This may be true for you, but if it is it suggests you have very particular technical requirements. This is not likely to be true for someone looking to get started with Linux, who just needs something that is easy to install, has reasonable defaults and a conventional desktop, and good support available for questions that come up.
Further, while the diversity of distros available is ultimately a good thing, it does present a barrier to new users. Particularly when we tell them that you need to understand which of the many distros is going to be best for their particular use case. New users wonât have any idea how to evaluate this, and it gives them the impression that they need to do a lot of research before they know enough to take the first step. And in a lot of cases, this leads, naturally, to them deciding Linux isnât for them.
So sure, you may have a distro for your file server, and a distro for your blog, and a distro for photo editing or whatever. But a new user will be just fine with a desktop-oriented mainstream distro. Better to spend a weekend installing and playing around with Ubuntu (or similar) than spending a month trying to decipher the perfect distro for their specific needs.
I think there is no conflict between what you and Mart say: âfor someone looking to get started with Linux, who just needs something that is easy to install, has reasonable defaults and a conventional desktop, and good support available for questions that come upâ, a distro like Mint or Ubuntu is probably a good choice, while for a server farm one could choose something else, and for a low-latency special-purpose setup (whether itâs studio work or process control) a third option would be best.
Totally agree with everything you just said⌠but⌠to be fair⌠my very first word was âpersonallyâŚâ in response to the simple question of âWhat Linux distribution do you prefer and why?â SoâŚ? I was simply answering the question? iamconfused.com
Hey, donât apologise! Thatâs what weâre all here for: a good old-fashoned debate. And I didnât think you were testy at all â you made some fantastic points! And⌠besides⌠I was just having a bit of fun with my reply.
I use Fedora 40 right now and have used Ubuntu for couple of years in the past and havenât seen any concerning issues. I believe each Linux distro has its own purpose and its just what supports your workflow the best is a best for you.
However I have issues with Nvidia driver in my current fedora 40. Upon reboot it falls back to Nouveau and thatâs bothering me for past couple weeks. Havenât get past it yet. Its not a show stopper at this point for now though.
I have fedora 40 now. Also have GeForce GTX 1060 driver installed but it falls back to Nouveau somehow on boot up. I have secure boot disabled too so that is not the cause. This was not the case while I was on Ubuntu 22.04. I moved away from Ubuntu as it is now turning into Windows form proprietary perspective.
SOP with the Nouveau drivers is to blacklist them.
Yah, been around the block with the Linux from back in the day. Been using a small footprint WM all that time and Gentoo for maybe 7 years or longer, Arch for around the same again. The truth is I prefer a standardised release distro so thatâs what I use now. I donât want to sound like a knowitall but once youâve been doing this for awhile they are all the same. A distro is basically a package manager and whether or not they have the option to not use systemd. Learn bash or something and a text editor and have fun!
Yup! I am 27 years in software engineering by now and have tinkered around with kernels and drivers and all that stuff. So I do understand that the workhorse behind the scene remains same while much of the frontend come with different flavors! However I dont prefer to get too deep into the code anymore. I am looking for some solution if someone has already worked out for the same problem as I have or as a last resort I may turn to openSuSE Tumbleweed!
Sorry that comment was not directed at you. Iâve been looking at this thread and debating whether or not to join in or not. I was trying to point out the similarities of all the distros to each other. Not very successfully.
But yeah, blacklisting is the only way I know of getting rid of nouveau.
As the person who started this thread some weeks ago I feel I owe it to the group to report back where I am today. To review I was disappointed with the direction of the MS Magic Bus and, since most all of my software is open source and or cross platform my objective was to find a distribution that would be a great platform to replace Windows 11 to run mostly darktable with some light office software and, a few misc. items. To be fair, I was having no real issues with Windows but, I felt it was time to move on. As a retired IT infrastructure engineer and manager supporting literally thousands of linux machines I am no longer interested in tweaking and searching for the latest and greatest. I wanted something that I could install and get back to my hobby.
Using Virtual Box I installed just about every distro that was recommended in the thread. My system is a fairly standard desktop, 10th gen i7, 64GB, three SSDs (OS, data & onboard backup) and the video is a Nvidia 1660Ti graphics controller. There is also an onboard intel controller on the MB.
The first distro I tried was the standard Mint/Cinnamon setup, everything just worked, the system and all my apps, which isnât very many. I installed most every popular distro always keeping my fully configured mint install available for comparison purposes. No matter what I tried I always came back to the standard mint setup, I even tried LMDE but found no compelling reason to go with it. The only thing I wasnât able to test were the propriety Nvidia drivers because I was running VMs.
Fast forward to today I made the cut a couple/few weeks ago 100%, no dual boot, and havenât looked back. My apps are running better than before. The only thing I havenât YET changed are my data and backup drives. They are still NTFS because I didnât want to invest the time to convert to EXT4 in case I had to go back. For now my home directory has sym links to the respective directories on the data drive and I am having no issues with that either. For video I am using the proprietary Nvidia driver version 535.171.04 and both of my video controllerâs GPUs are being used by darktable.
I think I pretty much covered everything, if anyone wants more detail I am happy to respond. I also want to thank everyone that commented for their contributions, it was a great help to me.
First I downloaded from nvidia website, didnât go well so next I just dnf installed it which I believe fetches it from rpm fusion. Itâs installed but on boot up it shows the âNvidia kernel module is missing, falling back to nouveauâ. I made sure that the secure boot is disabled which may be causing the issues as fedora forum suggests.
I was simply answering the question? 
