Linux distro recommendations

I'm not very knowledgeable about or experienced with Linux yet, but from everything that I've read, I have the impression that Arch is the one that's oriented to power users, not OpenSUSE. I've seen OpenSUSE suggested as one of the more beginner-friendly distros, apparently one of the, if not the most stable rolling release distros, and supposedly has one of the best KDE integrations. That's the one I'm leaning towards adopting as my first Linux distro to really use seriously to replace Windows on desktop (as opposed to just playing around with it). I am also considering the other flavors of OpenSUSE besides Tumbleweed: Slowroll and Leap, in that order.

I agree with your feeling that going with one of the source distros that other distros use as a base is a better bet, and have seen some reviewers say as much. As far as I know, the big 4 in that regard are Arch, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE. Most everything else is apparently either a derivative of one of those or a niche independent distro.

How about CachyOS?

Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.

If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.

Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.

1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.

2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).

3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.

4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.

I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.

I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.

Good job eliminating Ubuntu.

Doesn't seem like anyone mentioned it yet, so I'm gonna chime in: Bluefin-DX by Universalblue might be worth a look.

It's a special developer version of their already interesting and rock solid atomic distro, meaning it's not rly meant that you do much with the OS part of the filesystem (I'd recommend you read up on it, since I xan't explain it that well) It has VSCode preinstalled (you can replace it with VSCodium tho with a simple command IIRC) and allows you to doing up virtually endless Linux environments where you install your additional programmes that aren't available as a Flatpak (you can still use them in the CLI, DW)

Tumbleweed absolutely is an all purpose distribution. Most distributions are. Very few are specialised enough to make a difference.

And they really mostly all install the same thing in the end. It doesn't matter which one you choose. Just pick something that's not obscure and that has a release cycle that works for you.

For kde, I'd say that the best maintained ones are suse, fedora and kubuntu, in that order (although with the latter you still get Ubuntu, so ymmv).

Well from what you're saying I'd go for something like EndeavourOS.

Based on arch, usable out of the box but without much preinstalled so that you can do your own mix. Manjaro is a bit similar but with more preinstalled (and maybe more bugs from what I read).

Seems like you answered your own question. If a gaming software engineering privacy enthusiast isn't a power user, I don't know what is.

Also, Tumblweed really isn't intimidating. Give it a try.

I'd just go Tumbleweed

Give NixOS a look-see. Takes a different approach to package management, but for an engineer that want's customization abilities it's probably one of the top choices. I don't usually recommend this for newbies, but if you're an engineer it won't be too bad and simply using it may give you more skills to add to your repertoire when looking for work.

A lot of people put time into maintaining their dotfiles, but NixOS takes that idea to the infrastructure-as-code level when you use it as your daily driver.

ETA: in terms of gaming, with Wine/Proton + Steam/Lutris/Heroic pretty much any distro will be workable

Someone else mentioned it, but another vote for Aurora-dx (-dx for the developer version). It'll give you the KDE experience without having to worry about your underlying system, leaving you time to work on software dev in a containerized environment of your choosing. Arch is great if you want to customize and tinker with everything, but given your parameters, I think not worrying about that bit will make your life easier as you focus on what's more important to you. As long as you reboot your computer from time to time, you'll always have the latest version and can rollback easily if something goes wrong.

And as is tradition with Linux, it's not like you have to use whatever you decide forever. Distro hopping is a time-honored tradition!

I would recommend Arch, EndeavourOS or Garuda (awesome KDE gaming ed,) and a lot of peeps like CachyOS, mostly for their customized kernels/CPU optimizations. You can get CachyOS kernels inside of Garuda as well.

I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.

Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.

Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you'll be stuck in Debian 12's KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?

(You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I'd consider stable first.)

This mentality that "Corporate backed stuff is bad" should be thrown out of the window. Alot of evil corporations have contributed to make Linux better for everyone.

Regardless, have you tried Debian Stable with Backports?

Have you looked at Linux Mint or other Ubuntu derivatives that have programs compatible with Ubuntu without all the scuff Ubuntu is known to do bad

Again, are you sure affiliations with IBM and Redhat makes Fedora worse? Can you justify this statement?

If arch seems interesting to you, you can ease setup using arch-install, and you have access to its magnificent wiki and aur that arch provides.

Otherwise fedora is pretty much on bleeding edge and has all the niceties too

Also Slackware current if you want kiss but without dependency resolution and stuff.

You sound like a perfect fit for Arch.

I've been recommending Fedora.

You summarize it quite well. But I would still recommend Arch (but as an Arch user since 2008 I am biased on this). Why?

