Don’t settle immediately. If you can spare the time, distro hop for a few weeks / months. On the shorter run of things, give each OS you try a good week before moving on to the next. All distros do essentially the same thing, they just flavor it diffetently. Do you like typing apt, or dnf, pacman or yum? Do you prefer being deep in CLI or prefer using an application store? How do you like your userspace to look? Shiny? Bubbly? Classic? Retro? GNOME, Plasma, Xfce, Mate, Cosmic?
There’s enough options out there to make your head spin. Without touching arch, you should at least visit the following -
Little Champs
- Mint
- Zorin
- Endeavour
- Pop OS
Big Champs
- Fedora KDE (or any of its “spins” https://fedoraproject.org/spins/)
- Ubuntu (and its corresponding “flavors” https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors)
- Debian
- Arch (just one of the four main pillars)
Gaming focus
- Bazzite (fedora)
- Nobara (fedora)
- Cachy (arch)
Give each or those that pique your interest a fair shake. A week at the minimum. Some you may not need a week, some you’ll find yourself in a natural swing of things. You’ll know when you know.
Holy shit me three. Although I am currently running an experiment where my partner, who is less technically inclined, is using zorin instead of mint. Been about 2 weeks since I refreshed their laptop. They still haven’t turned it on. Will report back.
Insert spongebob time meme.