If I had to choose, I’d go with openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a solid distro overall. Arch, Debian and Mint are close though! I’ve been thinking to check out NixOS and Garuda for a while, but I haven’t had the time for that yet.
Short answer: Canonical is strong arming Ubuntu flavors into removing support for alternatives to snap (that run better and do the same thing). These types of decisions are generally worse for the overall Linux community.
Right now, a part of the Linux and Open Source communities are distancing themselves from corporate-sponsored projects given issues we’ve recently seen with RedHat’s CentOS and Canonical’s decisions with Snap and LXD
I was happy to see it. I still had solus installed on my old laptop and the update fixed a lot of issues like my cursor turning invisible.
I’m going to wait to see what happens with the switch to a SerpentOS base with solus 5 or if they get Wayland support on 4.5 before considering it for my main laptop again.
I would say i never considered Debian seriously, but after learning a bit more about it the perspective of a highly stable / not buggy OS on which i can easily switch between DEs , and without snaps really tingles me.
IMHO, Debian is not the best choice for KDE, especially if you are on Wayland. KDE is a bit more buggy than GNOME, but bugs are fixed constantly at a fast pace, and Wayland support gets better. With Debian, you are stuck with the old version and have to wait 2 years for bugfixes. Kubuntu would be a better pick since it has interim releases with more recent KDE and also official backports with fresher KDE version.
Not generic as Docker containers, not native as package managers. If I’m trusting an app to install it, then I don’t want to care about security rules.
Snaps have centralized control. Canonical has to approve a snap package. Flatpak is like most of Linux. Anyone can make a Flatpak. Also, in my experience, Snaps had a lot of issues early on that were not present in Flatpaks. Now, Flatpak dominates and Snaps kinda feel like a irrelevant runner in a race long after the officials closed competition packed it up and went home.
Snap is not fully open source. It's slower than flatpak, it's centralized to Canonical's servers.Flatpaks so not update by default where snaps do, so if a feature breaking update is released and you haven't disabled automatic updates, you're screwed with snap. Flatpak does not need admin privileges where snaps do.
I don't see how it would improve privacy at all. WSL is just for running Linux shell on Windows right? Your entire OS stack is still Microsoft's proprietary software.
Most community distros are small and based on something else; and that’s kinda the point. They’re not trying to be next big thing, it’s just a bunch of people with a common vision that come together to achieve what they need.
Debian and Arch are the exception, and, other than them, the only community distro that isn’t based on anything else that I can think of is Mageia.
Edit: OK, I forgot about Solus and Gentoo, but Solus is a zombie at the moment, and op asked for something easy.
I don’t mind adding forks to the list, or distros based on other distros, as long as the distro they’re based on is a community distro and not a corporate distro. Like you point out though, there aren’t a lot of those.
I use them constantly on laptop with GNOME. It makes it easier to switch windows with touchpad. On desktop I don't use them so often, because I forget about them.
Arch and Debian. I have two home PCs with all my data on an smb share. One runs Debian 12, the other runs Arch. When I sit down I decide which I want to use and go. I couldn’t pick one I liked better so…I didn’t.
From what I remember, AOSC OS is fairly easy to install, though it’s more niche, so I don’t know if I’d recommend it to a new user. There’s also Solus, I suppose, but while there is a new release out, I wouldn’t count on it remaining actively supported, given its track record. OpenMandriva and Mageia are worth noting, too. Their parent distro was corporate, but it doesn’t matter since its dead now. Not a lot else I can think of.
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