Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but I’ve had a lot of problems in my previous attempts to switch to Linux, so I’d like to create a list of distros to try out, and see what works for me. I’m mostly expecting to be doing basic office work and light gaming via Steam.
Mint, debian, fedora, Ubuntu, freebsd, tails have all been pretty simple experiences imo
Pretty much just stay away from cutting edge, rolling release, build from source, beta, testing branch etc and you’ll be fine, look for something with LTS in the versions name
Freebsd? That one surprises me.
Besides Debian?
Debian is also my answer.
Mint works perfectly for me, for that same use case
Of the 10~20 distros I tested in these past ~4 years, Mint is the only one I needed to go way out of my way to break anything. Also most of what you’d need is orderly laid out in the “Start menu” (don’t remember if it has a specific name on Linux), including there being a GUI-based “app store”, so it’s also pretty straight forward to install most day-to-day stuff.
The only downside of Mint is outdated packages.
I thought you were going to say you had to go way out of your way to fix it at first 😂 I was like wait what?
All the popular distros are more reliable than Windows 🤷
I really hate to be that person but that is unfortunately not always been my experience 😅
I’ve been using linux for like 10 years and aside from when I was doing really weird customization shit windows isnt supposed to even be able to do, I had pretty much zero issues. I’ve definitely experienced my fair share of jank on linux. I love it anyway, but as a less technical person I’m not entirely convinced thats always the case woth any popular distro
Depends on your hardware. I have had lots of issues with Linux regarding audio quality over Bluetooth, sound quality over laptop speakers, wifi driver reliability (had to disable power save), wake from sleep. For older NVDIA cards you can choose either the unsupported old binary drivers on an old kernel version or terrible performance and bugs with the free nouveau drivers. Wayland doesn’t work with the old binary drivers either.
Getting consistent theming between different versions of Qt and GTK working feels like an impossible task.
If you have an Nvidia GPU, it’s hard to beat Linux Mint, unless you have the absolute newest bleeding edge hardware.
If you have an AMD or Intel GPU, Linux Mint Debian edition is great.
Debian.
I think I’m a newcomer to linux even if I did use Ubuntu for many years. But generally I have no idea what I’m doing at any given time.
About a month ago I switched to Debian. No issues. Everything works. I should have changed years ago.
@PlzGivHugs not quite “just works” entirely, but I’ve grown more accustomed with MX Linux. Everything is pretty much just one click away tucked into the MX Tools app and you don’t need lots of skills to use it. Some of the said apps might open inside a terminal, but their options are pretty well explained.
Ehhh, I’d recommend against MX if only because they don’t ship with a more approachable app-store like Linux mint does.
MX’s app installer tool is more similar to Aptitude, which is to say, completely functional, but entirely text based (no screenshots, reviews of apps, etc) which isn’t to say it’s wrong or bad, but I’d wager it’d be offputting to the average person compared to the more image-heavy and user-friendly design of app-store that Mint or Gnome-based distros have.
@ProdigalFrog isn’t discover also available in the KDE version? I don’t remember
Hm, that could be, I haven’t tried their KDE version. Though I can’t say I’d recommend that to a newbie either, as KDE in particular isn’t a good option for Debian based systems since it uses a pretty old and (at least in my case) buggy version that won’t receive any bug fixes or security updates until the next major Debian release (it’s bad enough that the KDE devs themselves recommend avoiding KDE on Debian)
The older version of discover that comes with Debian is also pretty bad for newbies, IMHO. It is cluttered with non-relevant library files and system themes when searching for apps (I believe this was fixed in newer versions), and has no way to filter out potentially dangerous unverified flatpaks when flathub is enabled, which a newbie wouldn’t know to look for. Mint’s and Gnome’s appstore don’t show unverified flatpaks by default.
With the criteria flathub uses for verification, everything in debians own repos is unverified. We’re trusting the maintainer either way.
Definitely mint for “just works”, personally used it on loads of computers and haven’t encountered any issues
I don’t use them myself but Debian or Ubuntu are probably what you’re looking for.
Shortlist of traditional distros, ordered roughly in descending order:
Shortlist ofOnly[5] recommendation for atomic distros:- Bazzite[6]
As for deciding between a traditional or atomic distro, I’d personally suggest to try out Bazzite first. And refer to their documentation whenever something comes up during initial setup. If at any point, you’re not able to get it to work even with the help of its community —[7] be it through their Discord, Discourse or sub
reddit— then simply pivot to the traditional distros.
Attracts most noobs and is probs the most popular out of these; no-brainer. Lack of proper Wayland support and not offering (!) a (semi-)rolling release model are the only reasons why the others deserve to be on this list. Otherwise this would sweep clean. ↩︎
If you want something slow-moving, but still need/want Wayland. ↩︎
Arch-based distro, but comes with very sane defaults. Recommended if you’re on very new hardware. ↩︎
Relatively bare-bones. Especially compared to all the other distros found on this list. But, if you want a more minimalist approach while preserving excellent defaults, then this is definitely it. ↩︎
Technically, any of uBlue’s distros qualifies. But Bazzite is a lot more popular than the others. Hence you’ll have an easier time finding resources for it. ↩︎
This probs deserves a footnote of its own in which I elaborate, but I got tired. Here, have a flower; 💮. ↩︎
I know using the em dash here makes me look sus AF, but I can assure the reader that no LLMs were used in the creation of this writing. ↩︎
what is wayland and how important is it?
