Übercomplicated

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it has been the most stable and flexible experience I’ve had that worked out of the box. I have tried a lot of distros over the years, and openSUSE has really held up.

Additionally, I use Nobara for a multi-purpose machine that I also occasionally use for gaming (that’s why Nobara instead of openSUSE: it gets me slightly higher %1 lows and is less effort to set up for gaming) and a Void Linux machine for programming. Nobara is pretty good, by far the best gaming oriented distro I’ve tried, but I do regret that it’s Fedora based. Void is really fantastic, but for some reason it only boots on my System76 laptop, so that’s the only device I use it on 🤷.

Void is an arch-killer for me; it’s faster, has huge repos, and offers a similar experience. I honestly prefer it, and would probably use it on most of my machines if it weren’t for the booting issue (it’s been a few months since I last tried, so things might have changed though). OpenSUSE is king for low-effort stability and flexibility though.

Well, those are my two cents. Good day y’all!

+1 it was a tun of fun for me and rust is great

I love Nobara, but it regularly breaks between updates (though everything is usually fixed within 3 hours).

+1 for Quod Libet

I used Fedora, and am now leaving for the exact reason you’re leaving Arch (plus IMO bad repos). Switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed a few months ago and am having a much better experience than with Fedora :D; I use the PC for programming, audio recording and mixing, document stuff, etc. (No gaming though).

Nobara is good but does break regularly, FYI… If you’re a “power-user” I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver.

There’s also Void Linux, which hasn’t ever broken on me due to an update, but is still a lot of work, due to its nature. It’s actually quite stable though, and you might enjoy it, since it’s quite similar to Arch and has very large repos.

I can’t say much about immutable distros, as the only one I’ve used is bazzite, which was kinda horrible (broke constantly).

Well, I hope that helped. Good luck!

+1 — I tried getting the gosh darn API key for hours with no success. Share your secrets (original commenter)!

It crushes me, CRUSHES ME, that the wretched Fedora beats my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed in popularity! Why, oh why!??!

Seriously though, why do people prefer Fedora? I used it for 2 years and was very, very happy after switching my daily driver to Tumbleweed. It felt faster, had better repos, defaults, stability, etc. — aaaaaand it’s rolling release, which is so much easier (ironically) from a stability perspective (every, EVERY, Fedora release something would break for me, gosh-darn-it). I just don’t get it; am I the only one experiencing this?

I remember this from “The C Programming Language // ANSI Edition” — a.k.a. K&R! A great guide to C btw; I still consider it the single most informative and useful thing that happened to me in the realm of computer science.

I’d go with grimshot then, which I think works for hyprland as well (it’s made for sway). It provides an interface over Grim, slurp, and jq, and makes life easy. Combine it with a image viewer like imv, and your set!

Yeah, that’s why I specified fedora 40. I guess eventually I’ll need to try fedora again

Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.

My experience with Fedora (about 2 years of daily driving) has lead me to almost hate it, while my experience with Tumbleweed (approx. 6 months daily driver) has lead me to live it dearly. And I’ve never even used YAST!

Well, I guess a lot of this really depends on what packages you use, how you configure your OS, etc. — it’s good to know both sides of the coin no matter what.

Librewolf is the best ✅

OpenSUSE is my favorite distro.

I first installed it after having an abysmal experience with Fedora (bad repos, unstable, etc.). It took me a while to really enjoy, but after figuring out how to update the system properly (it’s zypper dup not zypper up), all my issues were quickly resolved.

OpenSUSE is extremely stable, has great repos (stable, large, up-to-date, good naming and dependency schemes, etc.), has a strong focus on security, provides appealing defaults (much better than fedora’s), while remaining minimalist enough to have good performance and to be useful for someone like me who is going to extensively customize their system anyway.

I’ve tried bazzite but hated it, as it’s difficult to customize, breaks very easily, and doesn’t seem to have a notable performance improvement over something like Nobara (unfortunately fedora based, good otherwise if gaming is your main thing).

To somewhat answer your question: openSUSE Tumbleweed is the best “normal use-case” distro (in my opinion). It is, however, not super beginner friendly, has a smaller community and fewer docs, and isn’t laser-focused on performance. It’s good for someone who wants to settle down in their Linux experience, and find a daily driver for their most used device.

