Currently running Kali on my laptop as that’s all it was used for. Looking for something more general purpose. Mainly steam for light gaming and being able to install the tools from Kali for stuff like tryhackme. Mostly familiar with Debian, as that’s what Kali is based on, but willing to try something else. Laptop is this Acer.
I’m not linux expert. But I have been messing around with it again lately, trying to get it working on my gaming laptop. I was using Nobara for a bit, which I liked quite a bit. It’s a Fedora-based distro that’s put together by the GloriousEggroll guys so it comes with Nvidia drivers and tons of gaming stuff preinstalled.
I ended up ditching it mainly for one reason: it didn’t handle my hybrid graphics well. Some games worked fine, some refused to even start.
I ended up swapping to Pop!_OS because it supports hybrid Nvidia graphics with no issues. The guys who make the distro sell laptops with hybrid graphics so they have incentive to have it work well. All the games that wouldn’t start in Nobara work seamlessly in Pop.
I’m not a huge fan of the desktop environment but I’m getting used to it and there’s definitely something to be said for everything just working.
Hear me out, grab ventoy, a decent USB drive (32-64 gb), download debian, kubuntu (maybe), fedora/mojara, any live arch derivative (endeavour, arco, artix. Stay away of Manjaro) and anything else you found appealing. Put all of them there and go nuts. At the end of the day, it’s always night.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great choice for a robust rolling distribution. Automated testing of packages rules out most of regressions and its KDE implementation is top notch. If you were considering Fedora or Arch, look no further.
I was hesitant for the last few years to recommend Solus. They stopped communicating with the community and there hadn’t been a new iso in a while. Software was still being updated behind the scenes but it seemed like it was dying. Now 4.4 was released a few weeks ago with short term and long term plans announced so I feel good recommending trying it. The only issue is it’s software repository isn’t as big as other distros. But I switched to Debian and have been happy with that. Probably the way to go if you are familiar with it from using Kali.
your computer can pretty much run every single distribution in any desktop environment without a problem so go wild and try lots of them, pick anything a let yourself have a good week with it and it’s online documentation to do your thing every of them have good and bad parts. when asked the filesystem pick btrfs and set-up snapshots, that will save your ass when needed and it’s so quick you could break your system every week without being bothered
Based on your needs any distro is probably fine. They’re pretty much all free, i don’t think you’ll find a better answer from internet randos than just booting from live usb and trying them out. I use arch btw.
Classic arch Linux is the way to go imo. If you need something a little more turn key, I would go with linux mint Debian edition! Debian was the first distro I ever used, an I think if you feel at home there, linux mint Debian edition might be what you’re looking for.
Fedora is just flat-out king for desktop IMO. It has packages that are new, but not unstable. Lots of Red Hat engineers use it as a daily driver, so fixes come quick, and it has a pretty large user base. It's made for this stuff.
No, I mean Red Hat engineers. Despite being a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM, they are separate orgs. This probably doesn't mean anything to you, because you are mad at Red Hat, but that doesn't mean that the decisions made were done by IBM's executives, and most IBM engineers probably aren't running Fedora Linux.
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