Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls “the plateau of sustainability”
I did my first ever Linux install on a new build last year. I chose Mint, and the process was very smooth with only a few minor bumps getting up to date drivers for my newish AMD GPU. Since then I’ve grown increasingly annoyed by how limited GNOME applications are in general while also gaining increasing respect for the amount of functionality packed into KDE applications. So I’ve been shopping around for a KDE distribution. Fedora and openSUSE keep coming up, and I think I’ll be trying openSUSE soon. So I guess I’ll be skipping from the bottom left all the way to the top right.
Mint was my first serious move to Linux too! It’s so user friendly and clean.
I’ve been running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with an Nvidia GPU for quite a few years now on my gaming / 3D art rig though, and I’ve really enjoyed it. My Win10 partition has been dormant and shrunk for a very long time. :D
Just make sure you stick with the default of using BTRFS at least on root, to get that snapshot rollback support!
For being such an up to date distro, it’s ridiculously stable. Usually issues I’ve had have been Nvidia problems, but I’ve been able to roll back until they resolved. Things have definitely gotten much better over time.
Wayland has also matured wonderfully and things like multi monitor setups with different refresh rates work just fine these days.
Totally get what you mean about KDE too, I really enjoy how much easy customization it has!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I have!
Awesome, thanks for sharing your experiences!