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.
Fedora 38 is great. Debian 12 is also good if you prefer apt. But with Fedora just use dnf instead of apt and its basically exactly the same.
Linux Mint is nice, it even has a Debian edition that runs on top of vanilla Debian, should be updated to a Debian 12 base within a month or so. Normal one runs on Ubuntu but gets rid of the “Ubuntu” stuff.
Pop OS is pretty popular now. They use a modified GNOME but are working on their own DE to replace that. One of their big claims to fame is the ability to make it do window tiling.
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.
Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.
Fedora 38 is awesome. Yeah, Red Hat drama I know, but I think Fedora will be fine.
Fedora is a fine distro. Red Hat is still a huge contributor to the open source community, despite the decisions made by IBM managers to restrict RHEL source code. It just means that it’ll be a little more difficult to make RHEL clones going forward, but I doubt it’ll have any lasting impact. Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and other RHEL based distros have all announced that they intend to continue their operations, with little to no change in how they do things. Really, the controversy is overblown.
Kinda yes, overblown. Will see where it goes.
I doubt my experience was the same as everyone else but I tried to install Debian on my gaming pc a week ago and I could not get Nvidia drivers to work for anything, there were no relevant search results and no one on any message board had any ideas. I gave up and installed Arch and Nvidia drivers without making any hardware changes and it was so unexpectedly easy I still can’t believe it.
I use Debian on my server so I was shocked that it was basically impossible to get Nvidia drivers working, at least on my chipset.
Mint Cinnamon
Personally love PopOS! It’s super easy and convient, has a super smart window tiling manager worth trying out!
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
Debian just released version 12 and it regularly gets high marks for being a good, solid distro – if you want a little more edge, you can switch over to Debian Sid …
Thanks for all the suggestions. Think I’m currently leaning towards Debian 12 for now, and depending on how that feels might try mint next.
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.
Debian.
I’d try Debian or if you’re feeling adventurous, EndeavourOS.
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.
Lots of Red Hat engineers use it as a daily driver
You mean IBM engineers.
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.
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.
Fedora. I’d avoid Ubuntu and its derivatives like Pop! or Arch derivatives. I think Arch is fine, especially if you know what you’re doing, but Arch derivatives in my experience are much less stable than for example Ubuntu or Fedora.
But seriously. Fedora. It’s the best. Ubuntu is actually fine too but Blue > Orange
Lots of Fedora haters here, but I agree. Fedora is the best distro ever, especially if you like stock GNOME.
I love Fedora, especially Silverblue, but the telemetry thing lately creeped me out. Jumped to Debian with no regrets
Eh, it’s opt-in so if even if you don’t do anything, nothing changes.
It’s perfectly fine to ask users if they’re okay with telemetry. I’m fine with that. The problem comes when it’s opt-out or if there’s no way to opt-out.
