Linux

Fedora is wonderful. I would not recommend Ubuntu to anyone. Fuck Canonical, who fancy themselves the next Microsoft.

For an easy version of Arch, try Cachy.

Thank you all for the many replies!

I'll summarize it as followed:

• Ubumtu: one does not use Ubuntu any more
• Linux Mint: always a good start
• Fedora: also always good and would be good for a Thinkpad
• Bazzite for gaming
• Gnome really is not for everyone

Since I already tried Fedora, I'm going with Linux Mint for the moment.

(In fact, the installation of Mint is running right now and I'm using the whole SSD, no windows boot manager partition will survive!!!)

Ubuntu? What is this, 2008?

Fedora

Im using linux Mint. no issues so far, except maybe dropbox integration. never going back to microslop

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.

I think the standard recommendation for people coming from windows is to try Linux Mint. It's Ubuntu based, but the interface is more windows like, which helps easy the transition. The transition is also easied if you've been using open source alternatives on windows or the linux for windows subsystem. Anything to keep the amount you have to learn at once relatively low.

I wish you the best on linux, but if you find the interface differences are too much for you and decide to go back to windows, try these other things to make switching to linux later easier. As fanatical as the linux community is, there's no shame in needing a longer more gradual transition.

Highly recommend Fedora over Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Server and Desktop has some dumb defaults that look measly next to Windows, but still annoying next to Fedora.

Fedora also generally has more solid documentation without a bunch of LTS slag threads with outdated answers.

fedora > ubuntu

personally, i like the ublue images, at least for general desktop and gaming - bluefin and bazzite.

Echoing everyone else, Mint. Bazzite (which is Fedora based) if you're planning to run more recent games on it. Mint isn't bad at running games by any means, Bazzite is just more fine tuned towards it. With Cinnamon/KDE they basically feel like Windows minus the bloat.

I am a Debian man myself for servers. I don't want any Canonical bullshit to break mid LTS.

While I am still running win 10 I am undecided which desktop to switch to. CachyOS and Fedora are the front runners but man do I hate Gnome.

Not Ubuntu. Mint or Fedora.

You like Gnome (how everything looks in Ubuntu)? Use Fedroa Workstation, or use Mint and install Gnome yourself.

This is only my opinion. After all, this is your computer; do what you want.

Kubuntu has been pretty nice to me. It has the beginner friendliness of Ubuntu and the modern desktop of KDE

Bazzite on my gaming machine, Bluefin on my other machines. Both are Fedora Atomic based (meaning read-only kernel). Secure, stable, amazing. Apps are installed via Flatpak, and cli tools using Homebrew.

I've been a full time Linux user for 25ish years now. I'm currently happy here, but have tried most of them

Any distro > Ubuntu > Qubes (not for beginners haha)

and sorry for the ragebait. I'm just a little bit frustrated and had to write it down

I had a great experience with Fedora on my thinkpad, it's almost as if they're made for each other. It's basically the testing version for Redhat. If you want something more stable and still enterprisey, Rocky Linux or Almalinux are both basically RHEL rebranded.

I've abandoned Ubuntu, even though it was what I started on and used for over a decade. Canonical is kind of like the Microsoft of linux right now, a bit hostile toward the rest of the community, but still an acceptable choice. I would recommend Linux Mint instead, though.

Keep in mind that the look and feel you'll experience is all the desktop environment, so if you don't like it, trying using a different one instead of looking at a new distro. I highly recommend using a few live USBs of what you want you try before installing to get a feel for what you like.

Fedora. Better than Ubuntu in pretty much every regard.

I didn’t want to program shit; I don’t care about command line; I love a good gui and didn’t want to fuck with finicky drivers. Moving to Ubuntu from Windows allowed me to continue to use my mostly browser-based computing existence without having to learn to use a new tool. I may not use Arch but one less Windows victim must be a step in a better direction.

Debian for the overwhelming majority of everything. With KDE, I don't do gnome.

My thinkpads both run arch, you may want to look at endeavouros for a simple approach to arch.