Choosing a Linux Distro

Choosing a Linux Distro

I am familiar with many Linux dirtibutions. I was using Linux as my workstation for a long time. These days I would like to revisit my Linux desktop experience.

At work I use Mac. It was Ubuntu before I convince them to give me an used MacBook Pro. But I felt like I need a secondary system at home.

I have an old MSI Nightblade X2 Desktop system which has NVIDIA 980TI and I rarely use it when I convince myself to play some ancient games. I wanted to try some known distros. The first one was Fedora 35. I worked with an exception. It was unable to support proritary NVIDIA drivers. If It would work I would probobly does not even try other options.

openSUSE

SuSE is one of my initial Linux setup about 15 years ago. I used it for about a year on my oldest PC. It was the KDE version I used. This time again I prefered the default KDE Plasma setup. It felt like I have a system which is full of bloatware. KDE made me feel like computer novice.

I tried to install openSUSE with Gnome Desktop but the installation medium somehow did not let me to finalize setup. I gave up.

Garuda Linux

I have never used Arch Linux. I am not even familiar. But Garuda looks like a very popular one and that may have a reason. This time I prefered the default option again. It comes with KDE Plasma which is highly modified. I even noticed a disk partition manager on the main dock after unmodified setup. It was not a live CD edition. It was full setup on my hard drive.

Also It was an awful experience that I had to turn off the secure boot. I do not know why I even give a chance when I see the unsigned disk image but that decision cost me about three hours.

Ubuntu Linux

I am long time Ubuntu user so I was expected to feel at home. But by SSD had a particular RAID system which did not let the operating system to run. I did not want to turn it of because that SSD disk was hosting my Windows OS and Ubuntu was supposed to be installed on the second HDD which does not have any RAID configuration. Ubuntu lost its chance to be on my desktop.

Finally, Fedora

I knew that Fedora was available for me. I use the standart Gnome Desktop. I am very happy with it. I will tweak it a little bit but having a very simple system to run on feels very good.

On my initial setup I was unable to setup Jetbrains software for some reason. This time it worked. I did not like Flastpack that much but it looks like working for most of the software. There are some wierd problems like installing Emacs from Flatpack does not work the way I setup from the traditional rpm repositories but I will get used to it.

I will not be able to spend much time with this new Linux setup but I will keep it around.