I started in '91 with a roll-your-own (about all there was at the time). Switched over to Gentoo maybe 20 years ago. But neither of those is for the faint of heart.
I started in '91 with a roll-your-own (about all there was at the time). Switched over to Gentoo maybe 20 years ago. But neither of those is for the faint of heart.
My preference is for something easy to use, but that let me do my modifications. It's being a while since I used a Linux distro, but I always used Ubuntu. It gave me already enough headaches, and for headaches, just life is enough.
For my use, Arch Linux. I like being on the bleeding edge and the Arch User Repository ends up being my lifeblood due to my niche use case.
For any one else, Linux Mint or Fedora. Both are solid and reliable, device can be disconnected for months and still be able to grab updates without issues 95% of the time.
If I’m using a distro as my primary device I’d probably use Arch Linux because of how it updates. But for something that I’m just going to throw on an extra device like a laptop I usually use Debian or Fedora because it doesn’t require a lot of effort.
Debian-based distros operate much more smoothly so it takes me less time to check that everything is in order. OpenSUSE didn't stick with me. I tried Fedora and Arch for a few months but just didn't like where my time was being spent. Debian is best for power. Mint is good. Ubuntu is good.
Fedora gives the latest updates quickly which helps a lot if you game and need up to date drivers and features. Using their default KDE Plasma gui gives you an interface that is very similar to Windows in layout if that's what you're looking for. I run Fedora on all my end user devices, and run Ubuntu with the Kubuntu gui for my servers.