I’m thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I’m wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I’ve heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don’t like Cinnamon all too much.

What’s a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?

edit: Woah, it seems that you’re able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?

edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences…

On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I’m open to using either.

I’m running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It’s one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.

I would say I’m open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don’t want to do anything too out of my scope. I don’t want to spend too many hours setting it up, I’d rather have something that works mostly out of the box :D

I want a stable distro as in I don’t want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I’m open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.

edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)

My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?

edit 4:

Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD

now I’m slowly installing my programs again…

  • beleza pura
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    1 day ago

    installing two DE’s can and will cause a lot of problems.

    more like small nuisances that can be easily ignored

    that installing each DE under it’s own user can prevent the majority of these problems

    what? DEs are usually installed system-wide, i’ve never heard of an user-local installation of plasma or gnome

    • lattrommi@lemmy.ml
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      18 minutes ago

      some nuisances are not so ignorable. having duplicate apps all over the place, each with their own settings, so if you forget which one you are using, you might find yourself spending more time in settings than desired. then there’s browsers. switching DE’s can cause browsers to log you out of everything, so switching often and you end up having to sign in to everything repeatedly, which for some can interrupt workflow and be frustrating. then there’s the fact that some use gtk and some use qt so title bar buttons and program menu’s can become confusing and ununified. can these things be ignored? sure, some people can. some cannot, such as people with ADHD for example, who can easily be sidetracked when the “file > open” menu is in a hamburger menu in one app and a bar on another.

      I did say that I read about, but did not try, installing two and setting different users for them. i believe the idea is that they are both installed but don’t generate config files until you log in with a user. so keeping two users, one for each DE, works but only if you never log in with the wrong user. from what i understand, i could be wrong. i believe SDDM and LightDM can both facilitate switching DE’s from the login screen.