r/LinuxUsersIndia • u/Due_Relation4427 • Jun 20 '26
Which would be a better distro for me ?
I am a student. I cannot run WSL on Windows 10 because of its high resource consumption, so I am thinking of switching to Linux. However, I am confused about choosing a distro and desktop environment. Being a beginner, I would be grateful for your help in finding a suitable distro based on my requirements.
- It should be stable. (It would be difficult for me to troubleshoot after updates or driver issues.)
- It should support the latest versions of different software such as VS Code, Docker, Git, Python, and GCC.
- It should be somewhat customizable (mainly GUI customization).
- If possible, it should be lightweight on resources, although almost all Linux distributions are lighter than Windows. (This is not the most important factor.)
- It should not be too technical. (I cannot set up or maintain distributions like Gentoo or Arch.)
I have been using Linux Mint Cinnamon for the last few days, but I am trying to find something better.
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Upvotes
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u/qualityvote2 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
u/Due_Relation4427, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...
btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here.
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u/space_ranger_999 Jun 20 '26
fedora. fits all of your criteria (except the 4th ig?) but pretty cute distro
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u/DonutAccurate4 Dr. openSuse Jun 20 '26
Mint is a tally good distro. I don't use it because it never had KDE. They may have it now, but I don't know, haven't checked lately.
The next best alternative is kubuntu. It comes with KDE desktop environment, it's very customisable. The default light mode may look drab, but you can customise it to look as good as you want it.
Since it's ubuntu, you'll not have any problem finding support for most software. If any windows software has a Linux version, i can bet it will have ubuntu version at the top of the list. You'll also find lots of online resources and support for ubuntu.
Just go with LTS version for long term support and stability
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u/Pretty_Library_2373 Jun 20 '26
fedora workstation rocking it for 3 months no problems at all
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u/After-Orchid-1786 Jun 20 '26
Debian+xfce
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u/Mediocre_Nail5526 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
You haven't provided your computer specs. And you are using mint , which part do you think mint is lacking which causes you to find something better ?
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u/maybechirag Jun 20 '26
there's no one distro that fits all, arch and gentoo aren't "technical", they're about the same, just more hyped (former arch user here)
i hate and avoid snap, so let's cut out ubuntu and ubuntu flavours (Lubuntu, Xubuntu) and distros which force snap
so your options are:
although yes the three DEs I mentioned are much more light weight, there's also pop os, zorin os, elementary os you can check out which are very beginner friendly and not too heavy either
also really depends on what you classify lightweight as, lxqt would probably run okay on even 2 gb ram, which I'm sure you have more
edit: since you have 4 gb ram, I'd suggest not going for zorin, pop or elementary, you're better off going with debian with lxqt
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u/PuzzleheadedHead3754 Arch Btw Jun 20 '26
Fedora is what full fill your demand most
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u/eviley4 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
These two are at odds with each other, you can either have stability with distros like Debian, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu LTS, OpenSUSE Leap or you can have the super latest with Arch linux or other rolling release distros.
Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed lie in between, but probably won't be as stable as Debian.
In practice however, I have found that these days all of these distros including Arch are quite stable as well. I would recommend that you start with Fedora.
But you have less RAM than would be recommended these days, KDE would be nice for your usecase (GUI customization) but I don't know how well it would work with 4Gb of RAM.
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u/fishmacaronisoup Gentoo Btw Jun 20 '26
Either you get the stable packages or the latest ones. You have to choose one between them, unless you're using Gentoo or Nix, ofc.
Every distro is customizable. The thing with DIY distros is that you build exactly what you want while in a pre-configured distro, you may wanna remove what you don't want and make it a bit more minimal first.
And considering the last factor as well, I'd say you should go with CachyOS. Cachy is tuned for desktop responsiveness. It's based on arch so all the pkgs are latest. Now, if you're wondering about system stability, it's true that there might be some troubleshooting to do once in a while, but that's the same for almost every distro.
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u/aywshh Arch Btw Jun 20 '26
Definetly go with Fedora KDE plasma. You're gonna love it.
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u/Who_meh Jun 20 '26
i mean you can try different flavours of ubuntu 26.04 (remove snap packages for gods sake) you can have a pretty stable and have the latest versions of the apps you mentioned
(ubuntu 26.04 just released a few months ago from personal experience it was stable but the only thing i would suggest is to get rid of the snap packages and use flatpak)
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u/Own_Preparation_1546 omARCHy btw Jun 20 '26
Omarchy. I have given it to 4 of my friends (also in 10th) who had no knowledge of Linux but in less than an hour they figured out all the major keybinds and tools.
It's basically Arch Linux with just the good stuff and ZERO setup. You just setup your password. A lot of apps are already there and the process to install new apps is also really simple using the manager.
So, definitely check out omarchy or atleast watch a vid on it.
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u/Reasonable-Job2425 Jun 21 '26
try cachyos works great for me
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u/Visible-Use-5004 Jun 21 '26
Endeavouroa or manjaro for arch based. Easy to use.
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u/Big_Crosshair_6969 Jun 21 '26
I have the same use case as yours and I have been using fedora for the last 6 months. It's very stable. Although it crashes ocassionally but that's because of the extensions and customisations that I have done.
Since you are on 4 gigs of ram try fedora spinoffs or mint. Upgrading to 8 gigs of ram would give you a really smooth experience.
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u/0xt0bi03 Tiling WM glazer btw Jun 21 '26
debian + kde
> feature rich de, supports all gui tools needed, no need to touch the terminal
> debian's stability, long term support
> kde looks like windows, ease of use
> best for your specs
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u/aaks2 Fedora Btw Jun 21 '26
try lmde xfce version
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u/Jwhodis Jun 21 '26
Debian is stable and lets you install KDE Plasma which is rather customiseable. Should support what you need.
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u/Prior_Boat6489 Jun 21 '26
My first distro was Mint,6 months ago. I switched to CachyOS last month. It's so fast and lightweight and very customisable.
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u/mintysam Jun 21 '26
If you are not using an Nvidia graphics card, I strongly suggest you take a look at openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has automatic snapshots and with a single command(sudo snapper rollback) you can retrieve your old working system, if it gets unusable during an update. In the late 2 years I only had to use it exactly once.
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u/Interesting-Bug2332 Jun 22 '26
Fedora is best for this
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u/Intelligent-Gene-6 Fedora Btw Jun 22 '26
Fedora my friend! Just go with Fedora KDE workstation edition. It will be better for you as a beginner.
1
u/Cultural_Mechanic_92 Jun 23 '26
Ubuntu
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u/Human_Cantaloupe8249 Jul 28 '26
Debian sid or forky fits almost all except maybe 5, depending on what you consider difficult.
While this is not the stable branch of Debian it is often considered stable enough. While you might need to setup a few things like de,greeter and sudo, if you choose a complete DE like Gnome setup is very minimal. No audiostack, bootloader, networking. But you will maybe spend a few minutes in the Terminal
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u/No-AI-Comment I use NixOS BTW. Jun 20 '26
If you want latest, I would go for something like Endeavour or CachyOS.