Got to keep my work laptop and just realised that I'm now free to ditch Windows and install Linux. It's a Thinkpad E14 gen 3 with AMD Ryzen 5, 16 gb ram and a 256 gb ssd. I dabbled with Mint a long time ago but consider myself a somewhat informed newbie, who now has the time to experiment and learn.
So I'm looking for tips and advice about which distro I should check out, what I should take into account and anything that can help me with this project.
@vitskapsdama Some opinions from a perhaps too old hand at this:
A lot of this is probably obvious to you, but I don't know you, so I won't make any assumptions.
Debian and Fedora are the classic, safe choices. Debian for old-ish software and stability, Fedora for fresh software and frequent reboots. (When I ran Debian as main driver, I found Debian testing a fine compromise to get newer software, sacrificing server class stability which didn't matter on the laptop which ran it anyway.) When you can download "Linux binaries", it's most often .deb (for Debian and its _many_ derivatives) or .rpm (Fedora/RedHat and their derivatives).
I guess you will get a lot of tips about whatever distro has wind in its sails these days, but I think it's better to go for something with an existing, functional organization backing it.
KDE, Gnome or something less vanilla? Pretty much all distros support both, and it's very easy to switch between them and have both installed at the same time. Same for something less vanilla, if the distro has it, just try it?
I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that distro hopping is _easy_ at your stage. It only gets hard if you have a lot invested. Throwing out a fresh install for something else, that's quick and easy.
Vitskapsdama
Lemmus