That’s surprising to hear since KDE is one of the most feature-packed DEs. What features do you reckon are missing?

Have you tried kde plasma 6, I have always wanted to use kde but gnome had a better experience for workspaces until 6 came out and fixed all that I wanted.

It does use systemd, just not by default. One small change to GRUB and it’s done.

Also, it’s literally the most popular distro on Distrowatch, so I don’t know what you mean by obscure. More popular than Mint, even.

Not sure to be honest, my experience with MX and Debian are limited, I like how MX looks, had no issues using in in the small amount of time I had used MX linux and I’m a sucker for good theming

MX has a ton of tooling and a newer kernel. It also doesn’t use systemd for some reason.

Saner defaults for a desktop, useful gui tools to manage and maintain your system, better looking

Depends on the person, I didn’t get on well with many distros, I like tinkering, arch afforded me that.

Some people are happy jumping in the deepend and having converter distros may alienate new users.

MX might be slightly easier due to MX Tools. Otherwise it’s a matter of taste: xfce vs cinnamon, thunar vs nemo, etc.

Both should work great, just take care to install packages like steam or lutris through flatpak. And if you’re setting it up for someone else, install some pm frontend like discover or software centre, so that they can have unified updates through a gui.

Fedora’s KDE spin from April forward makes this a nonissue. Plasma 6 makes Wayland and NVIDIA get along like on any other machine. Plus it’s been splendid since Fedora 35 for me.

Edit: I only use Fedora for work, so not too sure what you mean. I make detailed graphical images which are blown up sizably and have had zero issue. Also never have had a problem sharing with Apple or Windows folks (jah help them).

I’m no big gamer, but my gaming laptop is a Ryzen with RTX3060, and I dual boot it (Fedora and Windows 10.) I used the rpmfusion Nvidia drivers, no issue, and I get slightly better frame rates and a bit better 3D mark scores in Fedora than Windows. It’s been that way since 37 or 36, I think. Palworld, Monster Hunter World and Rise, Genshin Impact (I know, I know), Borderlands, EDF 5, all work great, along with some retro stuff like City Of Heroes and EQ99. So, I guess I’d like to know why I shouldn’t use Fedora with Nvidia? Also, when you say production machine, do you mean like a server? I’m a student.

Mint might do ya then if you want to remain in the .deb system. I ran it for a while and was happy with it. I’m on popos now but it’s based on Ubuntu lts only so it’s not quite as up to date at times.

I’d go with Ubuntu lts or Ubuntu neon (lts+latest KDE)

I think Mint is your best choice. Mint is not Ubuntu, even if the underlying base is based on Ubuntu. It doesn’t have snaps for example, and a lot of the ubuntu fluff and slowness has been cut out. For example, Mint Cinnamon uses 1.2 GB of RAM on a clean boot, but it uses 1.9 GB on Ubuntu-Cinnamon. It’s a cleaner system.

Between the snaps crisis and the ads in the terminal ubuntu seems to be doing its best to scare off regular users.

Hm, I never used resolve so I wouldn’t know about that. I guess you will have to try it out and see if it works fine or not, installing debian 12 doesn’t take much time.

You can always use Docker and run it on a Rocky Linux image.

Sorry, but, no. Pretty much any distro can do all of that perfectly well, the fedoras of the world, the mints of the world, but they don’t break constantly.

I have given manjaro to 3 people and used it myself for many years, i got sick of it because the team is incredibly incompetent and just breaks things all the time, i’ve switched to arch and all of these problems have gone away.

let me give you an example of a design flaw that has caused strife for every single person I have given manjaro, how the kernel is handled.

Manjaro does not let you sudo pacman -S linux, instead, you get linux with the version number as the package, this means for the standard user, your kernel will become outdated, unless you think to update it. This has broken every system of every normal person I have given manjaro at some point, and then i’ve had to go through GREAT lengths to resolve the issue for them, all of which I had to do from a terminal.

github.com/arindas/manjarno

You can read this for other examples of how incompetent the team is, i’m sorry but there’s just no usecase for manjaro, if you want a GUI, you should simply use something other than arch, like fedora. I see no advantages to manjaro over arch personally, but if you desperately need a GUI, just use something else instead of trying desperately to hack arch into something that it simply is not.

manjarno.pages.dev

You always take your chances when using AUR because it’s basically completely unsupervised and anybody can put anything in there. What AUR packages were you trying to use?

Arch-based distros are not usually recommended to beginners for a reason. Manjaro tries to be more stable but you have to work within its proposed safety limits (use its helpers, stay on a LTS kernel, stay on the stable branch etc.) And AUR will always be AUR.

Just read about how they miss very important things time and time again, like they cannot learn from their mistakes. EndeavourOS is what Manjaro should be.