Besides the terrible envy I feel about people with enough disposable income to swap pc parts every few years, I'm also looking at switching to AMD for the sole reason of ditching win10/11 but I'm completely lost about which distro is the best for a non-eccentric linux user that wants to avoid fiddling with settings as much as possible. Any recommendation?
I was going to use Bazzite. But I have a HTPC, so my needs are a little unorthodox.
Bazzite is often mentioned as a good choice. I havent personally tried it, though. I've been using
Manjaro (which is
fairly simple to use) and Arch (on my laptop) for a long time now, both with occassional issues that might deter people. But I feel
Ubuntu or its derivative
Linux Mint might still be the easiest go-to for many people.
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If you feel lost in the long list of distros:
The
Linux world has so many distros but if you strip it down you realise most of them are based on a lot fewer distros, giving you a shorter list of distro
families, so to speak:
Arch Linux — has derivaties such a SteamOS, Manjaro, EndeavorOS
Arch itself is not beginner friendly, it is very much a tinker-yourself-kind of deal; but its derivaties can be fairly easy to handle.
You can even install SteamOS directly on a PC (given you have AMD hardware), as showcased by
LTT on Youtube but I wouldnt necessarily recommend that.
Debian GNU/Linux — has derivates such as
Ubuntu, which in turn has derivates such as Linux Mint, elementary, PopOS
Debian itself is fairly easy, I would say, but Ubuntu is still a very safe bet
Fedora — has derivaties such as Bazzite which is tailored to be gaming-focused and "like SteamOS but for generic PCs"
OpenSUSE — it exists and I tried it in the early 2000s but couldnt tell you much about it otherwise
Gentoo — Dont know much about this other than it requires a lot of work
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On top of these distro families, you have a choice of desktop environment, there are a few main ones:
KDE Plasma (which is used on the Steam Deck/desktop mode),
GNOME, Xfce, Budgie, Cinnamon, Cosmic, MATE and many others.
These really come down to personal preference. GNOME has a very simplistic design but you can tweak a lot with extensions. KDE Plasma is much more customizable out of the box, but the defaults should please most people. Cinnamon and MATE both have a more "classic" (90s/2000s) look. I myself use KDE Plasma.
Usually distros will let you choose which DE you use.
Also remember you can try out many distros with a live USB stick! And I recommend watching Youtube videos covering the distro you might be interested in (or, say, a video like "
5 best Linux distros in 2025")
I know getting into Linux can look daunting because there are
so many options. I myself like having options and customizing my OS, but I realise that default options that
just work are important, too.
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For more linuxy discussions, we also have a
Linux thread (and for good measure,
another one)
metacouncil.com
