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Cinnaminty goodness...

I was on Arch for 14 years, but I've started moving to Tumbleweed. I don't have the time to configure everything now, but this gives me near enough to bleeding edge.

Its nice if you aren't on a laptop and need Wayland.

My first choice. Currently my only!

Good thing I’ll never tire of distrohopping then.

For me, it's been Manjaro for ten years, but I'm eyeing atomic distros more and more, like Bazzite.

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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.

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.

Zorin for me. Looks good, never breaks.

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.

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.