I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it’s the package manager.
When you’re just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don’t look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don’t distro hop just to see what you’re missing.
Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you’re trying to get work done.
Is Pop!_OS really that popular? I started using Linux about 10 years ago and it wasn’t around then, so I never tried it in my distro hopping days. I see it’s developed by System76 so I can see why you’d choose it on their hardware, but is there any point doing that on other hardware?
The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I’ve never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).
That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of “opinionated” good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it’s easy to go along with the “happy path” and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines–including machines not of their own brand. (I’ve contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they’ve always sent it through a code review and QA process).
Idk, it seems to be picking up steam. It’s what I use unless I’m trying to use something super lightweight.
For me it has the stability of Ubuntu without having to use Ubuntu.
Haven’t tried Debian yet though.
