What Distro and DE are y'all using at the end of 2024? What would you recommend?

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Wrapping some backstory in a details tag here, but the TL;DR is I haven’t really used desktop Linux for nearly 7 years, but want to get back into it with a Latitude 5430. What distro and DE should I be using?

Click to read the long version

I’ve mostly been out of the Linux game for a while now. I got a job in a Microsoft environment in 2018 and haven’t had nearly as much time to just “play” with tech like I used to. I left that job in the middle of this year after spending ~6 months being the “Mac guy” because I was the only person in the IT department willing to touch them, but I spent the majority of my past 6 or 7 years primarily in PowerShell on Windows 7, 10, and 11.

One aspect of my new job involves writing a daily tech trivia question for a different techy community, so I’d like to get back to having some more relevant knowledge on everything I’ve not kept up with but open source OSs are something that used to be very important to me and haven’t been for a while.

I’d like to force myself to use Linux on a laptop, specifically a Latitude 5430 I have laying around with an i5 and 32GB of RAM, because I know I will not actually use a VM to do anything realistic. I’ve got 4 VM hosts in my basement that I could easily run stuff on, but ADHD will ADHD, and I’ll never use them if I don’t have to, unless they’re for a very specific purpose.

I’ve kept up enough that I migrated my lab VMs off of CentOS and over to Rocky (and then Alma more recently) when that plug was pulled, and I know enough to know that I despise Gnome 3 (but I loved Gnome 2 and Mate previously) and that I cannot stand Snap, so Ubuntu is off the table for me. I know Wayland is a hot topic, but haven’t really used a GUI on Linux enough to care why.

I’ve installed Arch in the past, and wouldn’t be opposed to doing so again if that’s my best option, but I don’t have unlimited time to tinker anymore, so I’d rather have something with at least slightly less notoriety for instability, or at least quicker to reinstall if/when things break.

Anyway, this is probably way too much rambling already, but I’d love to hear what y’all are using in 2024 and if you have any suggestions for a distro for me to jump into, I’d really appreciate it :slight_smile:

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Debian Stable + learn how to use backports

Desktop environment really comes down to personal preference. I like Cinnamon for a “traditional” workflow and would use Plasma if Cinnamon disappeared.

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I’ve moved to Debian as well since I’ve used it for server application quite a bit. Using desktop environment feels different than staring at the command line but aside from that it works really well in my opinion.

I’m using KDE Plasma but might switch up to something else soon enough.

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Devuan+Mate here. Devuan is Debian less the systemd crap.

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just don’t use Gnome
whoever saw the combine on taskbar on Windows and thought, “wow, wish my task switcher had that” makes very poor life choices.

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Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the choice of distro and DE is mostly a question of taste and personality. You’ll probably have to try to see what you like, and that involves spending time with it. Which is difficult when time is in short supply; I’m speaking from personal experience.

I have used a bunch of distros and DEs/WMs since I started using Linux full-time on a private laptop in around 2012 or so: Crunchbang (Openbox+tint2; based on Debian but now defunct), BunsenLabs (spiritual succesor to Crunchbang but it’s no longer lightweight), Mint (Cinnamon; based on Ubuntu), Solus (Budgie; its own thing but didn’t properly support btrfs), KDE Neon (Plasma; based on Ubuntu). Plus I played around with a lot more. While I like the idea of using something like Void Linux, without systemd, and tailored to my taste and needs, it involves a lot of tinkering, and after trying KDE Neon for a week or three I found that I don’t hate it, it is reasonably lightweight despite being a full DE, and so have stuck with it for the last 3+ years. While I use it with X11 due to familiarity, for a completely new install you might as well stay with the now default Wayland session, and will hardly notice the difference, and make use of seamless fractional scaling if desired.

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Alpine stable (as of now 3.20) with Openbox + tint2.
I despise roling releases and systemd.

