I need some advice regarding which distro to choose. I tried installing fedora workstation on my laptop as test and it seemed quite annoying to get the user interface right.
I dont mind the technical differences, in fact i’m looking forward to them as linux is more secure and better designed.
The problem i’m having is that i want the good things from windows desktop. for example; tray icons, being able to control filesystem easily with gui, shortcuts on desktop.
Every distro i have tried or seen has been really basic regarding this out of the box with very little customization options. I prefer not having to download million extensions for every little feature that might stop working at every major update or if developer doesnt feel like continuing.
I also would like to be able to easily backup customization settings so i dont have to do everything again if i need to reinstall. I like being able to easily customize everything so having a lot of settings is good thing for me.
I read somewhere about kde plasma and screenshots seemed promising and downloaded kde fedora. Haven’t installed it yet but am I on the right track for what i’m looking for? Are there other even better choices? I’d like to nail this from the start so I dont have to reinstall later. I really dont want to wade through every possible distro.
Thank you all, you have been big help
Major desktop environments are KDE as you mentioned and Gnome.
Arch wiki is a good resource even if not running arch. You may want to look into their dotfiles page to back up your settings: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dotfiles.
NixOS ended up being my distro of choice for reproducible installs but it has a high learning curve and poor documentation so I wouldn’t recommend to start with. That said you can still use Nix on other distros with home manager to manage dotfiles and install non-system apps.
Distros just pick the default things to install. You can always use the package manager to install something else like a better file manager.
A lot of choices are simply subjective so its hard to recommend any one distro. Mint is close to windows, based on Ubuntu and uses Gnome. Ubuntu based on Debian I find to be user friendly. Not used a Fedora based distro in ages but there is also Silverblue I’ve heard mentioned positively.
Distros like Arch and NixOS are more design your own system setups. Pick what you want. I used arch for a bit, but got annoyed at keeping all my systems in sync. Had a huge wiki of all the tweaks I made. Then scripts to automate some of it. I started looking at automation tooling like ansible when I found nix.