and search for the appropriate terms. Similarly, some number of months back I ran into an issue with a game but was knowledgeable enough to realize it was a Wayland compatibility issue and did a mess of generating config files in x11 so that I could play the game "normally" after that.
But I guess I take issue with your depiction of this. Mostly? You found shortcomings in distros and picked what you like. Good. But you are more describing "learn openSUSE" or "learn Fedora" as opposed to "learn Linux".
My understanding of "distro hopping" is reinstalling the OS to try something different, not just using something different throughout the day. I also use a few different distros for different reasons (openSUSE Leap for my NAS, openSUSE Tumbleweed for my desktop/laptop, Debian for my VPS, Alpine for containers, etc). The package manager is the main important difference between them, and that's really easy to look up as needed.
To an extent. A lot of people recommend "distro hopping" to try a different desktop environment or something, and I've always just configured those within whatever distro I'm using at the time. I only switch when I either need to reinstall anyway, or something with how the maintainers handle packaging annoys me enough to try something else.
So yeah, I only recommend "distro hopping" when first trying Linux because hopping is fun, but once you see what's available, I think it's counter-productive unless you have a clear reason why your distro won't work with what you want.
My point is that I will "never" learn a particular distro. And I very much argue there is no point. If you focus on learning all the quirks of Linux Mint then you are screwed if the team behind Mint make choices you disagree with. And if that sounds impossible because Linux is open source and people will just fork it and blah blah blah: Canonical. Or even the shitshow that is Centos/Rocky and RHEL.
I've worked with people who insist they are an expert server admin. And, when push comes to shove, they lose their mind over the idea of not running Debian Server or RHEL. That means they are who we call if we have an issue with one of those specific distros but they are pretty much worthless in day to day because they don't really learn how to debug or "learn" and instead just memorized all the quirks that one team have turned into Features.
Agreed. The only people who should "learn" a particular distro are the distro maintainers and support people. Everyone else should just learn Linux generally, and ideally get some exposure to a few different distros if they'll be doing anything admin-y. But "regular users" are fine sticking to one, provided it solves their problems.