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Mained Kubuntu for almost a decade and for the most part it went well. Used other distros too, mostly Debian based. Recently switched to Fedora and so far I’m liking it too. Main reason I jumped was snap and got tired of the odd Kubuntu specific KDE bug that always crept up with every release. Wayland has been great for me. I do have an AMD GPU however. Last time I tried Wayland on a nvidia card it was not pleasant.

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25+ years of daily driving.

Tumbleweed. SuSE/opensuse for the majority of all of it.

Mate. Gnome, when it was still version 1. 2 was good, 3? Not a chance. Before you ask … everything.

None. Because they either can’t use Linux or it just doesn’t do what they want it to do in the way that they want. And are unable to tell you why or what it is that they do want. So … ?

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My recommendation is you do the distro-hopping dance - shortlist a few choices after looking at their websites/FAQs/screenshots etc. then use the ventoy.net tool on a large USB pen drive to run the Live sessions or install them on to your computer. Use each one for a few days to get a feel for how much you like it, then make your own subjective, personal preference/choice and off you go!

In my case. after a lot of distro hopping, my top two choices are KDE neon (neon.kde.org) and elementary OS (elementary.io) with a special mention for openSUSE Tumbleweed (ISO) which is a “rolling release” distro (meaning it has mostly newest software releases and latest hardware support/bugfixes) has options for the popular KDE or GNOME desktop environments.

Enjoy!

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Thanks everyone! I’ll definitely take a look at the suggestions y’all had here :slight_smile:

Did Debian ever relent on including nonfree drivers on the install media? Tracking down drivers for my hardware was always the biggest problem I had with getting it up and running the last time I tried it. It’s a great sever OS, but that was the biggest issue I had using it for anything else :joy:

One thing I forgot to mention is that I have done some RHEL training for RHEL 8, so I’m not afraid to play around with systemd, but I’ll keep that on the shortlist.

My biggest thing is it seems to be touch-focused… I abhor touchscreens and the movement towards making everything touch friendly/focused. I’m probably one of the few people that argues for Apple to not support touch on MacOS :joy:

Yep! I’m sure I’ll fall back into Mate if I don’t find another DE that really tickles my fancy, but since one of my main goals of getting back into the Linux side of things is to have some more relevant knowledge, I’m interested to see what’s been more popular (outside of Gnome :joy:) in the community.

That’s probably one of the first things I’ll try. Since most of my (still useful) knowledge is in the RHEL-clone area, I expect that will be the easiest thing to get me back into it.

Thank you for the heads up! The machine I plan to use just has built-in Intel graphics, but I do have a 4080 Super in my gaming rig.

Yep! The shortlist is currently basically the ones called out in this thread :slight_smile: And yes, Ventoy is awesome! My biggest gripe with it so far is that they have seemingly no interest in making it work with Haiku :joy:

Definitely on my list!

Thanks again to everyone!

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I think it’s correct what is said above regarding personal preference, but I think this also applies to the distribution, not just the DE.

I’ll try to avoid interposing my own, but suggest that if you are more comfortable with rocky/centos now you might consider fedora (non-gnome spins) rather than another distro base. that’s about a 6 month release cycle. you could even maybe take a look at alma (it has a kde download) or (probably) rocky if you wanted a longer term release cycle, but they aren’t going to prioritise desktop the way fedora would either.

I’d extend the general idea that a more ‘leisurely’ distro, of debian + flatpak, rather than backports (maybe kernel) is quite reasonable. That wasn’t the case in 2018, but might also still not be what you want.

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I daily drive Manjaro. Its a very livable Arch derivative with a lot of polish.

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Linux mint and cinnamon de for me at the moment. I’m a fairly recent convert to linux and mint was one of the easier distros to get up and running on my hardware and couldn’t stand gnome after a week of using ubuntu!

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I loathe roling discharges and systemd.

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Yes.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/10/msg00001.html

Firmware files were moved to the non-free-firmware repository. Firmware from that repo is included on install media since the release of Debian 12 (Bookworm).

