I’m daily driving it and it’s pretty nice. I was on fedora before and mint before that.

Yes.

Can you explain the questionable security practices?

Why don’t you look into projects that aren’t related to a company? Aren’t Ubuntu, fedora, and open suse the 3 that have corporate support? There are plenty of distros out there that are stable on the Debian branch and a lot of interesting projects on the Arch branch as well.

What’s went wrong in your .001% cases?

I’ll be sure to let you know 😜

Yeah bazzite is pretty stinking good. I have it on a media/gaming computer in my living room. Great for beginners but slightly annoying for some things since it’s immutable. I’ve ran into a couple things that it wouldn’t let me do. But, that’s also why I chose it for my living room. My family can’t easily break it

4 months or so? 0 issues so far. Was on fedora before that and had more problems. Mint before that and it’s not that mint is bad, it’s just not the only answer

The answer used to be mint. Now there are quite a few distros that are stable and “just work”. I’m using cachy as a daily driver at work and haven’t had any issues at all. And it’s arch based! So much for arch being unstable

I’m over on the other side of the states in the PNW. Also running a 5950x! We’re computer twinsies

I’m in the States but they were great about it. Issued an RMA and sent me new RAM. Total turnaround from me shipping bad ram to receiving new was only about a week. I haven’t tested the new RAM yet but assume it will be fine. I couldn’t ask for a much better process to be honest

Yeah I don’t see it. I’m assuming Duolingo messed up your game but it’s not obvious?

All the options you listed are downstream from a company. Fedora is from red hat, mint is a fork of Ubuntu, open suse is from… Suse? I can’t remember. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but figured I’d mention it.

Any distro you choose can look however you want. This is something I didn’t understand at first. Your version of Linux lives below the desktop environment. You can install (almost) whatever desktop environment you want on top of your version. Then you can tweak your desktop however you want. Some distros come pre-tweaked but don’t pick a distro on looks alone.

So really your deciding between 3 base Linux distros. Most “distros” are just the base system with some choice drivers and software to help you get going. A few of them are tweaking at the kernel level. You can do the raw version of any of the base Linux versions if you prefer to control and limit any software on your system.

Debian - updates slowly but stable, focus on testing before stable releases. You might miss new Linux features but unless you’re running the latest hardware you probably won’t know the difference. Distros based on Debian: Ubuntu, mint, popos, elementary os (looks like macos!), a hundred other ones.

Arch - updates rapidly with the risk of something not working. If you want bleeding edge features or every drop of performance choose an Arch distro. Just know that you MIGHT need to help it along. I don’t think arch distros being difficult is as true as it once was. There are some excellent distros out there making arch accessible and easy for the masses. Notable distros based on arch: endeavor, cachyos (my personal favorite right now), omarchy

Fedora: kind of a mix giving you fairly up to date software with a stable system. Honestly it’s probably the best place for a newbie to start. It’s not perfect though and you’ll want to read up on install if you have a Nvidia card. Fedora based distros: nobara, bazzite, but most people just use vanilla fedora.

I too was scared of the arch but it’s been as easy as any other distro so far

That’s not what I said. My experience with nobara personally hasn’t been great and while I use bazzite at home for gaming PC but wouldn’t recommend it at this moment because it seems that the dev team is having some drama. I use cachy daily and find it wonderful and super easy. Not the arch difficulty that I was expecting. It’s a downstream.

Yeah I thought it would be great and bought into the hype. It ended up being one of the more frustrating distros for me. Maybe your right about the de being included in base packages? Regardless, it lost me after the second issue. On cachy now and happy. Plus I really like the little terminal update animation thing if pacman C eating the progress bar.

Once I tried to install a different desktop environment and that didn’t go well. Another time it just… Stopped working? I hadn’t changed anything. It seemed like a Nvidia thing but I never did recover it. Ended up doing a fresh install. If you’re 2 months in you’ve done better than I did! It might just not like my machine

You might just want to recommend fedora with the caveat that he’ll need to do a little setup with drivers. Bazzite and nobara are both fedora distros.

I strongly disagree with the order. To me, nobara has broken more than any of these (quite frequently actually), pop os is clunky and not intuitive, cachy is surprisingly the most stable for me and easiest despite it being arch based. Bazzite I use on my home living room computer and it’s been pretty solid. I’m a little concerned with it though because I believe they are having some maintainer issues that might impact future releases.

For real. It’s basically do you like typing apt, dnf, or pacman more? Do you want stuff ready to go with potentially things you’ll never use, or do you want to do it all yourself? Do you want daily updates or just occasionally updates.