First things first, to pick a distro, you must understand what it is and what it's responsible for. Never pick a distro based on looks, as (apart from a few very rare exceptions) the looks are determined by your desktop environment, called DE for short. Most mainstream distros come with options for different DE's, Linux Mint calls them flavors, Fedora calls them spins. As a person who originally comes from windows, I prefer KDE, the defaults are very familiar, but the customization options are deep, lots of built in features (like being able to set custom keyboard shortcuts<3) allow you to customize the experience to your liking without relying on third-party tweaks or extensions which break with system updates. Another popular choice for DE is GNOME, but you pretty much have to like the way it looks out of the box, as native customization is sparse, and anything deeper relies on previously mentioned 'tweaks'. Cinamon (default for Linux Mint) is pretty nice, but the customization is not as deep as in KDE. XFCE is known for being very light weight, although I only tried it out once for a couple of minutes myself, on a modern system, I couldn't really tell the difference.
Back to distros. The biggest difference you're going to encounter between them is what packages (or what versions of packages) they allow you to download and install. Distros like Debian or Ubuntu focus on being stable, so they usually offer older versions, which have been extensively tested, while distros like Arch allow you to update to the new versions pretty much as soon as they are available, leaving the job to make sure that every package is compatible to the user themselves.
Next, I'm going to provide short reviews for some of the popular distros in order of that I have personally tried them.
Switching from windows to Ubuntu you'll probably feel very much at home. Not because of the way it looks, but because it's run by a similar corporation. Expect things like opt-out data collection, forcing their preferred way of doing things down your throat and so on. For example, Ubuntu has their own package type called snap, and the default browser that comes with Ubuntu is Firefox, but installed as a snap package. SNAPS ARE HORRIBLY SLOW, especially when first starting up, so expect to wait a good 5 or so seconds extra, every time you open your browser. You might be thinking "no big deal, I'll just uninstall it and install it through apt or something" well, think again. While yes, it is possible to do that, without doing any extra configuration, every time you try to install Firefox, Ubuntu will force install the snap version. It is exactly as fun and intuitive as it sounds.
I don't know, maybe snaps are good on the server side or something, but this type of operating system that goes against what the user clearly wants to do, is exactly why I switched from windows.
As I mentioned earlier, Ubuntu also focuses on being stable, which sounds good, but in practice, you'll likely be running software that is years out of date. I remember well how I used to see a video on Youtube, or read some article about a cool new feature that just got released in some app that I use, only to be disappointed by not being able to install it on my machine.
The biggest benefit of Ubuntu is that it is quite popular, so most guides online will have a version for how to do things on Ubuntu, most open source apps will have a release compatible with it and so on.
But here's the kicker - Ubuntu is based on Debian (which basically means they took Debian, and added/removed a bunch of things). That means that you can enjoy all the benefits of Ubuntu, without all the downsides, by just using Debian. Most online guides written for Ubuntu should work for Debian as well (in fact, a lot of them are written for "Debian/Ubuntu" or "Debian based distros"), and all software that works on Ubuntu should work on Debian just fine (Ubuntu uses .deb packages, which is short for Debian). I've never used Debian myself however, so I can't really speak on how easy it is to set up, but I have used
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian...) but with all the corpo shit removed, and nicely wrapped in a beginner friendly package. Honestly, if all you ever use is your web browser, look no further. Mint has all the benefits of Ubuntu, with the only downside of running older packages, which might not even be a downside, if you're looking for a stable system. It comes with some sensible options for DE's for you to choose from. A very solid choice for a beginner.
Once you get over the cringe of it's name, it's actually a very good distro, although it might not be as beginner friendly. First, the main reason I switched to it - newer packages. It's not a rolling release distro like Arch, so you don't have to worry about your system breaking anytime there's an update. However, it uses .rpm packages, and dnf as it's package manager (all previously mentioned distros use apt), which means that you'll sometimes have to compile that one niche open-source app you found on github yourself, even if it does "support linux", some only release .deb packages which are incompatible with Fedora. Also, when looking things up online, you might have to add "Fedora" in addition to "Linux" in your search query, as not everything works exactly the same here, and Fedora is less popular than Debian based distros, so information online might be a little more sparse. However, I just told ChatGPT that I use Fedora, it added that bit of information to it's memory, and now, whenever I ask it something, it always provides me Fedora instructions by default. This is why I'm having a harder time recommending it to a complete beginner, but at the same time, if you're at all tinker-ish with your tech, you'll probably end up with something non-Debian based in a short time on your journey anyway.
Just make sure to grab the KDE spin when you decide to download it for the most based experience ;)
Obviously, my experience with these is very limited, as I haven't personally tried any of them, but here's the gist of what I've gathered from other users online.
- Arch: as I mentioned previously, this is a rolling release distro, so expect things to break, and rtfm
- Manjaro (or any other "Arch based" distro): from what I've heard, these can become even less stable, as soon as you decide to step out of the environment the distro maintainers provide to you. If you're going to go that route, I say just go with Arch.
- Bazzite: the new king of gaming distros. It's actually based on Fedora too! It basically just offers a bunch of gaming related tweaks to make your experience better. I've been thinking of trying it, but as I haven't had any problems with gaming on Fedora, I never got around to it. I'm also not sure if it offers a KDE version, and I REFUSE to use GNOME again.
Can't wait to welcome you to the land of the penguins, M
