Hi there. I m changing away from windows. I already tested some stuff. I started with fedora GNOME. But GNOME wasn’t for me I felt. So I did go with Linux mint cinnamon. That felt better but not as snappy and fast as fedora. Then I did go with fedora KDE plasma and man I like KDE plasma. That’s a thing for me. Then I tried because of recommendations popos with cosmic. I don’t know why but it didn’t felt right. So another recommendation later I tried cachy is with KDE. KDE was good but catchy gave me some erros and problems so back to fedora with KDE.
Now my real question.
- Manjaro Linux is a European distro? Only I often see it with popos and Linux mint and fedora that these are good beginner distros? Is it stable? Customisation in KDE is the same everywhere I guess? Does many people use it? Is it really beginner friendly and snappy? Is it stable?
- Opensuse also has KDE but it seems that its not a beginner distro. Also online its not often spoken about. Is it harder to use? Or is it beginner friendly? Customisation KDE again. Is it stable or does it break often? Does many people use it.
- Fedora, manjaro, opensuse? Which off these with KDE is most beginner friendly and stable. Is used much so I can find help when something is going on. Customisable. Stable?
Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is excellent and no less beginner friendly than any other major distro, so I wouldn’t worry. It really is one of the most underrated distros out there.
Kubuntu could be a good option for you, but I recommend doing the “Minimal” install to avoid Snaps and bloat.
If you are mostly about gaming and flatpak, then consider Bazzite. You can’t just install packages on Bazzite, so if you need to do things that aren’t already built in then you need to use containers or, as a last resort, create a new layers with rpm-ostree.
For the record, Arch and it’s offshoots don’t especially resonate with me, either. I want my OS to “just work”, but at the same time I want to have the ability to go wild whenever and however I feel like it.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Bazzite lately and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it to most Linux newbies, especially gamers who want their system to “just work.” It’s also a very interesting system for jaded old Linux users because it works so differently than we’re used to. The “everything needs to be a container” paradigm is very interesting and has a lot of security and stability benefits.
If you want more control and freedom, then OpenSUSE is definitely the best option here. I’d only fallback to Kubuntu if there was some software you need that only ships in .deb and you have no other options. I’m not a fan of Canonical or what they’ve done to the Ubuntu ecosystem.
I would second kubuntu as I use it daily, but I don’t mind the snaps.
I’m a recent convert from Mint Cinnamon to Kubuntu. I would definitely recommend it for being user friendly.
Manjaro is hot shit. If u want newbie friendly, Linux mint Gamer friendly bazzite
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Yes, Manjaro is European. KDE is the same everywhere. IMO it is not stable, but that is just an opinion. I’m not sure how many people use it.
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OpenSUSE is relatively beginner friendly. Leap is the stable, non-rolling release, and Tumbleweed is the rolling, less stable but still stable release; Leap’s packages can be old, so you may not have the newest KDE. For this reason, I’d recommend Tumbleweed. A fair amount of people use it.
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I’d say use Fedora or switch to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Fedora is more stable and used more, but OpenSUSE is European.
I use fedora kinoite atomic fedora with KDE. I have had no stability issues on a day to day usage for going on 2 years. I agree plasma is plasma regardless of distro but some distros update slower. Fedora is not bleeding edge but does do a pretty good job of staying ahead of the curve. I have been a Linux user since the 90’s and have been around the block a few times with different distros. I always fall back to redhat/fedora for my desktop day to day.
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EndeavourOS KDE Plasma is my favourite! It’s really really considerate and inherits all the arch linux advantage :3
I have to second this. It’s been amazing across the board for so much. Lots of documentation to assist with problems and you learn so much.
You can also install KDE Plasma on Linux Mint: https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint-22/. My own distro right now is TuxedoOS with KDE Plasma (Can go on any hardware, not just Tuxedo computers) and it works great for me.
Why not Pop!_OS with vanilla Gnome3 and Wayland? It runs snappy and you don’t need the experimental Cosmic desktop.
This was originally intended as a longer comment, but the previous draft unfortunately blinked out of existence… Though, I’m more than willing to shed some light on the distros discussed below if you’re interested.
Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.
