Currently running Kali on my laptop as that’s all it was used for. Looking for something more general purpose. Mainly steam for light gaming and being able to install the tools from Kali for stuff like tryhackme. Mostly familiar with Debian, as that’s what Kali is based on, but willing to try something else. Laptop is this Acer.
Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.
Fedora 38 is awesome. Yeah, Red Hat drama I know, but I think Fedora will be fine.
Fedora is a fine distro. Red Hat is still a huge contributor to the open source community, despite the decisions made by IBM managers to restrict RHEL source code. It just means that it’ll be a little more difficult to make RHEL clones going forward, but I doubt it’ll have any lasting impact. Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and other RHEL based distros have all announced that they intend to continue their operations, with little to no change in how they do things. Really, the controversy is overblown.
Kinda yes, overblown. Will see where it goes.
Debian just released version 12 and it regularly gets high marks for being a good, solid distro – if you want a little more edge, you can switch over to Debian Sid …
Linux Mint is nice, it even has a Debian edition that runs on top of vanilla Debian, should be updated to a Debian 12 base within a month or so. Normal one runs on Ubuntu but gets rid of the “Ubuntu” stuff.
Pop OS is pretty popular now. They use a modified GNOME but are working on their own DE to replace that. One of their big claims to fame is the ability to make it do window tiling.
Mint is my recommendation too for general purpose desktop PC. Debian also works, but I found that Mint has most of the stuff already working out of the box, so I’ve stuck to that on my laptops since 2014 or thereabouts. On servers I prefer Debian.
Honorable mention: Zorin OS
Mint Cinnamon
Personally love PopOS! It’s super easy and convient, has a super smart window tiling manager worth trying out!
Debian.
Hear me out, grab ventoy, a decent USB drive (32-64 gb), download debian, kubuntu (maybe), fedora/mojara, any live arch derivative (endeavour, arco, artix. Stay away of Manjaro) and anything else you found appealing. Put all of them there and go nuts. At the end of the day, it’s always night.
Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.
your computer can pretty much run every single distribution in any desktop environment without a problem so go wild and try lots of them, pick anything a let yourself have a good week with it and it’s online documentation to do your thing every of them have good and bad parts. when asked the filesystem pick btrfs and set-up snapshots, that will save your ass when needed and it’s so quick you could break your system every week without being bothered
Fedora 38 is great. Debian 12 is also good if you prefer apt. But with Fedora just use dnf instead of apt and its basically exactly the same.
Since you’re more familiar with Debian, I recommend Linux Mint. Ubuntu if you don’t care about snap. These are generally good and pretty friendly. If you know your way around Linux and want something else that also has up-to-date stuff (Debian is always a little behind on updates) and you don’t mind reading on some documentation to get started, you could also try Fedora. Kali Linux tools are available to most distributions.
Thanks for all the suggestions. Think I’m currently leaning towards Debian 12 for now, and depending on how that feels might try mint next.
You should try Pop! OS. It’s pretty much Ubuntu without the weird snap garbage, so has a direct Debian heritage.
I’m a fan of Manjaro
Linux mint if you are new.
ZorinOS if your mom will use your PC.
Arch linux if you are sane.
Gentoo if you are insane.
Ubloatu, Fedora, Slackware and friends if you want to be a “different” user.
