[SmellTheGlove]

I’ll bite. What Linux distro currently has the nicest desktop experience? I work on a MacBook but my desktop is a windows PC that I use for gaming and personal projects. I hear Proton has made the former pretty good now, and the latter is mostly in WSL for me anyway. Maybe a good time to try.

What do you suggest? I’ll try it in a VM or live usb.

[jbstack]

There are so many distros that it really depends on your use-case and it's hard to make a generic suggestion. Ubuntu is a common recommendation for first timers, mainly because as the most popular distro you'll easily be able to Google when you need help with something, and it also uses the most popular package format (.deb). There's also Linux Mint which is basically Ubuntu but with some of the latter's more questionable choices removed (e.g. snaps) and minus the big corp owner. By using one of these you'll also be learning skills relevant to Debian (which Ubuntu is derived from) which is a solid choice for servers.

Regardless of which distro you choose, your "desktop experience" will be mostly based on what desktop environment you pick, and you are free to switch between them regardless of distro. Ubuntu for example provides various installers that come with different DEs installed by default (they call them "flavours": https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors), but you can also just switch them after installation. I say "mostly" because some distros will also customise the DE a bit, so you might find some differences.

"Nicest desktop experience" is also too generic to really give a proper suggestion. There are DEs which aim to be modern and slick (e.g. GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon), lightweight (LXQt), or somewhere in between (Xfce). For power users there's a multitude of tiling window managers (where you control windows with a keyboard). Popular choices there are i3/sway or, lately, Niri. All of these are just examples, there are plenty more DEs / WMs to pick from.

Overall my suggestion would be to start with something straightforward (Mint would probably be my first choice here), try all the most popular DEs and pick the one you like, then eventually (months or years later) switch to a more advanced distro once you know more what your goals are and how you want to use the system. For example I'm in the middle of migrating to NixOS because I want a fully declarative system which gives the freedom to experiment without breaking your system because you can switch between different temporary environments or just rollback to previous generations. But I definitely wouldn't have been ready for that at the outset as it's way more complex than a more traditional distro.

[SmellTheGlove]

This was a helpful answer. It really is hard to make a choice if you've left the ecosystem for a while. My mac as well as windows+WSL have been good enough for a while, but this post got me curious. And mind you, I'm not completely out of touch with _linux_ - its running two servers in my basement. I've installed slackware from floppies and compiled gentoo. But it's never been the year of the linux desktop for me.

I ended up booting Mint with Cinnamon. I like it. It's pretty intuitive coming from macos/windows, and I'm in the terminal half the time anyway. Installing the nvidia driver was easy, then steam does a good job installing whatever compatibility layers it needs. I'll do CUDA next and try it for a month or so.

[MiddleEndian]

Bazzite. It's KDE, it's easy, it's immutable so you can update and it's unlikely to break shit. It comes with Steam already. Keyboard shortcuts very similar to Windows. Dolphin (File Explorer equivalent) responds as quickly as one would expect File Explorer to respond if it were developed by sane people. You also get an Android-style permission system with Flatseal, so you can disable permissions for various applications.

One warning: keep in mind that if your desktop PC motherboard has a mediatek wifi+bluetooth chip, that chip will probably not work on any version Linux (AFAIK). I don't use wifi on my desktop but I do use bluetooth game controllers. You can replace the chip (which is what I did, with https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MJLPZPL), get a bluetooth dongle (my friend recommends https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Wireless-External-Receiver-...), or get a PCIe one.

[amitav1]

Something with KDE. Never used KDE extensively because I hate non-tiling WMs, but something like Kubuntu would give you a more windows-esque experience by default. Here's the download link:

https://kubuntu.org/download/

Bon appetit!

[andai]

I don't use KDE either, but it does seem to be the most Windows adjacent choice. Unless you like very old versions of Windows in which case you may prefer XFCE like me (Xubuntu or the xfce variant of Linux mint).

I heard Kubuntu is not a great distro for KDE, but I can't comment on that personally.

[amlib]

If you want maximum commodity and as many things to "just work" as possible out of the box, go for good old plain Ubuntu.

If you care a little more about your privacy and is willing to sacrifice some commodity, go for Fedora. It's community run and fairly robust. You may have issues with media codecs, nvidia drivers and few other wrinkles though. The "workstation" flavor is the most mature, but you may want to give the KDE version a try.

If you want an adventure, try everything else people are recommending here :)

[mmh0000]

That's literally like asking "What car has the best driving experience?". There is no one answer.

If you want something that "just works," Linux Mint[1] is a great starting point. That gets you into Linux without any headache. Then, later when bored, you can branch out into the thousands[2] of Linux distributions that fill every possible niche

[1] https://linuxmint.com/

[2] https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

[PlatoIsADisease]

I would never, recommend anything from Debian-family for consumer use. Its literally outdated linux, under the marketing 'stable'.

Fedora is so significantly better.

I wouldn't confuse popularity for good. Ubuntu gave away free CDs in the 2000s and are living off old marketing.

Debian family is so bad. You will be in the terminal constantly just trying to get stuff to work. Stick to a well maintained, up to date, consumer distro, Fedora.

(reminder that Fedora is Not Arch)

[taberiand]

If you're a developer, try NixOS. The code based configuration can be daunting but LLMs are very good at writing it.

[jbstack]

Not sure it's good as a starter distro, but other than that I agree. I was put off NixOS for a long time despite loving the principles behind it. Then a few weeks ago I had ChatGPT give me a short course on it, including flakes and the basics of the Nix language. I completed that in a few hours and achieved more than I ever had reading the Nix docs and blogs etc. Now I'm able to use an LLM to help me write flakes while also understanding what it is doing (I'm not a fan of blindly using AI generated code).

[taberiand]

That's what I'm getting at - the nixos learning curve is flattened out completely with LLMs to the point that I do recommend it as a starter distro for anyone technically competent (as it's still crucial to actually read and understand what the LLM produces)

[matheusmoreira]

For gaming I suggest a Steam Deck. I love mine, it's an awesome Linux device. Not locked down either.