There isn’t a default beginner distro anymore.
There are a dozen good choices with half a dozen different default desktop environments, all with their pros and cons.
But as a beginner, you have no idea what’s best for you.
It used to be a lot easier to choose your first distro, back when Ubuntu was still good (looong ago).
IMO Mint could be it, if they used Plasma instead of Cinnamon, which still doesn’t support Wayland.
I’ve heard real good things about the plug and play ability of Bazzite.
Though I say that as a guy that’s been debating the switch for a while, my main holdout being that I like to play weird indie games and spend a lot of time away from my computer, so would rather not have to spend my limited free time troubleshooting
I feel like maybe I’m missing something because I tried Bazzite for a bit (before switching to vanilla Fedora) and found it kind of overwhelming? Like there was so much stuff installed by default and it wasn’t super clear to me how it all was supposed to work together to do basic things like package management (esp. since dnf doesn’t work)
I think that’s what makes it good for beginners: it’s a lot like a mobile OS. There’s an “app store” where you get your programs (bazaar/flathub) and OS updates just happen automatically. Once you find yourself wanting to tinker then hopefully you’re confident enough to start installing “normal” distros.
There isn’t a default beginner distro anymore.
There are a dozen good choices with half a dozen different default desktop environments, all with their pros and cons.
But as a beginner, you have no idea what’s best for you.
It used to be a lot easier to choose your first distro, back when Ubuntu was still good (looong ago).
IMO Mint could be it, if they used Plasma instead of Cinnamon, which still doesn’t support Wayland.
I’ve heard real good things about the plug and play ability of Bazzite. Though I say that as a guy that’s been debating the switch for a while, my main holdout being that I like to play weird indie games and spend a lot of time away from my computer, so would rather not have to spend my limited free time troubleshooting
Sounds like Bazzite would be a good fit.
I feel like maybe I’m missing something because I tried Bazzite for a bit (before switching to vanilla Fedora) and found it kind of overwhelming? Like there was so much stuff installed by default and it wasn’t super clear to me how it all was supposed to work together to do basic things like package management (esp. since dnf doesn’t work)
I think that’s what makes it good for beginners: it’s a lot like a mobile OS. There’s an “app store” where you get your programs (bazaar/flathub) and OS updates just happen automatically. Once you find yourself wanting to tinker then hopefully you’re confident enough to start installing “normal” distros.
I don’t know about Cinamon as I’ve never used it, but I would never recommand KDE Plasma to a beginner.
It’s way too messy even if it’s really customizable.
Gnome is great, but I also think it’s too different from Windows for a beginner.
Plasma desktop is totally usable out of the box to a beginner, especially if they come from Windows.