For me, it's been Manjaro for ten years, but I'm eyeing atomic distros more and more, like Bazzite.
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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Bazzite is nice, I'm running it at the moment. The gaming customizations are nice and having the latest kernel stable+NVIDIA open drivers is swell. You can even use Distroshelf (to emulate a distro) and App pass through to install apps that don't have a Flatpak version. Or package layering, which is needed for VPNs like Mullvad to work properly; that's also pretty easy to manage, so I never feel like I don't have access to software. Too bad stock Fedora cannot be arsed to make NVIDIA drivers brain dead easy at the time of installation.
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Good thing I’ll never tire of distrohopping then.
For me it's Pop. It was my first real foray into Linux years ago. Now I've hopped a lot on side systems and use Arch on both my laptops. My gaming rig stays with Pop because It Just Works™.
The new Cosmic desktop has been fun though.
My first choice. Currently my only!
Solid first choice!
For me it's been Arch for the last several years. It's the only distro that can deal with the weird things I do while still working well for daily use.
I moved to Cachy (Arch-based OS) in 2024, and it's been perfect for me. I've used Linux since around 2012, and tried to move to it as a daily driver several times over the 2010s, but I wasn't able to stick with it due to drivers/software compatibility. Cachy is the first time it really clicked, and offered everything I wanted without needing to dual-boot.
People always talk about how complicated Arch is, but learning it was almost completely frictionless. It stays out of the way when I want it to, and I can go down a tinkering rabbit hole whenever I want. I can update stuff three times a day, or forget about updates for several weeks and just run the command whenever it springs to mind. I found it way easier to pick up than Ubuntu too due to the Arch wiki.
can you explain a few of those weird things?
I like to edit configs, which can break apt, and build projects from source, which requires bleeding-edge versions of many libraries that most distros don't ship with, which also tends to break apt when I manually install them.
Arch's pacman gracefully handled modified configs and the Arch repos ship very new packages, so I don't find myself fighting the OS.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don't like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Agree Mint is not the best option, in a big part because of their refusal to embrace QT and KDE, but I don't think every newbie needs immutability.
We often assume Linux newbies to be a bit of a grandma-style user - just browse, work with docs and play games from time to time.
But people coming to Linux are no average demographic - they are often enthusiastic about their computers and advanced use cases, and that's when they will get stuck with immutables because things work different there. Some things are different, some are harder, and some are pretty much impossible to do. Tinkering is complicated compared to traditional distros. Besides, it will always feel limiting, even if it directs you towards the best practices.
I like the way things are organized in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - it's a regular mutable rolling release distribution, yet, thanks to snapper being beautifully configured out of the box, you can be sure you can revert nearly everything. Big changes, like initiating an update, automatically trigger snapshots of all system and program files, and they are available from GRUB, so you can always revert with ease. To me, it's a very healthy compromise between ability to tinker and safety of the system.
Unfortunately, however, Tumbleweed does little to appeal to newbie users. Sure, it has some graphical tools (take YaST), but they are severely outdated and don't explain much to the user, some updates require nuances Discover cannot work with, prompting the user to go with command-line tools, etc. I would love for something to emerge that would be similar in philosophy to Tumbleweed, but more newbie-friendly.
Also, love Flatpaks and install them whenever I can. Saves so much trouble.
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Its nice if you aren't on a laptop and need Wayland.
Bedrock stopped my rabid^1^ distrohopping in 2012. Daily driving since^2^.
::: spoiler .
^1^ Seriously. Filled multiple spools of CDs and DVDs before switching to USB. The tall spools.
^2^ One brief interlude back to just Devuan, to "keep things simple" during the most stressful time of my life. Long horrible story.
I play with distro's on task specific PC's but with my main rig I stick with my distro.