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Cake day: July 7th, 2025

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  • Fundamentally, they’re all the same and they all are Linux. As long as you use the same desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, you name it) across different distros, you may not notice a single difference in your experience.

    That’s not to say there are no differences, but for someone just dipping their toes into the Linux world, the main piece of advice is not to stress that too much.

    Ubuntu is a fine distro choice - there are controversies, and it is arguably not the best at X, Y or Z, but it’s well-rounded, stable, and user-friendly, which is all that novice user needs.

    Of course, if you want, you can always explore other options and see what’s absolute best for you - this kind of thing is called distro-hopping. Start with something Ubuntu-based for familiar experience (Linux Mint is a common recommendation, if you don’t mind Cinnamon desktop), check out Debian as this is what Ubuntu is based on, and then try Fedora, OpenSUSE and stuff. After gaining experience with these, you can explore Arch and derivatives, such as CachyOS, EndeavourOS etc.

    But again, if what you have works for you - you’re not missing out on anything special. What you have is true, real, actual Linux experience, and there’s no best way to approach it.


  • I’d say go KDE.

    GNOME looks like it will be good for portable devices, but it’s kinda not.

    First, in my experience, Fedora on GNOME completely ignores battery limits (which are also set by jumping through so many hoops you can’t even imagine). It just drains this thing to 0, which is not great for longevity. KDE, on its end, has it all in the GUI and it works flawlessly on all distros I tested.

    Second, KDE has made plenty of great optimizations for touchscreens. A while ago, it was not great, but now it’s just the best at handling them, especially if you theme it respectively and do not rely on defaults.

    Third, customizations are so much better in KDE. You can make her laptop look and feel like a MacBook in no time, and edit everything to be touch-friendly.

    One thing GNOME does well though for the use case you describe, though, is app theming, namely Adwaita. Luckily, Adwaita-themed apps and style editors for the rest are freely available on KDE, and you can even change their look as you like.

    So, yeah, go KDE.






  • While I still care somewhat of distro differences for functional reasons, I completely agree that DE’s are the most important part in terms of user experience.

    Both my machines use KDE, and while they run two different distros, they look and feel pretty much the same since I use a very similar layout on both of them. This, along with file sync through my NAS and similar apps, makes switching from one computer to the other a breeze (pun not intended), despite some differences under the hood.