If you have HDR monitors or high resolution screens, that need fractional scaling you’re better off with Wayland and KDE.
Wayland is replacing X11 at a rate where quality control isn’t there.
Not very. X11 is still widely used and works fine. Wayland is the future, but you’ll probably be fine either way.
I copied this table from here: https://www.linuxteck.com/x11-vs-wayland/Feature X11 Wayland Architecture Multi-program chain (X Server + WM + Compositor) Single unified Compositor handles everything Render Method RAM multi-copy — pixels duplicated per frame Zero-copy GPU — same buffer start to finish Security Model Open trust — any app sees all input and screen Isolated by design — apps see only their own window Screen Tearing Common — vsync not guaranteed by protocol Eliminated — compositor controls frame delivery HiDPI / Fractional Scaling Inconsistent — requires per-app configuration Per-display — clean scaling built into protocol Multi-Monitor HDR Limited — retrofitted support only Full support — designed from the ground up SSH Remote Display Native — X forwarding works out of the box Needs external tools (e.g. Xwayland, RDP) GUI Automation Tools Rich ecosystem — xdotool, wmctrl, AutoKey Limited — protocol restricts cross-app access Legacy App Support Full native support XWayland compatibility bridge NVIDIA Driver Support Stable — long-established Good — driver series 495 and above Battery Efficiency Higher overhead — extra RAM copies per frame Lower overhead — GPU buffer reuse Development Status Maintenance-only since 2024 Actively developed — expanding scope Regarding its architecture, the table says about Wayland the following
Single unified Compositor handles everything
While this has been true in practice, this isn’t dictated. For example, very recently, we’re finally seeing the decouplement of the compositor from the window manager. Granted, this is still a very recent development and we don’t know if others will follow suit. But I’m excited to see where this will lead us.
what is wayland
Basically, whenever an app has a GUI it wants to display, it communicates that to ‘the system’ with all the necessary details. After which ‘the system’ does the rendering and whatnot. Wayland is a protocol that defines a set of rules on how this interaction should take place. Hence, technically, it is only (the defining) part of the modern solution.
how important is it?
Very. Basically, either it or its ‘predecessor’[1] X11 is involved whenever you want to display/render anything[2] on desktop Linux. As X11 has been abandoned in favor of Wayland, some modern features like HDR or VRR are only found on the latter. On the other hand, I believe Wayland was never meant to offer full feature-parity with X11. Hence, some unsupported edge cases may continue to exist indefinitely. Thankfully, it has come a long way. What remains are some concerns related to accessibility AND the adjustment[3] of the surrounding ecosystem.
The term is used loosely here, because there’s a very big difference between the two. ↩︎
Which, to be clear, happens literally all the time. Unless your display needs don’t go beyond what was already available on MS-DOS*. ↩︎
Like, how only very recently Electron got to become proper Wayland-native. Note that Xwayland is included with Wayland as a compatibility layer whenever something is not Wayland-native yet. ↩︎
Thank you for the intro, that helped. Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
Thank you for the intro, that helped.
Glad to hear it was helpful.
Sounds like Mint not having it is relevant
Yup. FWIW, there’s also the security argument; I.e. X11 makes keylogging trivial, while Wayland provides protection against it by default. Having said that, there is experimental support for Wayland in Linux Mint. But, ideally, it needs more time to cook.
Mint. It’s just good out of the box.
If you tell us what hardware you’re on, we might have other suggestions… but probably still Mint.
Mint Debian Edition
What’s different between LMDE and choosing cinnamon when installing debian? Do they change anything under the hood on the debian base?
It’s the same Debian base under the hood, but has:
- A more user-friendly installer (I know Debian’s has improved with Trixie, but Mint’s is still easier IMO).
- A newbie friendly welcome screen that walks them through setting up a snap shot back-up tool, theming, updates, firewall, as well as easily providing a link to help documents, and shows the user the software center exists.
- The excellent Mint Software Centre Appstore (I don’t think that comes with Cinnamon on a standard Debian install, I think it’s just the terminal).
The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the “cinnamon” edition uses Ubuntu as a base. I believe they both actually use cinnamon as the DE.
It’s more of a just in case because a lot of the linux community isn’t like Conical lately.
The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the “cinnamon” edition uses Ubuntu as a base.
Does that mean that the packages available to LMDE are older?
For gaming, Bazzite. It has been enough of an improvement that it has changed my opinion on immutable OS’. In my office, I use Ubuntu on Desktop/ Debian on server. But, I’m not sure those are the right answers in 2026. Ubuntu hasn’t exactly made the best decisions over the last 10 years or so, I keep using them mostly out of momentum.
I should probably change to Debian. Ubuntu has become a bit of a dumpster fire from its former glory as Debian for noobs. Also avoid Nvidia if you want it just works. (Nvidia can work… probably better than it used to but if you don’t want to screw with things)
Fedora (GNOME)
Respectfully disagree.
Gnome is the environment not implementing Server-side window decorations.
That makes everything harder for app developers since they have to implement client side window decorations to make apps movable just for Gnome.
When apps can’t be moved around on Gnome because they don’t have a window handle to drag, it doesn’t really fit the “it just works” requirement.
