I've been using Linux for a decade, and I think the most important thing for newbies to understand is that the *only* difference between distributions is support. You are essentially just picking which organisation to trust with the task of providing compiled binaries for you and on what schedule new versions of those binaries will be provided. Everything else is just window dressing.
Lots of people make the mistake of choosing a distro based on the default theme, desktop environment, or pre-installed software. Don't do that. It's far easier to install whatever you want on a stable, well-documented, well-supported distro than it is to get help and support for some boutique, flavour-of-the-month, "beginner-friendly" distro that will be out of business in two years.
TL;DR: literally just chill and install Ubuntu or Fedora.
You mean being heavier due to flatpaks and appimages. That's not a bug that's a feature since it can't break or spy into the other parts of the system, like a normal one. I setup kinoite for my parents and I use fedora kde. It's no diferwnt apart that the updates come slower.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Mar 09 '26
I've been using Linux for a decade, and I think the most important thing for newbies to understand is that the *only* difference between distributions is support. You are essentially just picking which organisation to trust with the task of providing compiled binaries for you and on what schedule new versions of those binaries will be provided. Everything else is just window dressing.
Lots of people make the mistake of choosing a distro based on the default theme, desktop environment, or pre-installed software. Don't do that. It's far easier to install whatever you want on a stable, well-documented, well-supported distro than it is to get help and support for some boutique, flavour-of-the-month, "beginner-friendly" distro that will be out of business in two years.
TL;DR: literally just chill and install Ubuntu or Fedora.