as much i am enjoying pop!_os and used linux mint, i also like to explore other distros.
OP: I've tried mint tea, what other drink do you suggest?
You: if you want an interesting cocktail, try a mix of ayahuasca and peyote.
Guix as an OS made me shit myself, yell at the computer many times, and curse David from System Crafters for ever showing it to the world. And that's with almost 10 years of Emacs experience, a loooot more Linux experience, and good enough scheme to muddle through.
It's great as a supplementary PM though. And when used in that way you get everything guix offers appart from system configuration, but you get to use other PMs, like the ones required by the programming language you're using.
If you want something solid you can depend on, especially when you forget to update and don't really need the newest features, Debian will carry that need. I love that distro and it's good to have installed as a backup tool even if you don't think it's a good main choice for you.
I like endeavor os. It's a pretty easy way to get started with arch and it comes with some cool space theming.
This ones my favorite too. Basically just a pretty installer for arch, that helps you pick a desktop.
Guix, slackware, void, PCLinuxOS, vanilla debian
Non linux: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, HaikuOS
Try Nobara, it's Fedora but with sane defaults. IMO it's the best of the (relatively) stable distros. The main downside is that Fedora will remove x11 support in the future versions.
I've recently moved from Arch based distros because I was tired of having to fix minor crap all the time. I went through Debian, MX, Mint, and Opensuse during that period.
What are your requirements? How well can you work with Linux and how much do you love to tinker? Do you want always the newest software or should it be stable for a long time? Or something between?
Then I guess something based on Arch Linux. Either Arch itself or Endeavour OS. Endeavour is pretty nice. Also using Podman/Docker can be a lot of fun, try toolbox.
I like KDE so I've been using KDE Neon which is just Ubuntu with KDE's stuff coming from it's own repo, so you get updates early. I don't like it that much so I was thinking on hopping to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling release) or Fedora KDE when Plasma 6 is available.
I got some free computers from my workplace, and I am considering installing Crystal Linux (an easy to use Arch-based distro in beta I learned about from DistroTube) on them and giving them to my mom and half-brother. I'm going to see how well it goes and if it works well for beginner Linux users. I'll let you know if I get any feedback.
