Help me choose a distro, please!

I’m ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I’m looking for advice on which distro I should start with.

About Me

I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I’ve never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I’m generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed.

Planned Usage

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers.

What I’m Looking For

I’d like an OS that’s highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don’t want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Anyone have good suggestions??

Edit

I’m aware of tools like Distro Chooser. They’ve recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I’m not ready to trust them yet. I’m looking for human input.

Edit 2: Hardware Info

I’m running on an ASUS ROG Strix GA15DK. It’s just over 2 years old. The hardware was shiny but not top-tier at the time. It’s not new at this point but also not old by Linux standards.

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Processor
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
  • 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM

Edit 3

It’s official. I installed EndeavourOS! I got it to work without any issues. Yup, first try. It definitely didn’t take me ~10 tries :D

Thanks for all the input all! Wonderful crowd here!!!

supert,

Void fits the bill. Debian if you don’t want rolling.

LoveSausage,
@LoveSausage@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Peppermint , Debian based , important stuff there but still slim , shit just works

Wrongleverkrunk,

Pop os or mint

snowcatridge10,

Linux Mint

possiblylinux127,

Linux mint

ultrasquid,
@ultrasquid@sopuli.xyz avatar

As others are saying, Debian is nice and stable. Its also pretty barebones, which gives you a lot of control. However, it uses older packages, meaning you’ll need to rely on flatpaks to get new features.

If you’re willing to lose a bit of stability in exchange for newer features and more control, you may also want to look into arch or endeavorOS. Arch uses a command-line installation whereas endeavor uses a graphical installer, but otherwise they’re pretty similar.

hemko,

Your post screams of Debian.

pascal,

“highly configurable” and “very little effort to start using” don’t blend together in car mechanics, and they don’t in Linux either.

I was going to suggest Gentoo or Arch because they’re the standard for “highly configurable” but they really demand some effort to start using them.

Also, so far, only Debian really, really, cares about open source, most distros don’t mind copyrighted video codecs or proprietary GPU drivers if they make the user’s life easier.

worsedoughnut,
@worsedoughnut@lemdro.id avatar

“highly configurable” and “very little effort to start using” don’t blend together […] Arch because they’re the standard for “highly configurable” but they really demand some effort to start using them.

Then they should just use Endeavour, it’s literally just arch with some nice QOL packages to start.

pascal,

Endeavour

Oh, nice choice!

qwool,

I’d say mint or debian, and NixOS is neat if you’re willing to spend weeks on it. It allows you to make reproducible and declarative systems as well as declaring sets of packages for the current thing you have to do

Ayhem,

Opensuse tumblweed

art,
@art@lemmy.world avatar

Use Debiain, by the way.

Astaroth, (edited )

I would recommend Arch and derivatives (supposedly EndeavourOS is Arch but better for beginners, I’ve never used it though) or NixOS, they’re highly configurable & have good package managers.

I would not recommend debian or it’s derivatives because apt package manager is way worse than pacman.

Also while Arch is a rolling release OS, it’s not really unstable, it’s not like it constantly breaks with updates.

I’ve used Linux Mint a bit at a relative’s house so they can have an easier & more “stable” GUI experience, but there weren’t all the packages I needed on the GUI software manager, and even some packages that existed didn’t want to install until I used the terminal anyway.

And as I mentioned earlier apt is just a worse package manager than pacman so it’s a pain to use.

Especially since I was using plain Bash without good tab completion unlike Fish or Zsh, which makes the much longer apt commands that much more annoying to type in compared to just -Syu -S -Ss -Qs -Rns.

And it’s not just that the commands and package names are better and shorter on pacman compared to apt, but there’s more packages (and I’m not even counting AUR).

For example, on Linux Mint I were going to install wine-mono and wine-gecko, which you’re going to want if you plan to play windows games outside steam proton, but they didn’t exist and I had to follow the wiki.winehq.org/Mono and wiki.winehq.org/Gecko installation guides instead of just downloading 2 binaries through pacman.

And tbh I eventually gave up on wine-mono and just got the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

If you’re really supper worried and paranoid then instead of Arch you can use NixOS, it’s whole shtick is that you can have multiple versions and always roll back to before anything broke.

yum13241,

Most based post here.

darcy,
@darcy@sh.itjust.works avatar

endevouros is a great option imo. not as bloated as manjaro, but everything works out of the box. it being arch based makes it easier to install things and troubleshoot, due to arch linux support. i would recommend kde as the desktop environment if you want something fully featured with lots of customizability options, but i3 is nice, but annoying to get started.

TheBroodian,

Pop_OS, it’s the most headache-free

downhomechunk,
@downhomechunk@midwest.social avatar

Slackware. Read the official installation guide and see what you think. YOU are the package and dependency manager, but there are several helpful tools. Nothing goes on or off the machine without your direct intervention.

You will probably find the open source nouveau (nvidia) driver lacking for gaming on any distro. The proprietary drivers help. But if you’re passionate about foss then you may want to trade the 3070 for an amd gpu. I swapped me 3060 ti for a 7800xt recently and have been very happy.

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