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.
I’ve heard that Mint doesn’t play well with DEs that aren’t Cinnamon (or Mate/XFCE), is that still an issue? Also, do the benefits of Mint (not requiring the terminal for everything) vanish if you KDE Plasma or GNOME?
I haven’t been a mint user for a while, but the fact that the mint folks specifically release MATE/XFCE versions is a good sign that they are tested for compatibility. You can try those versions on liveusb, too.
I’m guessing here, but the “less terminal needed” parts of Mint are probably specific tools and GUI settings managers they have put together to be more user friendly. if you search something like [name of Mint settings manager or tool] XFCE compatible, you’ll likely get an explanation. You might want to check out their Matrix chat room with specific questions: https://app.element.io/#/room/#linuxmint-space:matrix.org