I’m thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I’m wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I’ve heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don’t like Cinnamon all too much.
What’s a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?
edit: Woah, it seems that you’re able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?
edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences…
On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I’m open to using either.
I’m running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It’s one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.
I would say I’m open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don’t want to do anything too out of my scope. I don’t want to spend too many hours setting it up, I’d rather have something that works mostly out of the box :D
I want a stable distro as in I don’t want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I’m open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.
edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)
My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?
edit 4:
Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD
now I’m slowly installing my programs again…
I would recommend installing a fairly vanilla Gnome distro (like Fedora or something) and then a KDE version (most major distros have a KDE spin) in a virtual machine. Gnome Boxes is a really easy way to do that. And then just customize the shit out of both of them and see what you like best.
Gnome is more of a macOS-like experience so to me, it feels more trackpad driven (though keyboard shortcuts are plentiful). Install some extensions if you don’t like something. Someone else probably also didn’t like something.
KDE is more like Windows. I’m less familiar with it but it’s on my Steam Deck so I use it a decent amount. It’s more mouse and keyboard driven, as far as I can tell. So, that’s why I think it would be fine to evaluate in a VM.
They’re both high quality, though, so it’s really about what you prefer. I like Gnome, obviously, but I prefer to code on a smallish laptop (for portability/travel reasons) and a dock whereas a lot of people want an elaborate multi-monitor situation and a different interface. Everyone has their own workflow. Both work equally well so it’s just a matter of taste and preference. (Most Linux decisions are like that and people get weirdly angry about it but that’s part of the fun. Choose your own adventure.)
I’ve backed everything up to both the cloud and an SD card, now I’m installing Fedora Workstation!
one thing I’ll say, Fedora installed really quickly!
This is a great answer. I will just add that KDE in general exposes more settings in the UI than stock Gnome (but Gnome Tweaks is a thing). If you are the kind if user that just sticks with the defaults, Gnome is probably less confusing to use and what I recommend, but I personally prefer KDE because I like to tweak things.