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.
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.
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 …
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.
Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.
You could do straight Debian or anything else Debian-based like Mint Debian Edition or MX.
Otherwise Fedora is very recommended for general purpose desktop Linux. But, that isn’t Debian.
I don’t know if Kali is really recommended for general purpose.
I’m interested in seeing the other recommendations here, it is always fun to see what other users recommend or use. I use Alpine but it isn’t always perfect as a desktop for people who don’t like things breaking.
Second fedora, it looks modern, has up to date packages and is hardened. (selinux)
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.
Mint is my recommendation too for general purpose desktop PC. Debian also works, but I found that Mint has most of the stuff already working out of the box, so I’ve stuck to that on my laptops since 2014 or thereabouts. On servers I prefer Debian.
Honorable mention: Zorin OS
I had Linux Mint several years, it’s a great Distro on Debian/Ubuntu. But, as a heavy gamer, I needed fresh and up-to-date sources for Mesa and the Kernel and so I switched to EndeavourOS, which is Arch-based and I can highly recommend it! It’s rock solid and gaming is great.
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.
I’d go with MX Linux for sure, this is a very nice distro, w/o systemd, based on Debian, and using Xfce so it’s pretty fast
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.
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.
Linux Mint and then don’t worry about it. It just works.
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.
Classic arch Linux is the way to go imo. If you need something a little more turn key, I would go with linux mint Debian edition! Debian was the first distro I ever used, an I think if you feel at home there, linux mint Debian edition might be what you’re looking for.
