What new Linux distribution should I try?

I prefer Fedora over Bazzite as it gives you more control, but this also means it's easier to break. Bazzite is an immutable distro, whereas Fedora uses the traditional mutable root filesystem. But despite the difference, Bazzite uses Fedora Atomic as it's base OS.

Just as a fun little factoid, Linus Torvalds runs Fedora and while he was using KDE for a while, he switched to GNOME as he felt it required much less fiddling around with than KDE.

It's the first distro I've tried where everything just works right out of the box and nothing is overly bloated. All of the software I use was available from the Bazzar and my printer even worked right away. No fiddling with CUPS or trying to install from binary/tar/appimg/etc.

me and my homies are using fedora KDE, which we can greatly recommend. we use it not just for personal gaming, creative tools, and software development but also (especially) on our work machines.

The big one is no Snaps. You can get them, but I prefer flatpaks which I use on LMDE.

Linux Mint uses the LTS version of Ubuntu so the "base" gets updates about every 2 years just like Debian. As such, both are going to be "about as new" as each other (emphasis on "about").

Ubuntu LTS pushed a bad kernel update where the headers were not available for a while. This meant that anyone using additional drivers (like I was for my networking) would have the kernel fail to install and then the operating system kernel panic when you boot up the next time. That is surprisingly "not stable"...

Debian, which will update about the same amount, has not pushed a bad update like that as far as I recall. That being said, I have had less experience with Debian.

The Linux Mint team seems to publish packages to LMDE so that it will have similar features to Ubuntu (like codec support) so you won't be missing that by using the Debian base. That being said, minor differences were present (such as guest mode missing compared with the Ubuntu base). Also, Ubuntu may have support for additional hardware in case you need that sort of stuff and will have HWE kernels that will support newer hardware than Debian.

Still, if LMDE works for you then it is more likely to keep working in a boring and predictable manner. If you are using the Ubuntu base, you may have a random update mess things up which will require you to do some troubleshooting. Ideally, you won't notice much of a difference between the two though.

Niri is a joy! Tried it once and never looked back.

Nix is a wide ecosystem and you have tons of tools to use for your config to your hearts content, so this is a bit tough. Id say: Make your config a flake (its an experimental feature, but it's a de-facto default), use home manager or GNU stow to organize your .config and home directory, and if you like Nix and plan to stay, look into the dendritic pattern for your config (not the best for someone just testing nix, but for long term it's a total life-saver)

Best of luck to you!

Yeah, "unfortunately" since Guix is a GNU project, they don't package the upstream Linux kernel, just linux-libre, which removes a lot of binary blobs. Great if you want a fully free OS, not so great if you need drivers only available in the mainline kernel.

The practical solution to this is to use the channel nonguix, which packages mainline Linux for Guix. You can follow the instructions for nonguix to create a guix ISO with the regular Linux kernel, then make sure your installed system uses that same kernel.

It's not hard to do, but if one doesn't have the inclination I'd just recommended using NixOS. :-)

Yeah, it's been an ongoing debate whether the old Nix style or the newer Flakes are a better approach. I don't really know that much about it, but thus far I definitely like using Flakes more

If you're new I suggest not using flakes. You can always switch to them when you learn how to maintain NixOS.

Just do it!

It got a whole new release within the last week. Only thing- it is a reskin of Kubuntu, which is exactly what I already use.

I want to set time aside to set it up but I'd rather go with a fresh drive

Yes, I've seen it recommended in the past, but just wanted to mention the caveats. Might as well go for Tumbleweed, which appears to be their main distro. In fact, if I recall correctly they had announced a couple of years ago that they were going to sunset Leap but then walked that back when the community protested.

there's a stable release 15.0 released in 2022 and -current rolling release that's up to date for everything. i recommend -current for desktop/laptops.

there's not much automated tools like other distros, but the system itself is extremely simple and well documented. many tools in the system (package manager, init, etc) are all simple shell scripts.

there's also distros that are based on slackware like salix, could be easier as it comes with apt-get afaik

I like the stable, but newer packages that Ubuntu offers, plus the first-party support you get from a lot of projects. I wish debian was the standard dpkg assumption for first-party support but it unfortunately is not. Ubuntu makes it pretty easy to build automation on top of that is good for 5+ years without touching.

Yes I have, admittedly it's been about a decade but at the time I switched because getting hardware acceleration in chrome and Firefox was difficult on debian, trivial on Ubuntu. I like the stable, but newer packages that Ubuntu offers, plus the first-party support you get from a lot of projects. I wish debian was the standard dpkg assumption for first-party support but it unfortunately is not.

on and off for a few years. It's decent as fuck. It's very windows like, more so than KDE or cinnamon imho.

theyve come a long way, i keep an eye on them all the time. i think its possible that one day they will eclipse kde in functionality but theyre still in the adding features stage. its getting close though, maybe another year baked and i'll swap entirely. its very snappy on cheap laptops, fully recommend it for that use case