I’m surprised that no one else has mentioned them yet. Thus, for the sake of completeness, consider Aurora and Bazzite. It’s what I would personally install/recommend for/to relatives/friends that would like to make the switch to Linux.
Aurora on their website looks really promising but I guess its a rather small distro that not many people know?
but I guess its a rather small distro that not many people know?
It’s true that it’s not as well-established as many of the other distros discussed here; it probably has like 1k users or so. Which is quite literally just a small fraction of Fedora KDE’s over a 120k user base. Granted, it’s a relatively new distro built on Fedora’s latest/‘future’ tech. Usage numbers should follow eventually[1].
Thankfully, that same tech enables Aurora (and other projects like it) to be very robust and reliable; tangibly more so than the more popular ‘traditional’ alternatives. I assume you’ll come to cherish and value this reliability, especially as stability seems to be a concern of yours.
I’m currently using bazzite, and I have had a couple of hiccups with it so far. One was it being immutable, meaning for any software that wasn’t in the flatpak store, I have to spin up a container running a mutable version and use that.
The second is a weird audio thing where on install, the volume knob on my headset changed the system volume like I expected. Now, it changes like, local volume and doesn’t show up as changing in the system volume.
Anyway, my only real point is that looking problems up on a small distro is harder, because it might be a bazzite problem, or a universal blue problem, or an atomic fedora problem, or a kde plasma problem, and it makes it difficult to search if you don’t know the specific piece that is broken.
One was it being immutable, meaning for any software that wasn’t in the flatpak store, I have to spin up a container running a mutable version and use that.
Sorry for being that guy, but please allow me to nitpick the above:
- Bazzite’s founder and lead maintainer doesn’t refer to Bazzite as immutable[1].
- Bazzite supports a lot more than just Flatpak and pet containers. And that list isn’t even complete.
my only real point is that looking problems up on a small distro is harder
While I agree that Aurora definitely is a small ‘distro’[2], I’m not comfortable to refer to Bazzite as a small project. Both Steam’s own metrics as well as ProtonDB’s suggest that it holds a moderate chunk. Sure, with just over 25k users it isn’t quite comparable to (say) Fedora’s 300k+ user base. But it definitely ain’t a slouch either.
As for the looking problems up part, honestly, if a quick search doesn’t help ya, you should just go over to their Discord or Discourse and ask the friendly maintainers and community for help/support.
Heck, even their subreddit seems to be doing a commendable job.
I’d argue it’s their legit resistance against the common notion/understanding of immutability that doesn’t apply to Bazzite. ↩︎
The uBlue team doesn’t refer to their images as such 😅. Frankly, I agree that the daily pipeline their images go through to deliver system updates screams everything but the traditional model. To be clear, in uBlue’s model, the daily-delivered base system is rebuilt from source every single time. So, my base system of Bazzite is identical to yours (unless either one of us created their own image). ↩︎
Fedora KDE pretty much offers the best KDE Plasma experience, maybe right after OpenSuse.
If you are still using Fedora, I recommend sticking with it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
I wouldn’t use Fedora mainly because I object to how IBM/RedHat handled the removal of CentOS and how they hampered RockyLinux from keeping the original CentOS mission going
I would pick a leaf off the Debian tree
Which is why I moved to Debian/Ubuntu based and haven’t looked back. But functionally, nearly every distro has a different strength and purpose, so go with whatever piques your interest.
Fedora is not Red Hat. While they fund Fedora development, they don’t dictate how to it is ran.
For those of us that despise Red Hat, sorry, but increasing the user base of Fedora, dramatically helps Red Hat’s marketability and profitability (and IBM’s). These companies not only make decisions bad for the FOSS community but way too happy to do business with a country massacring kids as we speak too. Now, I still recommend using Fedora since, as you say they are not straight IBM and they are at the vanguard, yet, for those with a conscience on these matters, there are as equally comparable offers out there.
Fedora is upstream CentOS Steam which is upstream RHEL. It’s part of RHEL cycle/stream
easy non-gnome = plasma on Debian or xfce via mxlinux
Lot’s of great answers already. I’ll just had my thoughts and hope it helps.
