My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We’re talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking “dissidents” so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.
I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been… entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn’t work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn’t make me happy, and it’s not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn’t reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.
What I primarily want is the sort of “mostly just works” like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?
Linux Mint, Debian and Fedora
Fedora is debatable but it solid if you use Silverblue
Sadly I can’t recommand pop-os. In 2 years, the updates broke twice on me.
The resolutions where simple enough if you can use the command line to run sudo apt update, sudo apt upgrade. But the GUI shop updater just crashed on me without the apt error message visible.
It is a nice distro overall with which you can even try tiled windows without commiting to it.
-> pop-os is nice but it may break from times to times. So if (like me or most dev) you are ok with the CLI and just a bit of fixes from times to times then go for it. But if you are affraid of the CLI or never want to fix anything, then some other distro may be a better choice.
The short rant:
- You don’t need to ask which distro, ask which mint version
- The answer to #1 is MATE or xfce.
The longer rant:
I’ve been using xubuntu a bit, for guest OS in desktop VM, but I don’t really know if I like it enough to recommend it. It’s less rough than Arch, but so is 24 grit sandpaper.
Like others have said, there are many contenders for your use case, but mint stands out. I’m probably gonna go with mint once windows 10 stops getting updates. Mint or parrot. But TBH I don’t want to daily drive parrot either.
Which version of mint then? That’s really the question to ask. And if you ask me then I don’t care for all the bells and whistles, I don’t need animations or semi transparent windows. And when Ubuntu went with unity back in the day I walked. So I guess I want my GUI to stay the same. So I’d go with MATE or xfce.
Bazzite is the new Ubuntu without snaps etc, give it a try
I’ve heard good things about Fedora. It seems to be mostly set-it-and-forget-it while still being flexible enough for power users.
