Hi there. I m changing away from windows. I already tested some stuff. I started with fedora GNOME. But GNOME wasn’t for me I felt. So I did go with Linux mint cinnamon. That felt better but not as snappy and fast as fedora. Then I did go with fedora KDE plasma and man I like KDE plasma. That’s a thing for me. Then I tried because of recommendations popos with cosmic. I don’t know why but it didn’t felt right. So another recommendation later I tried cachy is with KDE. KDE was good but catchy gave me some erros and problems so back to fedora with KDE.
Now my real question.
- Manjaro Linux is a European distro? Only I often see it with popos and Linux mint and fedora that these are good beginner distros? Is it stable? Customisation in KDE is the same everywhere I guess? Does many people use it? Is it really beginner friendly and snappy? Is it stable?
- Opensuse also has KDE but it seems that its not a beginner distro. Also online its not often spoken about. Is it harder to use? Or is it beginner friendly? Customisation KDE again. Is it stable or does it break often? Does many people use it.
- Fedora, manjaro, opensuse? Which off these with KDE is most beginner friendly and stable. Is used much so I can find help when something is going on. Customisable. Stable?
Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.
Fedora KDE pretty much offers the best KDE Plasma experience, maybe right after OpenSuse.
If you are still using Fedora, I recommend sticking with it. It doesn’t get much better than that.
I wouldn’t use Fedora mainly because I object to how IBM/RedHat handled the removal of CentOS and how they hampered RockyLinux from keeping the original CentOS mission going
I would pick a leaf off the Debian tree
Which is why I moved to Debian/Ubuntu based and haven’t looked back. But functionally, nearly every distro has a different strength and purpose, so go with whatever piques your interest.
Fedora is not Red Hat. While they fund Fedora development, they don’t dictate how to it is ran.
Fedora is upstream CentOS Steam which is upstream RHEL. It’s part of RHEL cycle/stream
For those of us that despise Red Hat, sorry, but increasing the user base of Fedora, dramatically helps Red Hat’s marketability and profitability (and IBM’s). These companies not only make decisions bad for the FOSS community but way too happy to do business with a country massacring kids as we speak too. Now, I still recommend using Fedora since, as you say they are not straight IBM and they are at the vanguard, yet, for those with a conscience on these matters, there are as equally comparable offers out there.
there’s:
- KDE neon (sorta dodgy but always has the newest KDE release on top of ubuntu)
- Kubuntu (KDE on ubuntu but a bit old)
- Debian+KDE (KDE but a good few months old)
I wouldn’t recommend manjaro, they’re very dodgy
Opensuse is pretty good, iirc they have a GUI for most configuration items and you get the newest packages for everything. it’s like easier arch
What makes Manjaro dodgy?
The distro itself is OK, and it’s fine if you switch to their “unstable” repositories so it directly mirrors Arch. Where the problems lie is in the admin. In the past they have:
- Let their certificates expire and suggested that users put their clocks back to work around it, several times.
- DDOSed the AUR with coding mistakes in pamac, at least twice.
- Had controversy regarding their finances.
- Other things that I can’t remember right now.
They seem to have sorted themselves out as their have been no reports of mistakes recently. But trust once lost, is hard to regain.
Remember when they dropped hardware acceleration a few years ago? That was what got me to move off.
This was originally intended as a longer comment, but the previous draft unfortunately blinked out of existence… Though, I’m more than willing to shed some light on the distros discussed below if you’re interested.
Or any other Good KDE Distros out there.
I’m surprised that no one else has mentioned them yet. Thus, for the sake of completeness, consider Aurora and Bazzite. It’s what I would personally install/recommend for/to relatives/friends that would like to make the switch to Linux.
Aurora on their website looks really promising but I guess its a rather small distro that not many people know?
but I guess its a rather small distro that not many people know?
It’s true that it’s not as well-established as many of the other distros discussed here; it probably has like 1k users or so. Which is quite literally just a small fraction of Fedora KDE’s over a 120k user base. Granted, it’s a relatively new distro built on Fedora’s latest/‘future’ tech. Usage numbers should follow eventually[1].
Thankfully, that same tech enables Aurora (and other projects like it) to be very robust and reliable; tangibly more so than the more popular ‘traditional’ alternatives. I assume you’ll come to cherish and value this reliability, especially as stability seems to be a concern of yours.
I’m currently using bazzite, and I have had a couple of hiccups with it so far. One was it being immutable, meaning for any software that wasn’t in the flatpak store, I have to spin up a container running a mutable version and use that.
The second is a weird audio thing where on install, the volume knob on my headset changed the system volume like I expected. Now, it changes like, local volume and doesn’t show up as changing in the system volume.
Anyway, my only real point is that looking problems up on a small distro is harder, because it might be a bazzite problem, or a universal blue problem, or an atomic fedora problem, or a kde plasma problem, and it makes it difficult to search if you don’t know the specific piece that is broken.
One was it being immutable, meaning for any software that wasn’t in the flatpak store, I have to spin up a container running a mutable version and use that.
Sorry for being that guy, but please allow me to nitpick the above:
- Bazzite’s founder and lead maintainer doesn’t refer to Bazzite as immutable[1].
- Bazzite supports a lot more than just Flatpak and pet containers. And that list isn’t even complete.
my only real point is that looking problems up on a small distro is harder
While I agree that Aurora definitely is a small ‘distro’[2], I’m not comfortable to refer to Bazzite as a small project. Both Steam’s own metrics as well as ProtonDB’s suggest that it holds a moderate chunk. Sure, with just over 25k users it isn’t quite comparable to (say) Fedora’s 300k+ user base. But it definitely ain’t a slouch either.
As for the looking problems up part, honestly, if a quick search doesn’t help ya, you should just go over to their Discord or Discourse and ask the friendly maintainers and community for help/support.
Heck, even their subreddit seems to be doing a commendable job.
I’d argue it’s their legit resistance against the common notion/understanding of immutability that doesn’t apply to Bazzite. ↩︎
The uBlue team doesn’t refer to their images as such 😅. Frankly, I agree that the daily pipeline their images go through to deliver system updates screams everything but the traditional model. To be clear, in uBlue’s model, the daily-delivered base system is rebuilt from source every single time. So, my base system of Bazzite is identical to yours (unless either one of us created their own image). ↩︎