Choosing a Linux distro is fucking hard, but the good thing is that you already have a DE (Desktop Environment) that you like, KDE Plasma (KDE is the community, Plasma is the name of the DE) and it’s my favorite.1 - Manjaro was my first distro for daily use. I would not recommend it, i don’t think it’s stable enough to get into linux. Would not recommend any Arch based distro.
2 - OpenSuse is an old distribution, but not beginner friendly, so maybe not a good idea to dip your toes into it.
3 - Fedora is well established with lots of documentation, a big community and a 6 month update release model that should give you the newest features very fast while still maintaining stability. I don’t recommend the Atomic distros. If you’ve already installed and it works then stick with it for a while.There are also the Ubuntu based distros like Kubuntu, KDE Neon or Tuxedo OS. Ubuntu has probably the largest user base, so documentation is abound everywhere regardless of the distro you pick.
You’re already testing out different distros, try to daily drive for a month and read up on what makes them different. In general it’s how to install software, the release model (“Long Term Support” or “Rolling Release”) and the core system. Apps are installed on top of the system and right now come in a variety of formats. I strongly recommend that you enable Flatpak on the distro you chose and use the Discovery app for software management.
Edit: Added “Tuxedo OS”
I also thought about Kubuntu and KDE neon. I think I will test these 2 and then decide between these 2 and fedora. After reading all this I don’t think opensuse and mamjaro are for me for now.
Sounds like you nailed if
openSUSE Tumbleweed is the rolling release, where you may have dependency decisions to make during regular updates. Updates must be done in the terminal.
The more beginner friendly version is openSUSE Leap. That has a longer release cycle, and you use the Discover interface (or yeast, or zypper in the terminal) to update.
Either is pretty friendly. Both have recent KDE.
Pop!_OS’ Cosmic DE is a recent fork of Gnome. It’s the fourth “No, I’d rather put up with being a FOSS project manager for the rest of my life than keep using Gnome” DE I’m aware of, after:
- MATE is basically “No, we like how Gnome 2 was, so we’re keeping it.”
- Cinnamon is basically "GTK3 is cool but we’re not doing all this “almost nothing works because you HAVE to use it EXACTLY like this” crap. Linux Mint is basically a grievance distro; it’s defuckulated Ubuntu with defuckulated Gnome.
- Unity. Because Canonical was reinventing the wheel, the inclined plane, the lever, human speech, electromagnetism, fire, antiperspirant, package management, the display service and the init system, so why not the DE as well?
- Cosmic. I’m not sure why System76 bothered, other than Gnome wasn’t sparkly enough.
Onto your actual questions:
- I don’t know if Manjaro is European or not, but I have given up on them. They’ve made a lot of rookie mistakes like letting security certificates expire, they dropped the ball pretty hard with the PinePhone IIRC, and every time I’ve attempted to use Manjaro it just didn’t work that well.
Pop!_OS is the in-house distro of System76, a for-profit computer vendor based in Colorado. It’s meant to work well on their hardware out of the box; the big claim to fame that I saw when they were the trendy distro of the week is they had a version that had Nvidia drivers baked into the install, so to the end user “If you have an Nvidia card, click the link on the website that says Nvidia and it works.”
Linux Mint, as previously mentioned, is mostly concerned with distancing itself from questionable decisions made by Ubuntu and Gnome. It maintains compatibility with Ubuntu, so Ubuntu install instructions for software pretty much always work with Mint, and yet the DE is more easily understood by Windows users.
Fedora is Decommercialized Red Hat, honestly I don’t really see them making much effort towards beginners besides maybe their immutable/atomic versions.
Customization of KDE is going to be pretty similar if you stick to things you can change via the settings menu, at some point during “customization” you’ll find the boundary between DE and distro. Yes, many people use KDE. Unlike Gnome, they haven’t pissed off four different groups over the ages resulting in forks. KDE is mighty popular.
“Is it really beginner friendly, snappy, stable?” Lots of things “it” could be, if you mean KDE…yeah? I personally prefer Cinnamon as a “give to grandma” OS because KDE tends to slop more crap on the screen, especially in that One Settings Menu To Rule Them All they have. This is a subjective experience but, if I ever found myself thinking “Is there a setting to change this?” I felt more able to find that setting in Cinnamon than in KDE.
