Ubuntu 8.10 in early 2009, after Windows Vista otherwise bricked my laptop. I’ve distro-hopped on a few occasions but most of my 16 years of Linux have been on Ubuntu. That said, I moved away from Ubuntu after a failed upgrade to 22.04 LTS, to OpenSUSE and then to KDE Neon, now I’m on Nobara and couldn’t be happier.

Mull development has been abandoned. You might want to switch to IronFox, the community’s fork to continue its legacy.

I personally vastly prefer mutable distros for my own system, but I understand the appeal for those who like them. As long as mutable distros remain an option I don’t mind immutable distros.

Mint or Pop_OS are likely the most widely recommended distros I know of for beginners. I haven’t tried either of them myself, but from what I hear about them I’m inclined to agree. Personally I would NOT recommend a rolling release distro to beginners. Too much potential to break things way too easily and way too often, which would likely require digging into the terminal to fix. Terminal-averse beginners wouldn’t be served well by that at all.

I used Sabayon for a bit too. It was basically “Gentoo made easy” with a simpler installer and as you said a binarypackage manager rather than compiling packages from source. It’s wasn’t 100% completely dead after dropping the Sabayon branding, it morphed into Mocaccino Linux, but when they did so they re-based it on Funtoo, which is also now dead.

Ditto here. NewPipe + VPN works fine on my tablet I use as a YouTube machine. The only problems have been when YT messes with stuff to try to block them, and then NewPipe will have it fixed usually within a day. And that doesn’t happen as often as people think.

I don’t know how “bleeding edge” it is, but Nobara is a good gaming distro maintained by GloriousEggroll (the maker of the GE versions of Proton on Steam) that also has a GUI driver manager. It’s based on Fedora, so you’re not gonna have the absolute latest stuff 100% right now as you might with Arch, but it will likely be ahead of anything Debian or Ubuntu based. The one drawback in my short experience with it so far is that the package manager sucks for exploring stuff or locating packages if you don’t know the package name, it’s just an alphabetical list you search through by name.

But as has been said elsewhere in this thread, if you’re having driver issues with new Nvidia stuff, you may just be SOL until the Nvidia driver support in general catches up, no matter the distro.

If you’re already thinking of extracting/attempting to run a desktop version of Office, you may as well save yourself the effort if you can and give the free online version a try. You’ll be using a proprietary piece of software either way.

Servers are the one thing I’ve generally heard people agree that snaps are good for, so given its history it’s a bit of a strange thing to hear of Ubuntu being a better server distro than desktop distro nowadays.

I’m a centrist but I lean slightly right, and I’ve used Linux for 15 years. There are plenty of conservatives who use Linux for the privacy and security advantages it offers. At least one of the Linux YouTubers I watch is quite conservative. That said, Linux dev communities don’t tend to take kindly to conservative members voicing opinions while many allow left-wing opinions free rein, and some distro devs have openly stated they don’t want conservatives using their software. They should either allow political opinions from everyone or nobody, IMO. I’d say preferably just leave politics out of it altogether, FOSS should be open to be used by anyone regardless of politics or any other factors.

GNOME is more different from Windows, which means that users will have to put more effort in to get used to the UI, but it doesn’t have as many complicated settings or customizability for EVERYTHING that Plasma does, so it can be less confusing in that sense. I switched to primarily using Plasma a couple years ago and I’m probably with Plasma to stay, but personally I think GNOME might be better for Linux beginners. Though if you really want a beginner-friendly DE, go for Cinnamon.

Definitely, XP was by far the best version of Windows. (Telling that I switched to Linux in the Vista era).

Temple OS returns!

Temple OS returns!

I think some other threads on similar subjects have said that’s basically because of the Elden Ring DLC.

Vista bricked my laptop after a year without a reliable way to recover. Made the switch over in 2009.

It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.

Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.

For security Because no one knows of it Why not run Haiku?

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.