My journey started in earnest with my first ever new PC purchase after a decade and a half as a Mac laptop user. I decided on a 2021 Razer Blade Advance laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super for a graphic card built in. It came with Windows 10 that I de-bloated and later when I upgraded to Windows 11. From the outset on Windows 10 and even more so on Windows 11 I did not like the state of relying on Microsoft cloud, their privacy data processing practices, always being upsold on their other products, and ads for third parties. So in 2022 I began to try out several distributions of Linux. These Linux distributions or “distros,” I think of them as a series of opinions either of style, ease of use, or target audience guiding the operating system’s design or decisions to include or not include software by default. MacOS and Windows are very opinionated and so is every GNU/Linux distribution.
Ubuntu
The desktop environment required a lot of tweaking for me to feel comfortable. I was not persuaded to wipe a PC for it.
Rank: B
Debian 11 and 12
I had a second hand 10 year old Mac mini and I wanted a home server and macOS was too vintage on the hardware to be relevant. I installed Debian 11 Bullseye with GNOME then uninstalled the DE since it’s headless and to save power. After nearly 1 year uptime I upgraded to Debian 12 Bookworm. This Mac mini ran Debian 11 until it died. I replaced it with an HP Z2 mini workstation and the same Debian 12 installation lives on.
Update: I still stand by Debian on my home server and lab server that run my Docker containers though now virtualized on Proxmox.
Rank: A
PopOS
I found PopOS to be unstable on the Mac mini, crashes and freezes. Possibly at the desktop environment level. Haven’t revisited for their homegrown Cosmic desktop environment.
Rank: B
Nobara 37
Was good enough for me to buy a 2TB SSD and load it into my Razer Blade Advanced to run as my daily driver for three months. I regularly had issues waking from sleep in the form of display artifacts or not waking from sleep. I ran Steam, Epic, and EA Origin AAA games like CyberPunk 2077, Hitman 3, Control, and my favorite Assassin’s Creed, Origins. It is a good mod (not spin) of Fedora until it broke while updating.
Rank: B
Endeavour OS
Heard a lot of buzz about Endeavour and how Steam Deck is on Arch Linux with KDE so I decided to run with the best gaming focused Arch with KDE. I hated it. I am not a KDE guy, maybe I love GNOME because I think in macOS. Also the Arch terminal syntax is plain goofy.
Rank: C
Fedora Workstation 39
Fedora is the GNOME distribution and I have not been disappointed. I applied some of the tweaks (not the dangerous hacks) from Nobara to Fedora 39 and it’s stable and it updates. If I cannot have a MacBook with a RTX 4070 for $2000 then this is my OS on a PC.
Rank: A
PikaOS
I heard about this one on YouTube, famous last words. This is a gaming distro based on Debian Cid. Crazy, right? I liked PikaOS for incorporating a tool to let you actively switch out your kernel and change the scheduler on the fly. This ultimately was too much control for me. My sleep/wake issues kept cropping up despite installing Open Razer. I really wanted this one to work.
Rank: B
Bazzite
Another buzzy distro name on the tongues of podcasts, subreddits, and bloggers. Not quite, this is the real deal best distro I have used so far. It’s immutable Fedora Silverblue (KDE default) with your modern graphics drivers baked in along with everything else. This is a distro I can recommend to a non-technical person to get up and going and trust that it not break, because its immutable! I compare Bazzite to macOS a lot in the most positive ways for being install and go, plug and play, it simplifies and makes Linux more approachable. I love that Bazzite updates in the background and on your next reboot everything is up to date so I don’t even have to think about it. Best of all, Bazzite is super stable and the Open Razer drivers are stable enough that I have never had sleep/wake issues like the other distros. I sometimes keep my Razer laptop on for weeks as a daily driver and I have not been disappointed. The non-gamer oriented build of Bazzite is called Aurora and I like it also.
Rank: S
I’m very glad to have had the opportunity and time to try out Linux distributions and sample their varying philosophies. I will remember to keep an open mind and keep trying new things. Wherever your journey takes you hope you do so too.
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