I mean…

My old intel MacBook has 3 flavors of Linux, macOS and windows. Because why not go through the order of operations guess and check hellscape.

You’re not wrong.

The lemon ones are great

It’s also developed by glorious egg roll, the GE in GE-proton. I wanted to love it but Wayland + multi monitor + KDE + Nividia = pain

Mainline mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. Lmde is largely the same OS with a pure Debian heart without Ubuntu clogging the arteries

LMDE 7 and send it. Regular mint has Ubuntu nonsense baked in, lmde is basically the same end user experience and smooth Debian jazz underneath.

Like someone else said, steam, heroic.

I’d avoid any of the gamer distros.

Both are meh. I wanted to love KDE but it always lets me down. Cinnamon has been great, running a fedora spin with it now. Sway has been calling my name tho.

Gnome apps are better than KDE apps. GParted vs partition manager, for example. Dolphin sucks eggs next to Nemo too.

Just my incorrect opinions obviously. Use the stuff ya like.

EDIT: I’d avoid bazzite in general. They have great marketing and it works. But as an Immutable distro, aka read-only, it can give inexperienced users unique challenges to learning Linux. Caveats apply obviously and if you like it and it’s working for you that’s rad too. I’m a cranky bitch but I’m all about people enjoying their stuff to the max in their own way. And the more nerds using Linux the merrier.

I stick with X over Wayland but I’m an nvidia loser. I’m on fedora but would not recommend it to someone just starting out. Same with straight up Debian or arch. They’re all great if you know what you’re doing. But distros exist for a reason.

CachyOS/EndeavorOs. Rock on. I loved these and they’re my fallback if fedora or lmde makes me mad or I want need arch for some homelab thing. I’m weary of the AUR though, making arch kinda pointless for me.

But I stg if you complain about your second monitor again I'm taking your thunderbolt dock away.

Thanks to both of you. And thanks for cat tax.

Got slammed for asking why for context. Ended up in the O room for “being too smart”

This is about my distro hopping journey. (kinda freaky honestly) Skipping the Red Hat CD's from compusa and some other fun times over the past 20 years ago or so. -LMDE is my keep going back to distro if I need it to just get out of the way, but have more creature comforts than vanilla debian. Cinnamon is great, it's kde without the issues for me. The driver manager is excellent and just everything from the mint utilities, themes, and polish are lovely. -MX/void/antix...I've never had the patience to learn not systemd. These are rad, I love the older school window managers and the light weight indie vibe. Maybe I'll stop being lazy and keep screwing with them in vm's and actually learn other init's.
-Manjaro, I wanted to love you so fucking bad, I tried to more than twice and you were a massive disappointment each time. (if it's working for you, cool. But you should really just look at EndeavourOS/Cachy OS, you'll have a way better time)
-Did the Arch from scratch thing. Just to do it. btw, I ran Arch.
-Endeavour/CachyOS are amazing and you'll have a good time for the most part. More complete experience than doing it yourself with much less effort.
-Fedora, ohh fedora. We've wanted to love you forever and ever. Going back to running linux as a Daily driver a few years ago, when I re-visited fedora it was exactly as this picture describes. Ironically, I just installed fedora, replacing cachyos last night. I spent the time to research and translate my arch notes into fedora and so far I'm pretty happy. Bit more fiddling out of the box than the derivative distros obviously. Gaming performance is what I expected once we got settled in and I haven't run into any show stoppers yet.

It really doesn't matter what distro you run. As long as you can install and run the software you need, and interact with it in a way that makes since to you, then have fun. It's your computer.