Other, more specialized options, you might find interesting:

• Nobara Linux: by far the best gaming distro, maintained by the glorious glorious eggroll (proton-ge creator). It breaks every once-and-a-while, but everything is always fixed within one update, at most a day apart, and the breaks are never disabling.
• Void Linux: uses runit instead of SystemD, meaning it’s super, super fast. Has a great installer, is stable, and has good defaults, but absolutely a horrible choice for beginners, if you consider yourself such.

Again, openSUSE is absolutely fantastic, and my own daily driver — but I have Nobara installed on my gaming PC, and Void installed on my portable laptop. In the end, it’s all a matter of use-case.

Edit: sorry for the insanely long response, my thoughts have been meandering today…

It’s better than any built-in history tools (including zsh and fish) and I find the sync feature very useful. It’s definitely saved me time in having to re-find old commands I used once. Probably the second best quality-of-life tool for the shell after zoxide (a brilliant cd replacement).

Mostly it boils down to three categories:

• Case build quality. This seems a be a frequent issue among System76 laptops; in my case (no pun intended), the laptop case was very badly made and easily broke. I carry my device around very much, always in my backpack, which has a padded laptop section, and in a fancy padded laptop case (or bag or whatever the word is—arg). I essentially have double padding, and I have had a good experience with this padding and previous laptops. This time, however, even simply putting the backpack down, was enough force to dent and eventually completely crush the empty corners next to the hinges. I had to manually repair the corners very often, but wasn’t able to prevent damage to the hinges and stripping the threads holding the hinges in place. No other laptop, even ones much cheaper, has ever presented me with this problem, and it is extremely frustrating that the laptop isn’t designed to be even mildly rugged.
• Faulty motherboard and bad quality-control. The laptop I bought had two M.2 NVMe slots, with only one occupied. I was planning to add one of my existing SSDs into the second slot. The second slot, however, did not work. This is such an easy thing to test before shipping it, that it really left a bad taste in my mouth.
• Faulty part and known issue. After about two weeks of using my laptop, the touchpad started malfunctioning. I looked the issue up, and, well and behold, this was a well known issue with this specific laptop. I contacted support and the problem remained unsolved. System76 released and continued selling a laptop with a known, unsolvable issue. This was the final blow, and I totally lost trust in the company after experiencing this.

Forgive the shitty writing, I’m doing this in my phone.

Hope I was able to help, kind regards.

I unfortunately had disabling experiences with the System76 Pangolin (12). Since then I would absolutely not recommend System76.

You don’t need the laptop to run it, and I have unfortunately only had negative experiences with System76 laptops. I’d stick to the classic ThinkPads or maybe something like Tuxedo; the latter if you’re based in Europe.

Yeah, I second this. You may want to look in to DEs/WMs like DWM ©, Xmonad (Haskell), and AwesomeWM (lua) that let you customize them through programming.

Huh, this may vary game to game or WM to WM. I lose like 40% performance (mostly in 1% lows), get insane stuttering, shaders start glitching, and some games won’t even start. I’ve tried this on KDE Wayland and SwayWM, mostly with the games Counter Strike 2, Vampire Survivors, the DOOM games, and a few others. The only game that’s worked for me in Wayland was Transport Fever 2 ¯\(ツ)/¯

Okay, people have said many good things so far, so I won’t add much. Simply one thing: take one problem at a time.

By this I rather mean, make your life easier, and only progressively deal with more complicated things. When it comes to distro choice, this would mean picking something with plenty of default installed packages (since you won’t necessarily know what to install yourself) — this rules out my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed as well as the popular Fedora and Debian — something that will play nice with NVidia (Desktop Environments use display managers/servers, the two most common being Wayland and X11; Wayland is better, but unfortunately will really mess up NVidia gaming, so try to stick to X11 for now — you can always switch later!), and, lastly, something with a large community (and by extension a large help forum and wiki).

I never thought I’d hear myself (see myself?) saying this (typing this!?), but Mint checks all those boxes.

I wouldn’t recommend staying with Mint for long (though some people claim to enjoy it…), but as a first distro to introduce you to Linux, it really may be the easiest. Using a different DE is already difficult, don’t overwhelm yourself from the get-go!

Alright, that ended up being longer than expected. I wish you the best of luck, and a lot of fun on your approaching Journey!