Hi, I was here and asked about a few distros already, so here’s a quick summary of my situation:
I’m thinking about what distro to put onto my new Laptop, which will be used for University, Work, and just general daily usage. I am currently using EndeavourOS on my main PC and have been decently satisfied, but I want to experiment more. I’ve already asked if Arch was fine for this situation, to which the answer was a general “Yes, but keep x in mind” and I’ve asked about NixOS, where the answer was generally a no.
I’ve been looking around a bit more, and now I’m kind of curious about Fedora, specifically the KDE spin (or i3, I haven’t quite decided). It seems to be cutting edge, compared to Arch’s (and by extension EndeavourOS’s) bleeding edge, and I’m wondering what you all think of it. From what I can gather it has basically all traits which people used to enjoy in Ubuntu, before Canonical dropped the ball on that. While it’s not rolling release, the stability improvements and user experience compared to something like Arch, or even a more comfortable fork like EndeavourOS, seem quite decent, but in your experience, does that make up for the lack of the AUR and reduced applicability of the Arch Wiki?
I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
Edit: I feel like I need to clarify, I know about the difference between EndeavourOS and Arch, I mostly just brought it up as a note that I am somewhat familiar with arch-based systems, and as a question of if it’d be stupid to just go with raw Arch, as EndeavourOS is basically the same, but with a more comfortable installer. I should have specified that more clearly in the first place, my apologies.
Disclaimer: I am by no means a Linux expert, but figured I could give my 2 cents.
I recently installed Fedora on one of my machines that I mainly use for web browsing, file downloading, and general office like activities. And I don’t have much experience with it yet. I specifically went the KDE route, as I am a huge fan of what KDE has to offer. That being said, for the most part everything “just works.” Sorry I don’t have much more to say about Fedora, but I will report back as I use it more.
The distro I have used for a few years now that I quite enjoy is Arch. What drew me to Arch was the fact that it is bleeding edge. That being said, as with anything bleeding edge, you should have backups and other contingency plans for failure. That should be done for all systems, but doubly so with things that are bleeding edge I would argue. Arch has been quite stable for me, but I would say that it is more tailored to someone who is looking to tinker. On my desktop, I unfortunately still run windows due to some proprietary hardware and software that I have yet to figure out how to get working within Arch. The biggest issue I have had with Arch over the few years that I have been using it comes down to the Nvidia graphics card I use in my desktop. I know not everyone has had the same issues I have had with Nvidia, but getting wayland working on it, as well as just general multi-monitor issues, have sort of taken the wind out of my sails for linux on my desktop computer.
Here are a few resources I would recommend checking out to help you make your decision [https://distrochooser.de/](Distro Chooser) - Distro Chooser asks questions about what you are looking for and the like to help you pick a distro to try. [https://linux-hardware.org/](Linux Hardware) - This is Linux Hardware website and is quite handy for looking into getting drivers,and checking to see if there are known bugs for specific hardware you are trying to use on a Linux system.