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> baby's first distro Zorin has a privacy policy and terms of service page, as it's published by a for-profit company.

As though Red Hat and Ubuntu weren't a thing for literal decades.

Distros like Debian and Ubuntu also suffer from issues with compatibility with newer hardware due to their older kernels. This is part of why distros based on Fedora and Fedora Atomic (such as Nobara and Bazzite, respectively) have seen popularity.

Also, gamers at least want the latest drivers. Not the ones from three weeks ago. The latest ones. That's why everyone is recommending Arch-based distros for that purpose. I'm currently on Pop, and waiting months for Mesa updates is no fun.

I find Fedora hits a nice sweet spot between compatibility/updates and random breakage, especially since they backport KDE versions along with kernels.

I have tried Debian, but I found that the software on the main version was out-of-date, and the testing version eventually broke during an update (which is when I abandoned it.) It's not something I'd recommend to a new Linux user.

The question is, do you really need the newer versions? If so, maybe check availability via backports or extrepo.

From my perspective a solid OS that stays out of my way most of the time outweighs the slight disadvantage of working with older software versions. YMMV.

Stable with back ports works well for me. I have not upgraded to Trixie yet and have 6.12, which handles dev work, Steam, and llama.cpp (ROCm) without issue.

On that I agree. I run Fedora Atomic and I'm not switching to any other non-atomic distro ever again. Once you get used to the papercuts, the old model of overwriting system files and hoping for the best is antiquated to say the least. (And no, I don't care for NixOS, sorry)

I'm still wishing very hard for a serious and battle-tested Arch-based atomic distro, so I can chuck Fedora and its RPM packaging model into the flaming sun.

I'm going to have to tap the sign for distrowatch not being a measure of popularity: https://blog.popey.com/2021/01/distrowatch-is-not-a-measure-... A very small number of linux users have ever even heard of distrowatch, much less ever visited it, it's totally irrelevant for anything other than news about distros, which again only a tiny portion of people care about.

But it is amusing when I hear about distros that are "doing numbers" and it's the first I've heard of them. I don't really care about how many downloads, though, what's more interesting is weekly or monthly active users based on unique IP hits to update servers. (Some distros track and publish this.) Recently Bazzite, a distro targeting gamers, hit 31.6k weekly active users, not bad for something only a couple years old. (Over 2 years ago, Ubuntu Desktop was at 6 million monthly active users.)

Smaller distros have more incentive to boost their perceived popularity -- as a Gentoo user I don't really care so much about popularity (and I'm happy to see more Linux adoption in general regardless of distro) but about longevity. But I guess props to Zorin, they've apparently been around as an Ubuntu derivative since 2009 despite this being the first I've heard of them. Yet only two years ago did they get the ability to dist-upgrade, so I wonder wtf they were doing for the prior years: https://blog.zorin.com/2023/07/27/zorin-os-16.3-is-released/

> Rock-solid distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora don't have that "cool" factor so noobs don't even consider them

Isn't Ubuntu the first thing a "noob" thinks of when they hear the word "Linux"?

Ten years ago, sure. Judging from their landing page, not any more.

CachyOS is the new cool noob distro, with plenty of footguns so it stays fun

I don't trust Distrowatch's popularity list. I have thought for years it was probably gamed.

There are constantly distros in that top ten list that aren't in other top ten lists like mentions of reddit, mention on Twitter, Google searches for "linux distro", etc.

MX Linux is quite ok. Not sure why it is so highly ranked on distrowatch though.

The distrowatch rankings are based on page views to the distros section on the site. So the distros that lead the rankings tend to be moderately popular distros that link to that page on their site.

The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms.

I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.

Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.

Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).

It took me a week or so to get used to Gnome, and now I find Windows 11 (and KDE) frustrating!

I like the gnome paradigm. The gnome implementation is bad though. I was promised that xwayland would be the bridge to a glorious future yet stuff like pointer confinement just doesn’t work and their implementation of refresh rate doesn’t play nicely with vscode. So, the reality is I still use KDE even if it’s not quite as visionary.

Same here I switched to Gnome many years ago and even the newest windows and macos desktop feel old and non user-friendly in comparison.

You know what is proven effective? Not needing to reach for a mouse to interact with taskbar, start button and menus. GNOME is extremely effective as long as you aren't a clicker. If you want to stick to a 30 year old desktop metaphor that's on you but the rest of us have moved on.

I often see people praising gnome for it's keyboard efficiency but they are not even 10% as good as macos.

If they cared so much, they would have keyboard shortcut for everything, in every app, with the top bar displaying menu and every shortcut attributed to it, just like macos.

Instead you can use the keyboard to switch an app, close it and so on but once you are working inside, you immediately need to take your mouse. What's the point ? It saves 1 second and confuse lot of beginners.

I'm not sure what you mean - pretty much every modern GNOME application has keyboard shortcuts. In fact they use a consistent keyboard shortcut to bring up the screen that shows all the keyboard shortcuts: ctrl+?

What i mean is that the keyboard shortcut in gnome application is lackluster. there must be a dozen per app, whereas on macos every single function has a keyboard shorcut. Even KDE has more.

Discoverable user interfaces are orthogonal to keyboard interaction efficiency.

Menus are one of the primary ways you can discover keyboard shortcuts.

I’ll echo the other commenters who are praising Gnome. It is pretty keyboard-centric. Once you’re used to it, it’s quite nice. I’ve moved on to Niri, and can’t imagine going back to a floating window manager, but between Windows, macOS, and Gnome, I prefer Gnome hands down.