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.

edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)

My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?

edit 4:

Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD

now I’m slowly installing my programs again…

  • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.br
    1·
    4 days ago

    first of all

    I mean no malice towards you and hope this doesn’t seem aggressive or angry.

    don’t worry, that’s not at all how you came across. different points of view, that’s all

    anyway, i’m not going to have the energy to reply to this point by point. i will say that i might be biased for being a total linux nerd, so things might appear easier to me than they actually are (even when i take that very fact into account, i’m sure there’s an xkcd for that). but my main point still stands: having multiple DEs installed is a supported configuration in most linux distributions. it’s not a hack or a fringe corner case, even if it might not be recommended for beginner or even intermediate users.

    there’s still one thing in your comment that confuses me, though

    Maybe forgetting which text editor worked best and seeing a dozen in the application launcher and start searching for the right one

    don’t you just use the default one? maybe you like a specific text editor and then you’ll need to change your defaults, but you wouldn’t need to that for every single case

    • lattrommi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      That was me recalling a time when I was using MX Linux XFCE edition. i installed something that I didn’t realize was pulling most of KDE in. i was still very new to linux and still relied on a couple windows programs, so i was dual booting as well. i was using zim because it has windows support, so i could keep notes in zim in both windows and linux, sync it to my dropbox and not lose notes switching between them.

      I think my default text editor changed, either by me and forgotten or from something after KDE was pulled in. i think it went from mousepad to kwrite, and kwrite uses kate, which made zims behaviour change because it was using whatever was the default editor as its backend. i think. it’s still a bit beyond me honestly. one change had to do with how tabs are processed. some tabs were done as 4 spaces instead of a tab, which messed up some formatting i did in zim. so i thought i had to figure out which text editor to set zim to use to get my tab key to work like expected again.

      me saying “a dozen” is an extreme exaggeration. i do that sometimes, use hyperbole too much. the application launcher grouped libreoffice stuff with kwrite, mousepad and kate. i think it had emacs and vim in there too. i kept trying to figure out which one was was causing formatting errors. there were issues with newlines due to going from windows to linux as well i think.

      it led to me getting trapped in a recursion, doing test notes in linux with different editor backends set in zim, going to windows to see the effect, going back to linux and trying another editor, repeating this while sometimes forgetting to sync to dropbox, forgetting that kate and kwrite are connected, or forgetting what i was doing and just sort of going insane. i don’t have any friends that use linux. at the time, i had severely limited internet because of data caps with my isp. it was also the first year of the pandemic. so other factors were involved.

      i eventually tried uninstalling everything KDE but that did not go well and i ended up without a DE at all somehow, it just booted into busybox and i started over. i’m pretty good at making the wrong choices and reacting by making worse choices. creating my own hell. i feel like i’ve witnessed other new users doing similar things too, so that adds to my reluctance to encourage beginner users to try things that might be too much.