There is a warning header on the old “unofficial” images page indicating that images there are now obsolete.

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I never stopped distro-hopping, settled on slightly engaging with a different distro on every computer, like a sane, well-adjusted man.

Depending on your preferences, I recommend Slackware, Gentoo, and Mint. Mint for being stable, turnkey, and polished. Gentoo for having a cool approach to package configuration (global system configuration flags that all the package maintainers are aware of) + compile all your software, and Slackware because I like it.

Slackware doesn’t require you to learn distro-specific abstractions as much. It’s as close as you can get to a distribution being a pile of files on a disk, conceptually, while still having somebody else do the init scripts and software packaging and updates. For me, slightly more up-front learning as a tradeoff for less system-level complexity feels great. Pat Volkerding does tend to go a long time between major releases though, so if you want new stuff or your hardware’s new, you wind up running the dev branch (Slackware-current) and treating it like a rolling distro. And there can sometimes be some extra labor if you want to build a package that has a decent number of dependencies that aren’t included in the base distro. (There’s a bit of an include-lots-of-libraries sensibility to the stock installation because of this.) Wouldn’t be a good fit in a server farm, I wouldn’t think, but as a pet, it’s my favorite.

I know Nix has been very popular kind of recently, but there’s something about it that I dislike in the abstract. Can’t put my finger on it. But it’s been Big News in the past couple years or so, and everybody else seems to like it.

I recommend against Fedora. I use it, but it uh… smells corporate.
And I’ve had this really annoying issue with malformed permissions dialogs popping up that hasn’t been fixed for several months. Something to do with the Wayland / Flatpak / Portals pile of security abstractions not being fully realized yet. It might be a KDE thing (since I’m not running Wayland + KDE elsewhere right now).

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Yeah, that’s where I planned to start, but I ended up installing elementary and have enjoyed it so far… Will probably spend a few months hopping around before I settle, and Fedora will definitely be in that mix somewhere.

As for Alma, I moved all of my rocky VMs over to Alma when I upgraded from v8 to v9. I don’t really have a preference for either, but my VPS provider didn’t support Rocky but did support Alma… I have, however, just now realized that I don’t have even a single VPS with them anymore, though so that shouldn’t be a holdup for me anymore :joy:

Adding it to the list. The name sounds familiar, but I don’t think it’s one I’ve played with before. Antergos is one I know I did use for a while, but it looks like it was discontinued in 2019.

Awesome! I’ll have to give strait Debian another shot then as well.

I did use Mint a lot back in the day… Looks like it’s based on Debian instead of Ubuntu now? I might give it a shot too… Probably either the Xfce or MATE editions, though… I remember not liking Cinnamon when I tried it, though it’s been quite a while.

Gentoo seems interesting. Looking at their “Philosophy” page, it seems like something I would have been really into when I was in school, had I known about it. Building the perfectly efficient tool for all of the work I wasn’t doing :joy:

I may be conflating it with something else, but in my head I remember slackware literally being a bunch of binaries on a CD that you had to copy to a hard drive yourself to “install” it. I’ll have to take a deeper dive into it when I’ve got some more time, though!

I’m not completely opposed to corporate. I still run Active Directory in my basement, after all, but I would generally prefer to have something a bit more “out there” than Fedora by the end of my experimenting :slight_smile:

Thanks again everyone!

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Gentoo is a bit older, I’d suggest Funtoo instead. The main dev of Funtoo is actually the same guy that made Gentoo, but Funtoo is more current in s/w packages. Still building from source though, so a decently quick CPU is recommended :wink: Ran it for a while before finding Devuan, but unless you update it e-v-e-r-y effin’ second, emerge concocts a dependency-hell for you, and in contrast to apt, it can’t solve these on its own :rage: Hence I stopped using it, although I do like the ideas behind it. (and it’s systemd-less :+1: )

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Rocking Arch with KDE Plasma on my i7-2600K machine which is set to become my music room recording station.

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