I’ve tried a few distros recently in my efforts to migrate away from Windows. I landed on Solus https://getso.us/ for my own personal use and I’ve been very happy with it. I’m a power user of course, but Solus just feels solid to me. No stability issues, no significant driver issues (details below), very easy to work with / low learning curve, no real need for terminal commands or tinkering, and all of the apps that I use on a regular basis are available and easy to install.
They’ve implemented the KDE Discover app in a recent release to manage packages (they used to only have their own package manager by default). Discover combines their own curated repository of apps that are known/designed to work well with Solus along with Flathub so users have options to install other apps, all from one place. I like the approach since it seems to offer increased stability.
The default Budgie DE is just okay. It’s fine, functional, and easy to use, but there are some quirks that I don’t love that make it feel a little incomplete in some small ways (i.e. you can’t really customize the start menu). I’m personally willing to make the tradeoff for the simplicity that it offers overall. That said, they do offer Plasma, Gnome, and Xfce builds. Plasma was my second favorite and I think it might be a better choice for a newbie.
The only problem I’ve had with drivers/compatibility on my modern Dell laptop is jumping through some hoops to get the fingerprint reader working and enabling hibernation which really wasn’t necessary, just a personal preference.
Another distro that caught my eye that I haven’t tested personally yet is ArduinOS https://www.anduinos.com/ . It’s another distro that touts a default DE layout reminiscent of Windows to make it easy to switch. However, it is Ubuntu + Gnome based, so take that as you will.
I’ve tried a few distros recently in my efforts to migrate away from Windows. I landed on Solus https://getso.us/ for my own personal use and I’ve been very happy with it. I’m a power user of course, but Solus just feels solid to me. No stability issues, no significant driver issues (details below), very easy to work with / low learning curve, no real need for terminal commands or tinkering, and all of the apps that I use on a regular basis are available and easy to install.
They’ve implemented the KDE Discover app in a recent release to manage packages (they used to only have their own package manager by default). Discover combines their own curated repository of apps that are known/designed to work well with Solus along with Flathub so users have options to install other apps, all from one place. I like the approach since it seems to offer increased stability.
The default Budgie DE is just okay. It’s fine, functional, and easy to use, but there are some quirks that I don’t love that make it feel a little incomplete in some small ways (i.e. you can’t really customize the start menu). I’m personally willing to make the tradeoff for the simplicity that it offers overall. That said, they do offer Plasma, Gnome, and Xfce builds. Plasma was my second favorite and I think it might be a better choice for a newbie.
The only problem I’ve had with drivers/compatibility on my modern Dell laptop is jumping through some hoops to get the fingerprint reader working and enabling hibernation which really wasn’t necessary, just a personal preference.
Another distro that caught my eye that I haven’t tested personally yet is ArduinOS https://www.anduinos.com/ . It’s another distro that touts a default DE layout reminiscent of Windows to make it easy to switch. However, it is Ubuntu + Gnome based, so take that as you will.