I would honestly recommend against Ubuntu. I had the same issue: tried Ubuntu because it’s “the beginner distro”, and it turns out it wasn’t that at all. Ubuntu for me was a cobbled-together piece of shit with a terrible UI, corporate enshittification, and a major breakage around every corner. After a while dual-booting on my laptop, it started taking ~4 minutes to boot into it. Windows, meanwhile, was taking about 30 seconds. It also nuked my config twice, so everything I’d set up to mitigate Ubuntu’s default “person who designed this just had their eyes dilated” trash was undone. I quit Linux for years before giving it another try, because if this broken trainwreck was the “beginner” experience, why would I want to go further?
If you want KDE (which I think is the best DE and it’s not even a little close), I think you’ll find a nicer experience in something like Fedora. Fuck, I think you’d experience less maintenance burden with something like CachyOS, although please don’t treat that as a recommendation. I use EndeavourOS now, and I would genuinely go out and buy a macOS device if my only Linux distro option were Ubuntu (that’s not high praise of macOS) on the grounds that it’s such a poorly designed hunk of dogshit.
Being supportive of Ubuntu seems to be a minority, but I picked it over others simply because it felt more like what I wanted from the Debian lines. And I haven’t had any major issues at all. The main project I’ve got ahead of me is to remove Snap, as I see that’s a problem, mainly due to updates being so far behind (plus I’m pretty sure it’s a resource hog, I can see it there in Btop all the time). I’ve had several apps that I originally used Snap (I mean, it’s right there, why not) to find the version is old and missing newer features. So I just find the Apt or deb version, or even AppImage, and I’m back running. The OS itself is solid, and I so, so love just booting up and going within seconds, as well as shutting down right away. Not the classic Windows “hang”.
But I get that some people run into incompatibilities sometimes with hardware, so you do have to look around and find what works best for you. An example of mine on that was an old MacBook I had that simply was stuck since the OS isn’t supported anymore. So I put Kubuntu on it (since it needed a light OS), and it works fine for what it is.
I would honestly recommend against Ubuntu. I had the same issue: tried Ubuntu because it’s “the beginner distro”, and it turns out it wasn’t that at all. Ubuntu for me was a cobbled-together piece of shit with a terrible UI, corporate enshittification, and a major breakage around every corner. After a while dual-booting on my laptop, it started taking ~4 minutes to boot into it. Windows, meanwhile, was taking about 30 seconds. It also nuked my config twice, so everything I’d set up to mitigate Ubuntu’s default “person who designed this just had their eyes dilated” trash was undone. I quit Linux for years before giving it another try, because if this broken trainwreck was the “beginner” experience, why would I want to go further?
If you want KDE (which I think is the best DE and it’s not even a little close), I think you’ll find a nicer experience in something like Fedora. Fuck, I think you’d experience less maintenance burden with something like CachyOS, although please don’t treat that as a recommendation. I use EndeavourOS now, and I would genuinely go out and buy a macOS device if my only Linux distro option were Ubuntu (that’s not high praise of macOS) on the grounds that it’s such a poorly designed hunk of dogshit.
Thanks, I will try a different distro soon!
Being supportive of Ubuntu seems to be a minority, but I picked it over others simply because it felt more like what I wanted from the Debian lines. And I haven’t had any major issues at all. The main project I’ve got ahead of me is to remove Snap, as I see that’s a problem, mainly due to updates being so far behind (plus I’m pretty sure it’s a resource hog, I can see it there in Btop all the time). I’ve had several apps that I originally used Snap (I mean, it’s right there, why not) to find the version is old and missing newer features. So I just find the Apt or deb version, or even AppImage, and I’m back running. The OS itself is solid, and I so, so love just booting up and going within seconds, as well as shutting down right away. Not the classic Windows “hang”.
But I get that some people run into incompatibilities sometimes with hardware, so you do have to look around and find what works best for you. An example of mine on that was an old MacBook I had that simply was stuck since the OS isn’t supported anymore. So I put Kubuntu on it (since it needed a light OS), and it works fine for what it is.