• Lightweight, ideal for gaming. My full-featured Wayland-setup with labwc runs with ca. 2 gigabytes of RAM, including Firefox, which on it’s own currently takes up 800 megabytes. Not that RAM would be an actual issue on modern gaming setups, but still, this shows how little resources the system needs for itself.
• Gaming on Linux is pretty much solved nowadays thanks to Valve (Steam, Proton, etc.) and Flatpaks. Games that do not work are intentionally made to not work on other platforms than Windows due the games using ring0 spyware as DRM and for anti-cheat.
• Privacy by concept – while there are no specific measures taken regarding privacy, the default installation just does nothing except initializing the hardware and allowing the user to sign in. Everything else is up to you.
• Software development is – like gaming – a no-brainer. All common tools work on Linux. Even more: Dependency handling, setting up the environment, using different compilers – all this feels much smoother than on Windows.
• Maintainability is great. Since there are no package changes from upstream, you can be sure that bugs are typically bugs in the software and not coming from Arch packaging.Thanks to rolling release you get much less updates at the same time compared to fixed release distribution – ganted you update regularly. I check the news and update every 1-2 weeks at the weekend.

And since you’re coming from Windows, you have to learn new stuff anyways. So why not dive head first into Arch?

Like others have said Arch is not as intimidating as it would appear to be. Over the last couple of years, they improved IHMO the most difficult process for the average user of installing Arch. You now just run archinstall Then follow the system prompts. It's constantly being improved. If you do go with Arch, aside from using Pacman to install apps, you can use "Yay" or "Paru" or others which pull from the vast AUR repository.

I used Arch for a few years and recently moved over to Aurora Linux (Immutable KDE distro adapted from Fedora's CoreOS and uBlueOS which is an offshoot of CoreOS) Specifically, I use the Developer experience of Aurora which gives you a VSCode type of editor as well as Podman desktop included as well as other items. It's meant for those who wish to develop and not have to worry about keeping the system up to date. It runs updates in the background and rebooting your system will run the updates.

The reason I left Arch was simple, I used to like to live on the edge of software as well, until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system. My home PC has morphed from being my dedicated computer to my wife's and my computer which is fine, but I'd like to keep it available for her avoiding the need to do a repair because an update broke it.

Keep an eye out for the KDE Linux OS which they have in development and not yet for use, but is earmarked for being the official immutable OS for KDE which will receive their bleeding edge updates. https://linuxiac.com/kde-announced-its-kde-linux-distro/ https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux

I plan on migrating to that once it's finished. :) I've become a fan of immutable OS's because they allow you to roll back if something should go wrong. Which it rarely does :)

Remember that you can always have current versions of programs by using flatpak and appimage on Debian.

I'm currently on Fedora because my hardware was not supported yet by Debian when I got it. I've had a lot more problems with Fedora than Debian though and intend to go back to Debian when 13 comes out and use flatpak for the applications that I really want to be at their current version.

I have similar values to yours re community and privacy.

I've pretty much run every distro under the sun. From arch to Gentoo to Debian and all of the middle ones. I then landed on endeavour OS and used it for around 3 years. It was great until it broke.

Every couple of months something breaks and I can never fix it. Nothing fixes it, even a timeshift restore. I just had to reinstall, and that was painful. I've then set out on a new hunt.

I'm now experimenting with Nobara OS as it is a better Fedora and comes with some goodies for gaming. It's been ok so far besides this occasional random freezing that I can't figure out. It goes away by either rebooting or switching to a tty and back to GUI. I'm still experimenting with it. If it works well, I'll keep it, if not, my next experiment will be BazziteOS. I did try mint for a little bit, too, and liked it, but I wanted to explore more.

I was about to suggest Debian and Gnome. 😂

Gentoo is also a good candidate. The drawback is that being source based, updates can take more than on binary distribution, but its wiki is very well written with a lot of use cases.

arch or fedora, opensuse tumbleweed is fine though zypper is pretty bad. not using fedora or ubuntu due to the company behind them just seems really stupid to me.

Similar thoughts and after hopping a bit I'm liking Solus really well. It's rolling release but what they call "curated" rolling release. They take a little bit of time to iron stuff out. There's a weekly update cycle.

The installation is through live ISO and was pretty easy, took only a few minutes. They have a Plasma ISO too, since you mentioned wanting KDE.

As a plus, I've not once used the command prompt in the past couple of months since I installed (GNOME first and then since the last week, KDE). I'm not averse to commands but I do want something that I can recommend to my less techy anti-capitalist friends. My games have all been working fine too.

Edit to add: I think they've also mentioned that their aim is for a personal desktop.