I moved my SSD from my old 8th gen Intel laptop to my brand new Zen 4 Framework 16. It was absolutely uneventful. Almost disappointing 😅

Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.

I have updated Debian across 4 major releases without issues. I have daily updates on Fedora without issues. I had to do maintenance probably monthly on Manjaro.

Arch doesn’t do things for you, therefore Manjaro doesn’t do things for you. This means you are the one who needs to do the maintenance and upgrade config files and such. It is interesting, it is formative, but it is not for beginners who might get the impression that Linux needs constant maintenance and breaks often.

Thanks for this great writeup about what makes Ubuntu its own thing rather than standard.

Thanks, if you know who to lobby for it, please do ;)

I’ve updated my post with “I heard conflicting stuff over the Internet and now I’m scared” and an introduction. Those are legitimate questions for people who, like me, do a lot of research before committing to something. Some of the discussions here and in other communities might scare people off, as they might feel they’ve done the “wrong” choice or are afraid to do the “wrong” choice.

I’ve ran my gaming pc on Manjaro for about 2 years. There were too many issues to list here, but the one huge problem for me for new users is updates.

You have to wait for the semi-regular “stable update” post, check the major issues and act accordingly. This shouldn’t happen in a “beginner friendly” distro. I mean, those posts are great, but all other majors distros update without intervention.

Also, I always updated from the tty as there’s a weird “never update inside Gnome” policy.

I’ve edited and merged the Snap paragraph with Flatpaks. After all, they serve the same purpose.

There are daily threads started by new users who say stuff like “I read that systemd is bad, should I switch to [insert systemd-less distro here]” or “My RTX 4080 runs Sim City 2000 at 12 FPS, is Linux trash?”, so there seems to be a need to at least help alleviate the fears of people who read conflicting stuff (or downright flamewars) on the internet and might be overwhelmed by those conflicts.

So… Fedora + Distrobox ?

Nah I use Super and Super-A all the time when docked. Otherwise I mostly use trackpad gestures.

You’re right. I’m changing this paragraph.

OK I’ll reformulate, thanks.

I was running out of steam yeah :D

Sorry, the goal here was to offer a few sensible alternatives, not overwhelm the reader with choices. The gist here is “start with something solid, reputable and popular, branch out later”.

Too much choices lead to analysis paralysis, and to goal here is to learn how to swim first. There are dozens of great distros, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list, as there are dozens of great DEs, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list.

Thank you for your feedback!

I’m enriching this guide with the info you provided :)

Thank you <3

Haha I’ve already been using Forge for weeks :D

I like the concept of it, but it lacks Hyprland’s smoothness.

True. Although this post is less a comparison of the two than a renewed appreciation of what makes Gnome fantastic, especially the QOL parts taken for granted for so long ;)

Oh nice, I like it. Although a few minutes with it and it’s starting to look suspiciously like my Gnome setup :D

Also, the tray doesn’t seem to work on my machine, probably some missing dependency.