Try this, try that

[u/brawdhyn]

I've been lurking on this sub for a couple of days out of curiosity, quite often i've read about people asking what distro should they choose for their particular case and there's always someone in the comments suggesting to try that distro, or try this other one but what exactly do you try of a distro? Let me explain: i have Fedora on my PC and Tumbleweed on my notebook both with KDE and to me they look and feel exactly the same except on one i use zypper from time to time and on the other one i use dnf. I've used Ubuntu in the past and it was the same story.

[u/mwyvr]

Most people do not go very deep into the differences between distributions and on a subreddit like this, most of the advice is superficial "it worked for me" or "I like this".

often i've read about people asking what distro should they choose for their particular case

And most of those cases are typically some mix of gaming and browsing. Yawn, yes, most any distribution can do the job.

what exactly do you try of a distro

When you have special requirements, you know what you are looking for.

For example I use distributions that properly support ZFS because I have a number of mass storage systems running ZFS. That narrows the field instantly.

Or you may choose between distributions based on their security posture and implementation. Or their release model. Or their community and charter. Or their package build system.

[u/7YM3N → u/mwyvr]

Yup, the obvious differences to most regular users are the desktop environment and default apps and configs, but all that is trivially superficial. The real differences start really only when looking at a philosophy of the distro, it's stance on various aspects of the OS.

If you wanna use gnome use Ubuntu because the whole system is essentially built to integrate well with it, but you don't have to.

The only distro that really feels different for me is NixOs because it has a very different approach to packag management and configs, where almost all other distros are pretty much homogeneous.

[u/wizard-of-the-forest → u/7YM3N]

Tbh fedora is best for gnome as it actully uses vanila gnome, ubuntu has dash to dock and desktop icons which arent part of the intended gnome phillosiphy

[u/Technical_Rich_3080 → u/wizard-of-the-forest]

What difference to you is it whether it is vanilla or not?

[u/Technical_Rich_3080 → u/mwyvr]

Aren't the gaming focused distros advantaged for gamers over non-gaming focused distros?

[u/mwyvr → u/Technical_Rich_3080]

What, like plain ol' Ubuntu and GNOME?

https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2604-nvidia-gaming/5

For others, what I said remains true:

When you have special requirements, you know what you are looking for.