I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
Cachyos, I swapped from windows with it, og dualbooted, ended up never wanting to open windows agaun
You cant really go wrong, de is more what decides the desktop experience, like theming/look ,etc. Kde plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce , etc. or tiling managers like hyprland (id stick to des for now coming from windows)
Ive mostly tried plasma and gnome Kde plasma is windows on steroids, customizable and snappy, tons of settings, most customization built in and not reliant on extensions
Gnome is like chromeos/macos futuristic opinionated, I like it a lot with extensions, slightly better than kde plasma with a lot of extensions imo
Cinnamons like closer to a simple windows experience
xfces lightweight but I think plasmas caught up there?
They all come with different preinstalled apps, which are a mix of os and de dependent, like mint with cinnamon may use nemo for files, cachyos with gnome may use nautilus, but I like nemo so on cachyos with gnome I have nemo installed and set as the default.
Deepin and elementary have unique des I think, and pop os with cosmic in alpha
If you mainly game: Nobara (and I get less and less convinced of that - Fedora original is almost as good by now) If you mainly work on it: Fedora.
If you need broad support: Ubuntu. Sadly. But read up on the drawbacks.
Ubuntu, Ubuntu is fine, it gets hate but tbh it’s fine. It’s well supported, issues getting fixed and there’s plenty of info on how to fix stuff when you inevitably find something that doesn’t work.
I find Fedora provides a great balance between new code and stability. I’ve had lots of trouble getting distros like Ubuntu to work with newer apps and features.
Fedora has 2nd best repos compared to Arch/AUR in my opinion, but because Fedora is actually stable I use it instead to avoid headaches. As much as I miss pacman, Fedora just works. Flatpaks and Appimages fill in the blind spots.
What Desktop Environment or Window Manager to use is your call. I spend most time in my livimg room vs at my actual desktop so I like GNOME it’s couch friendly. Desktop I’m KDE. Boring I guess but I’m too lazy to fuck with ricing.
Put Linux Mint on an USB thumbdrive and play with it until you are comfortable. Be wary it would be somewhat slower than a system installed on the laptop’s drive.
Then, if it is a spare laptop, go ahead and install it. Avoid dual booting, it is more hassle than worth at this stage in your journey. Disable secureboot before installing, or Windows will try to hijack the laptop. You can always re-enable it later if you really want to, but it’s such a bad implementation currently that it doesn’t actually provide much security.
Alternatively: if all you want is to use the computer, without having to worry about the technical details of managing an OS. Try something like Bazzite (for gaming) or Aurora (general productivity) instead. They just work and will (practically) never break.
Mint has so many drawbacks these days and so few advantages that I wouldn’t recommend it anymore.
Sadly.
I installed it and it’s running. Even plays games well.
Are these drawbacks that anyone would care about if they’re not a Linux geek?
If you’re a gamer with variable refresh rate monitors that differ, you’ll really want Wayland. As others have said Mint is good and easy, but not the most up to date and lacks features compared to Windows. I’m liking Fedora KDE spin for this reason.
How do you mean? I recently installed it and now I’m curious. What other distro would you recommend instead?
Mint is often “slow” in the adoption of things. It has its benefits,as this makes it fairly stable. But it also has its drawbacks - hardware support is a hit or miss, especially with newer hardware (it either works out of the box or you are screwed for years), has still not adopted wayland fully and will likely not be there before Mint23(2026).
That is all fine and dandy if you can live with that. If it works and does what you need it to do you will have very little issues with it. That’s what once set Mint apart, it simply worked when others did not and was bloody easy to set up.
Nowadays that’s no longer something other distributions don’t manage to do. I have recently switched my family and company to fedora(and some Alma/Rhel VMs on my Proxmox cluster) from Windows and tbh: It was as smooth as fuck and as smooth as Mint is, but has a lot of advantages in terms of “up-to-dateness” of a lot of things. (And KDE Plasma is indeed nice)
(We only have two issues that are more KDE based and less Fedora based and that are already being addressed - and only apply to domain networks)
There are other Debian based distributions that are similar as well.
In other words: Mint has, in my eyes, lost it’s unique selling point a bit over the last years. Even my most “tech illiterate” employee found herself “at home” in Fedora (as she would have done in Mint), something that was not the case when she trialed Linux 4 years ago.
So in the end: If you are happy with Mint,go with Mint. Be aware of the downsides. If they don’t bother you then it’s perfect. If it does, well,there are alternatives.
I see now, thank you!
My recommendation is, don’t go with any of the distros you haven’t heard of before.
At some point, you will need to google “<distroname> how do I…” many many times. It is much better if you have something popular and common to do that in.
I have tried to approach this off the basic principle of “Oh, it’s basically Fedora!” on a few distributions but it doesn’t work as reliably as you’d like.
I tried Linux Mint Cinnamon but swapped to Fedora Workstation. I like Fedora Workstation, it’s very well animated and smooth.
But I think I heard in another YouTubers review that on her laptop it wasn’t as battery efficient as other distros. But I like it on my desktop pc.
Zorin Linux is very Windows’ish (xp) :]
Linux Mint and PopOS.
If you use your machine predominantly for gaming, Nobara is a good option. Built by the same people who made Proton (the tool to get Windows games working well on Linux). Comes with everything you need to get going out of the box. Based on Fedora so lots of community support. Comes with either KDE Plasma or GNOME to give you the desktop environment you prefer.
Xubuntu is very user friendly, low on resources, and overall great to use.
I know you want to move away from Windows, but trying to choose something completely different might be a bad idea, you’re already unfamiliar with the system also being unfamiliar with the way to interact with stuff might be a bit too much. That being said I don’t think any of the largest DE mentioned would be a problem, so look at pictures and choose on what you think looks best.
As for distro lots of people recommend Mint and I’ll back that up, although I haven’t used it in years it was my go to distro to give new users as it was very plug and play.
And the two recommendations I always give new users are:
-
Keep
/and/homein separate partitions, this allows you to format your system, change distro, or whatever without losing your personal files. -
As much as possible use the package manager, googling a program and downloading an installer is 99% of the time the wrong way to install stuff and a major cause of problems for new users.
A note about the package manager: Mint, and most other distros have a GUI software centre. Kinda like an app store. So you can search for an app there, find it, and install it.
Linux mint also comes with flatpak but apps installed from the software centre default to the .deb version.
When you mention putting the
/homeelsewhere, that’s something I do when setting up a distro install? I can’t recall from the last time I did a system install of mint. Sounds extremely helpful so I would like to do it next time
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imo every single beginner friendly distro all have the same problem. They are, for some extent, easier to use than others, until they’re not, at which point you find yourself digging through documents and forums or asking ChatGPT to break the system.
After few years of that dance, I found Linux Mint to be the easiest and Fedora KDE to be the nicest.
They are, for some extent, easier to use than others, until they’re not, at
The thing is that many well integrated distro have enough user friendly features to not need to go in the until they’re not part. If the most complicated thing you do is install a standard package and a printer, you won’t need to learn much.
Obviously, if you want to program a driver to control a nuclear reactor, it’s another story.
Mint if you like windows, Ubuntu if you like Mac.
Or whatever else looks interesting. Try a couple. It’s not hard to just replace it with another if you don’t like it. Most of them are easy to run off a USB stick to try out first too
