Nobody said Arch yet? The wiki is very comprehensive so you can get by if you’re a newbie plus learn a lot.
If you want to work with the terminal as much as possible, it’s a decent choice. I only start X/my graphical environment if I need to do non-writing/non-coding activities.
You may need a day to configure wifi, Bluetooth, your de/wm of choice, etc., but if you use Ethernet & just install xfce you should be able to hit the ground running.
Any distro can do what you need. Others have suggested Pop, Mint, Debian, Endeavour, and more. I’d agree with basically all of them. Really it comes down to what you prefer most.
Personally I’d lean more toward Debian as it’s a basic distro with very little extra bloat, loads of documentation, incredibly stable, etc. I always prefer a spartan, basic system I can add pieces to as I please, rather than a bunch of preloaded defaults that may or may not be to my taste. Again though, that’s just me.
Endeavour is great, but if you aren’t used to Arch, and how to maintain it, things can get sort of messy after a while (definitely need to make a good habbit of cleaning your package managers cache, as well as read up on what’s called a “pacdiff”. In general, Arch and its derivatives require research). It’s worth trying if you’re interested in rolling distros though.
Another might be OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. From what I hear, it’s a bit more stable and curated than Arch so it may be a better option if you’re inexperience with a rolling release. I’ve never personally tried it, but have heard lots of good things from causal and power users alike.
PeppermintOS everything you need and nothing you don’t. Debian based with extra on top. Runs on 2gb ram , fast. Click install and setup but all the terminal stuff you want.since everyone mentions mint , it was a while since I used it. Felt bloated , perhaps better now. I stil say peppermint even for someone coming directly from Windows
I’m in the same spot and 95% settled on moving to debian.
xubuntu has been good to me the last 10yrs. But its been about xfce, ubuntu got be part of the relationship because it was easy when i knew very little about linux. that and it can run well on a potato with a bunch of computer parts just duct taped randomly onto it. which is basically what my dumpster dived laptop was 10 yes ago.
This is the answer. Current stable Debian already has the latest release of Xfce (4.18); and for recent gui apps there’s flatpak.
For packages like syncthing you can enable official apt repos to get the latest versions.
Other packages for which the latest versions are desirable though the flatpak versions get a bit too finicky (like vim & emacs), you can compile from source. It’s not hard, even for a newbie.
I’m aware that MX works on a lot of excellent GUI tools that are shipped with it. Which is great, but perhaps necessary; because they ship a systemd-less distro. Which, in the end, might cause more work than it should. (I’m aware this is in part caused by software just assuming that systemd is installed by default.) And while I think it’s a noble endeavour to maintain a relatively easy systemd-less distro, I don’t think it’s enough to justify a recommendation to a relatively new user to Linux. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this?
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