I recently got a decommissioned Dell 3410 with an i5-10210U processor and 8GB of RAM. Currently, I use Linux Mint XFCE on my main laptop, a Thinkpad T430 with an i7-3610QM and 16GB RAM, which I've found great for the last three years. I'm looking to explore other Linux distributions, especially since this Dell sports a nice FHD display. My preferences include trying a different package manager and having Wayland support, but I want to avoid Debian or Ubuntu-based distros. I'm eager to dive into something user-friendly yet quite different from Mint. I'm flexible with desktop environments, as long as it isn't GNOME. Any recommendations?
6 Answers
Besides Tumbleweed, you might also want to consider Kalpa, which is an immutable distro based on Tumbleweed and currently looking for testers. OpenSUSE has a tool called 'opi' that you can use after installation to get proprietary codecs for multimedia support, which is really handy!
Fedora is a solid choice, especially with the KDE version. You might also like CachyOS if you're open to bleeding-edge distros.
MX Linux with XFCE is another solid option if you're looking for something different. It's user-friendly and performs well on various hardware, plus it's quite lightweight.
Another option is Fedora Sway, which uses DNF as its package manager and supports Wayland. It does have a steeper learning curve, but it’s manageable for someone willing to tinker a bit.
You should definitely check out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed! It's got a great relationship with KDE Plasma, and the package manager has improved a lot, becoming faster recently. Plus, it offers a bunch of graphical tools to help with setup and features like hibernation.
You might find Vanilla OS interesting—it’s quite unique but based on GNOME and is immutable. I haven't installed it myself as I'm not a fan of GNOME at the moment, but it could still be worth a look for you!
I've never heard of it before either! Not against trying new things, but I'm not into GNOME-based systems right now.