Advice choosing a Linux distro

This is a post written for the kind of person who watches programming influencers, or maybe for the kind of person who watches LTT. However, I’m comparing distros for general desktop use, not server nor gaming specific.

So what’s the best distro? Fedora. Why?

• It’s well configured by default, in large part because Fedora has close relations with many of the big Linux Desktop projects, like GNOME and systemd.
• Packages are mostly vanilla, which usually means they have fewer bugs.
• Even if it’s not the most popular, it’s popular enough, so you can find things like forum posts that solve your issues, or custom repos for proprietary software like Sublime Text.

It’s not without problems

• SELinux is an annoyance but easily sidestepped.
• There’s not as many packages as other distros in the official repos.
• They shot themselves in the foot with codecs.

Go with either GNOME or KDE.¹ Don’t go with Silverblue/Kinoite, atomic variants are annoying when you need to work around their limitations.

There are of course other good options depending on purpose:

• Debian is nice if you won’t use your computer more than once a week, because changes are infrequent.
• Arch is good if you’re a teenager with lots of time in your hands,²because it’s a nice blank slate to create your computing experience.

Both offer the option of choosing, again, either GNOME or KDE.

So there are various right answers, but what about wrong ones? Yes, there are those too:

• Distros that come with heavily customized GNOME, like Ubuntu, PopOS or arguably Mint. It’s fairly common for these to have visual glitches, like white text on a white background. App developers then take the blame for things they can’t reallistically fix.
• Distros that try to sell you on stuff. Ubuntu is the obvious example here with snap. Snaps are a feature that makes your calculator take 5 seconds to open. Although to be fair, my beloved Fedora is also guilty of trying to sell stuff, as I mentioned with SELinux.
• Distros that are derivatives of Arch, especially Manjaro. Say, hypothetically, you needed a Windows computer, but instead of installing the normal one, you installed a pre-modded WINDOWS COOL JOHNNY EDITION because there’s a fire effect when you click the start menu. If that thing was buggy as hell, would you be surprised? Yet many Linux users install cool johnny editions without a second thought.

The word “stable” has been intentionally omitted from this post, as it can be confusing on this topic.