Hello! Long story short I have decided to start moving away from Manjaro Linux. I have also decided that while my computer will most likely move to EOS, I have a few other computers that are mostly used by people familiar with the commandline, but want something more stable. I was wondering if there is a distro out there that has a strong community and is
More fixed release
Uses a common package manager (apt, dnf, pacman)
Has a newer version of KDE (5.18 maybe)
Is beginner friendly
Supports multiple DEs
If you could recommend me a good distro to install on the other computers, thatâd be great! Thanks
I was in much the same situation as you, and ended up with Debian.
With the Debian net install iso, you can do a base install rather easy, and then shape it to whatever you want, kinda like an Arch install.
You canât do that with Mint, or many other Debian based distros. It used to be easy with the server Ubuntu install, but with the new 20 version, it is a dependency mess. Debian is so much easier to set up to your specifications, from ground up like Arch.
It is not as beginner friendly as Mint and Ubuntu, but if the person setting it up has some experience, it is rather easy to set it up to be user-friendly for less experienced other users.
I wouldnât recommend anything Ubuntu based (apart from Mint, but if you can, choose Debian Edition of Mint) to anyone who is used to Arch. The shock of having so much bloat on our system might be too much for our fragile hearts.
Vanilla Debian is, obviously, better than any other Debian or 'Buntu-based distro. But itâs not the friendliest distro for newbies. Also, Sid is the only Debian worth using on a desktop or laptop pc, if you want fairly fresh software, and then you end up with a rolling distro (though it does not roll as fast as Arch).
The thing I like about pure Debian, is that you can basically do it Arch-style, from the base install. Thereâs basically no need for derivatives then, you can shape Debian to be anything you like, from the ground up.
As long as you can live with some software being one version behind. Thereâs also always Flatpaks.
Since they track Debian Stable, and Stable will be staying at 5.14, I doubt MX will upgrade their Plasma package on their own.
Debian Testing (and SID) are at Plasma 5.17; Sparky Linux is a nice little distro that tracks Debian Testing.
EDIT - well, it looks like Sparky doesnât ship an ISO with KDE anymore; youâd have to do a minimal installation and then add Plasma yourself, which is probably not what youâre looking for - sorry.
Any âstableâ distro is going to inevitably have an old version of whatever software youâre using; in particular the desktop. Canât really have both. So, that in mind thereâs plenty of distros out there that are beginner friendly and support multiple desktops. Go for ubuntu mainly because of the ease of finding support online, but others include debian, suse and mint to name a few. Go to distrowatch and look at the top distros to get a feel for whatâs out there.
KDE Neon is pretty bad, in my opinion. Very bloated and itâs all Cannonical âwe take your privacy very seriously, now give us all your dataâ McSnapTM⌠You may as well just use Kubuntu in that case.
But try it in a VM and make your own judgement. Donât take my opinion too seriously.
Since you are asking on behalf of others. The question is what are you comfortable with supporting?
That being said⌠what ever you can run stably will probably work.
Itâs based on ubuntu so canât go too wrong really. I canât say itâs got much of a community compared to other distros though so if thatâs important to you Iâd look elsewhere.
Specifically one of the computers had wifi issues which annoyed the heck out of me. Unfortunately it was a dual booting Mac so I couldnât exactly just get a nice intel WiFi replacementâŚ
Also considering that the driver we need for the card is WL, fedora might not be the best idea since I think fedora is strictly open source and getting any proprietary software requires extra repos to be manually added.
When I decided to drop my Mint Cinnamon desktop, I was toying with the idea of their Debian Edition - it seems theyâre preparing for the time that Ubuntuâs base goes too far off the rails.
I think I used Mint for about 6 years - pretty good experience apart from the ppa issues. Moving to pacman and AUR impressed me, though, especially as something Iâd expect many people to use - Plex Media Player - is so simple to install (with Mint I used a crippled appimage). In that respect, if youâre not an expert, then AUR is more noob friendly to install things not in official repos.
Alternatively to the âtop dogsâ you may give PCLinuxOS a try, It is semi-rolling, therefore quite stable, has a good configuration panel (drak-tools) for convenience and uses apt for rpm as package manager with synaptic as backend. And since youâre living in the USA you wonât have issues with the localization.
