Distro suggestions?
Distro suggestions?
Currently running Kali on my laptop as that's all it was used for. Looking for something more general purpose. Mainly steam for light gaming and being able to install the tools from Kali for stuff like tryhackme. Mostly familiar with Debian, as that's what Kali is based on, but willing to try something else. Laptop is this Acer.
Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.
I doubt my experience was the same as everyone else but I tried to install Debian on my gaming pc a week ago and I could not get Nvidia drivers to work for anything, there were no relevant search results and no one on any message board had any ideas. I gave up and installed Arch and Nvidia drivers without making any hardware changes and it was so unexpectedly easy I still can't believe it.
I use Debian on my server so I was shocked that it was basically impossible to get Nvidia drivers working, at least on my chipset.
there were no relevant search results>
Not sure if you were only looking for debian specific posts, but most arch or ubuntu tutorials work just fine most of the time.
Not sure how new your card is, but i got a 3080 working... I'm on sid though. Maybe thats the difference
Fedora 38 is awesome. Yeah, Red Hat drama I know, but I think Fedora will be fine.
Fedora is a fine distro. Red Hat is still a huge contributor to the open source community, despite the decisions made by IBM managers to restrict RHEL source code. It just means that it'll be a little more difficult to make RHEL clones going forward, but I doubt it'll have any lasting impact. Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and other RHEL based distros have all announced that they intend to continue their operations, with little to no change in how they do things. Really, the controversy is overblown.
Debian just released version 12 and it regularly gets high marks for being a good, solid distro – if you want a little more edge, you can switch over to Debian Sid …
Linux Mint is nice, it even has a Debian edition that runs on top of vanilla Debian, should be updated to a Debian 12 base within a month or so. Normal one runs on Ubuntu but gets rid of the "Ubuntu" stuff.
Pop OS is pretty popular now. They use a modified GNOME but are working on their own DE to replace that. One of their big claims to fame is the ability to make it do window tiling.
Mint is my recommendation too for general purpose desktop PC. Debian also works, but I found that Mint has most of the stuff already working out of the box, so I've stuck to that on my laptops since 2014 or thereabouts. On servers I prefer Debian.
Honorable mention: Zorin OS
Mint Cinnamon
Personally love PopOS! It's super easy and convient, has a super smart window tiling manager worth trying out!
You could do straight Debian or anything else Debian-based like Mint Debian Edition or MX.
Otherwise Fedora is very recommended for general purpose desktop Linux. But, that isn't Debian.
I don't know if Kali is really recommended for general purpose.
I'm interested in seeing the other recommendations here, it is always fun to see what other users recommend or use. I use Alpine but it isn't always perfect as a desktop for people who don't like things breaking.
Second fedora, it looks modern, has up to date packages and is hardened. (selinux)
Hear me out, grab ventoy, a decent USB drive (32-64 gb), download debian, kubuntu (maybe), fedora/mojara, any live arch derivative (endeavour, arco, artix. Stay away of Manjaro) and anything else you found appealing. Put all of them there and go nuts. At the end of the day, it's always night.
You should try Pop! OS. It's pretty much Ubuntu without the weird snap garbage, so has a direct Debian heritage.
your computer can pretty much run every single distribution in any desktop environment without a problem so go wild and try lots of them, pick anything a let yourself have a good week with it and it's online documentation to do your thing every of them have good and bad parts. when asked the filesystem pick btrfs and set-up snapshots, that will save your ass when needed and it's so quick you could break your system every week without being bothered
Debian.
Since you're more familiar with Debian, I recommend Linux Mint. Ubuntu if you don't care about snap. These are generally good and pretty friendly. If you know your way around Linux and want something else that also has up-to-date stuff (Debian is always a little behind on updates) and you don't mind reading on some documentation to get started, you could also try Fedora. Kali Linux tools are available to most distributions.
Fedora 38 is great. Debian 12 is also good if you prefer apt. But with Fedora just use dnf instead of apt and its basically exactly the same.
