jjhanger

Debian with the Awesome WM. I’m biased because that’s what I use.

I’ll respond when I’m done doing it. I plan on firing up my 15+ year laptop and install it the Arch way for the hell of it.

Just ran out of my local brews, Troegs Field Study IPA, so going to be cracking open some Coors Banquet soon. But I don’t think you will. I use Debian 12 with AwesomeWM and love it.

For me, the systems I’ve installed Mint on for people, haven’t had any problems at this current time. While I have never had an issue using Fedora myself(never been interested enough in OpenSUSE to keep with it when I’ve tried it), I’ll never recommend Fedora in similar cases where I’ve installed Mint. The machines were older and the users aren’t Linux enthusiasts. They just want a working machine to do basic tasks without breaking their bank to get a new machine when their Windows OS reached EOL.

However I can’t confirm or explain why the people you say that are doing this challenge are having problems. I don’t know their hardware specs and I don’t know them so I don’t know what they know about Linux.

(Please note, to all Mint users, I’m not saying Mint is only for non-Linux enthusiasts. I love how Mint is good for the non-enthusiasts and enthusiasts alike).

Find another platform if you don’t like it. I don’t use Twitter anymore just because I found other platforms I prefer.

I’m at the point whe recommending distros fir new comers its Debian, Arch, Fedora and Linux Mint.

Debian is my go to. Stable, I love the apt package manager. Desktop environment is a bit irrelevant with recommendations because you can easily install any desktop environment or window manager. You will figure out what environment you like along the way. Installation is simple, you can do minimal installs as well and it’s what many big name distros are based on.

I really like Arch. Minimal, great package manager, AUR extends application availability even when you have flatpaks, snaps and app images and the repo. You can use the archinstall script these days so you don’t have to worry about installing the old-fashioned Arch way. It will also teach you what to do when updates fail because it’s a rolling release.

If none of those are appealing then I would advise Fedora. Great package manager, get newer packages if package versions are important for you and a solid distribution that is the upstream for Red Hat. It’s the best of both worlds of Debian and Arch in my opinion.

The last one is Linux Mint. I’ve found myself avoid recommening forks. This is my exception. I can’t say a lot because I haven’t used it much. But I’ve installed it 2x to different family members who never used Linux before and use it and love it. I did it because they are forks and I can give support because I’m familiar with what it’s based on and the high recommendation from the online community. It’s great for beginners and veterans alike from what I can tell from the online community. Great team of developers.