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I know very little about OpenSuSe, I’ve never once tried a SuSe-based distro.
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Out of the three you listed, I’d go with Fedora. I’m typing this on a machine running Fedora KDE. I would personally recommend KDE Neon or Kubuntu before Manjaro or OpenSuSe. Manjaro because I’ve had bad luck with Manjaro, and I have no experience with SuSe. I might also steer you to EndeavourOS or vanilla Arch over Manjaro.
You’ve used the word “stable” a lot. Users typically mean “is it going to crash?” None of these are going to crash, you’re not going to crash Linux. What you might find, depending on the distro, is someone will push an update to a software package that breaks your workflow. Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, distros like those do point-in-time feature freezes to avoid that possibility. You might not get the newest features but your system will continue to work like it always has. Rolling release distros like Arch push updates as soon as their developers release them, so you get all the cutting edge features, bugs and breakages.
Of the three you listed, Manjaro will be the least “stable” by that definition; it’s a fork of Arch. Fedora and OpenSuSe are both forks of commercial distros so you get that less, but I can attest on Fedora it does happen, they broke the lock screen last month. You want to never reboot your computer to find something suddenly doesn’t work, go with Debian Stable.
Fedora and OpenSuSe are both forks of commercial distros
It’s a bit more complicated than that with openSUSE. Tumbleweed is a snapshot of the Factory repo that’s put through automated testing, and if it passes, it is released straight away. Suse Enterprise Linux is also a snapshot of the Factory repo that’s put through a polishing process and when it’s ready, released. Leap is a community fork of Suse Enterprise Linux.
Both Tumbleweed and Leap are good, the former if you want bang up to date software and the latter if you prefer older software in a more stable, as in unchanging, distro.
I started with Opensuse Tumbleweed about 2 years ago from almost 0 knowledge and never looked back.
there’s:
- KDE neon (sorta dodgy but always has the newest KDE release on top of ubuntu)
- Kubuntu (KDE on ubuntu but a bit old)
- Debian+KDE (KDE but a good few months old)
I wouldn’t recommend manjaro, they’re very dodgy
Opensuse is pretty good, iirc they have a GUI for most configuration items and you get the newest packages for everything. it’s like easier arch
I don’t like any distros where I have to fight the system to get it to do what I want. And to install GrapheneOS I needed a normal Chromium, not snap (because of USB access). You won’t believe how much Ubuntu will fight you over this these days
If I wanted to scour the web for a .deb I’d still be using Windows
I had this same issue and I was about to tweak out. I love mint and it really is the best OS out of the box with no tweaks but damn. Debian edition mint for the win. Ubuntu shit is nice but it introduces breakage every few updates and I hate debugging or fixing issues. I want shit to just work at this point. So I jumped ship to NIX and I really love it but there’s still some debugging occasionally. I guess that’s the norm with Linux. Pick your poison.
same, that’s why I like neon/debian a lot
What makes Manjaro dodgy?
The distro itself is OK, and it’s fine if you switch to their “unstable” repositories so it directly mirrors Arch. Where the problems lie is in the admin. In the past they have:
- Let their certificates expire and suggested that users put their clocks back to work around it, several times.
- DDOSed the AUR with coding mistakes in pamac, at least twice.
- Had controversy regarding their finances.
- Other things that I can’t remember right now.
They seem to have sorted themselves out as their have been no reports of mistakes recently. But trust once lost, is hard to regain.
Remember when they dropped hardware acceleration a few years ago? That was what got me to move off.
Now that you come to mention it, I have a vague memory of a few distros doing that because of licencing issues.
they’ve had a few SSL certificate renewal issues and the way they dealt with that was very dodgy (asking to just ignore it)
also manjaro beginners seem to often use the AUR which isn’t really supported for manjaro and break their install in the process
That was 3 years ago. I understand they made a mistake (twice) but ok since then. I think most of the Manjaro criticism is no longer warranted. All distros had made mistakes.
Kubuntu is not a bit old, currently is 6.3 while newest kde is 6.4 Iif you use an os for its SW and not its de, remember kubuntu let’s you access snaps, flat packs, appimagss and all tutorials for Ubuntu out there.