I had Linux Mint several years, it's a great Distro on Debian/Ubuntu. But, as a heavy gamer, I needed fresh and up-to-date sources for Mesa and the Kernel and so I switched to EndeavourOS, which is Arch-based and I can highly recommend it! It's rock solid and gaming is great.
Thanks for all the suggestions. Think I'm currently leaning towards Debian 12 for now, and depending on how that feels might try mint next.
Fedora. I'd avoid Ubuntu and its derivatives like Pop! or Arch derivatives. I think Arch is fine, especially if you know what you're doing, but Arch derivatives in my experience are much less stable than for example Ubuntu or Fedora.
But seriously. Fedora. It's the best. Ubuntu is actually fine too but Blue > Orange
Linux mint if you are new.
ZorinOS if your mom will use your PC.
Arch linux if you are sane.
Gentoo if you are insane.
Ubloatu, Fedora, Slackware if you want to be a "different" user.
Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.
Linux Mint and then don't worry about it. It just works.
Just installed this recently. Both monitors worked out the gate, my new headset worked, haven't had any issues with it yet
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great choice for a robust rolling distribution. Automated testing of packages rules out most of regressions and its KDE implementation is top notch. If you were considering Fedora or Arch, look no further.
Based on your needs any distro is probably fine. They're pretty much all free, i don't think you'll find a better answer from internet randos than just booting from live usb and trying them out. I use arch btw.
Fedora is just flat-out king for desktop IMO. It has packages that are new, but not unstable. Lots of Red Hat engineers use it as a daily driver, so fixes come quick, and it has a pretty large user base. It's made for this stuff.
Lots of Red Hat engineers use it as a daily driver
You mean IBM engineers.
No, I mean Red Hat engineers. Despite being a wholly-owned subsidiary of IBM, they are separate orgs. This probably doesn't mean anything to you, because you are mad at Red Hat, but that doesn't mean that the decisions made were done by IBM's executives, and most IBM engineers probably aren't running Fedora Linux.
I'd try Debian or if you're feeling adventurous, EndeavourOS.
I'm a fan of Manjaro
Can't really recommend Manjaro to new users after the fairly recent controversies.
Oh no! What happened?
Classic arch Linux is the way to go imo. If you need something a little more turn key, I would go with linux mint Debian edition! Debian was the first distro I ever used, an I think if you feel at home there, linux mint Debian edition might be what you’re looking for.
I was hesitant for the last few years to recommend Solus. They stopped communicating with the community and there hadn't been a new iso in a while. Software was still being updated behind the scenes but it seemed like it was dying. Now 4.4 was released a few weeks ago with short term and long term plans announced so I feel good recommending trying it. The only issue is it's software repository isn't as big as other distros. But I switched to Debian and have been happy with that. Probably the way to go if you are familiar with it from using Kali.
I'm not linux expert. But I have been messing around with it again lately, trying to get it working on my gaming laptop. I was using Nobara for a bit, which I liked quite a bit. It's a Fedora-based distro that's put together by the GloriousEggroll guys so it comes with Nvidia drivers and tons of gaming stuff preinstalled.
I ended up ditching it mainly for one reason: it didn't handle my hybrid graphics well. Some games worked fine, some refused to even start.
I ended up swapping to Pop!_OS because it supports hybrid Nvidia graphics with no issues. The guys who make the distro sell laptops with hybrid graphics so they have incentive to have it work well. All the games that wouldn't start in Nobara work seamlessly in Pop.
I'm not a huge fan of the desktop environment but I'm getting used to it and there's definitely something to be said for everything just working.
I suggest you to try Void.
I'd go with MX Linux for sure, this is a very nice distro, w/o systemd, based on Debian, and using Xfce so it's pretty fast
since you're used to debian, maybe try something that isn't debian based.
PCLinuxOS
Mageia
Slackware
OpenSuse
Free/open/netbsd