I’m thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I’m wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I’ve heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don’t like Cinnamon all too much.

What’s a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?

edit: Woah, it seems that you’re able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?

edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences…

On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I’m open to using either.

I’m running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It’s one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.

I would say I’m open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don’t want to do anything too out of my scope. I don’t want to spend too many hours setting it up, I’d rather have something that works mostly out of the box :D

I want a stable distro as in I don’t want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I’m open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    111·
    18 hours ago

    Most of them should be able to handle that easily. Even those that come in “flavors” like Kubuntu. OpenSUSE certainly does. You just install them both or start with one and install the other later and in the login manager you can choose which one to start.

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      13·
      18 hours ago

      Damn, you can just choose from the login manager? You don’t get ANYTHING like this on Windows! Crazy that you can just swap out the whole GUI of your OS like that

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        Technically you can replace Explorer with any other desktop shell, but you’ll probably end up launching it anyway because of how many components use it.

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
        7·
        18 hours ago

        Not only that, you can use the programs from one desktop environment in the other one. Really confused me the first time I used Linux because it had installed both Gnome and KDE and I was wondering why I had two of almost every type of app. But I really liked Gnome’s Solitaire.