Wayland has some great new stuff but some people don’t like change

More like: it was released 15 years ago and it’s still broken for a lot of people, while x11 is actually working without issues.

IDK about KDE, but Nobara gnome has Wayland and xorg entries in the login manager.

Btw Fedora is removing x11 support, so that’s going to be fun for everyone who’s having issues with Wayland.

I3 is a hybrid wm, there’s a shortcut to change between vertical and horizontal splits.

I find that approach much better than having to cycle through a bunch of presets to get a configuration I want.

On top of that tabbing/stacking tiles is amazing for keeping everything organised in more complex configurations.

Meat stickers that detect ammonia and block the barcode if the meat has spoiled.

Kubuntu stands out as it has KDE plasma installed, while the others have a tweaked gnome experience.

Meanwhile the mint team has been releasing their own DE since 2011 and made it the recommended default

Fedora, Manjaro and OpenSuse are all viable alternatives to Ubuntu/Debian.

Manjaro is an alternative to a working distro. There’s literally no reason to use it over endeavour/arco/garuda, and plenty of reasons not to.

1. Arch wiki - installation. You’re installing a lot of those components yourself, so it lists out common options.

Is this approach even valid?

Not really. People don’t replace an audio server for example if everything is working, and the default choices are almost universal.

2. Go to a social media like this one, and observe nerds arguing about distros.

3. Emacs, Firefox, kmonad

4. That depends on the distro, but something like (if necessary): enable nonfree repos, install proprietary drivers, install proprietary codecs, install stuff you need for work.

5. No, unless you’re a bloat obsessed supermodel.

6. You’ve got two main things to worry about at this stage: release cycle and preferred DE.

All three of those are Ubuntu derivatives so they get updates on pretty much the same schedule. But they’ve got different default DEs in cinnamon, gnome, and KDE. That doesn’t mean you can’t install xfce on mint, but their dev time is focused on cinamon so xfce looks like ass in comparison.

Take a flash drive, install ventoy, and try out their live environments. After a few reboots you’ll have a clearer idea of what you’re looking for.

I’d also try something slightly different and include Nobara. It’s also a stable workstation distro, but it’s got a shorter release cycle and it’s based on Fedora instead of Ubuntu. Also, it might be interesting to compare pop gnome, nobara gnome, and classic gnome.

However, I am not looking for windows-like. I want a new & fresh experience like using a smartphone for the first time or switching from ios to android.

Be careful what you wish for or you’ll end up with guix running stumpwm, and you’ll sympathise with your grandparents using a PC for the first time.

But seriously, use gnome in that case, and maybe try out a tiling WM like i3. Gnome is the only big DE to go down a different UI route after being threatened with litigation by Microsoft. Tiling managers are IMO the best, but it takes a while to get them really set up.

I never said it can’t work, but try using MX for a bit and tell me it doesn’t make Debian much better as a workstation. MX tools are enough of a reason for me to always pick it over Debian in that scenario.

There’s a reason it’s such a well used distro, and it’s not just because it’s good for servers.

What are some workstation specific reasons it’s well used?

I’m pretty sure stuff like function keys are just DE defaults. I’ve installed default gnome and they worked.

The main reason people use Debian, no matter what they use it for, is stability. While it’s great that nothing ever breaks, you’re also receiving nonessential updates every ~2 years.

That’s not an issue on a server that’s running mysql released 7 years ago, but you probably need to use flatpak and guix to keep specific tools relatively up to date. You’re less likely going to need those tools when using a workstation focused distro like Fedora, that’s released on a fixed 6 month cycle.

On top of that, workstation focused distros also integrate flatpak. Since synaptic only knows about apt, MX improves on it by only requiring you to enable flathub as a source to get a unified search/install/update.

Small stuff like that is important for a beginner that’s asking for distro advice. They’ll most likely want to click through a pretty gui, and Debian is lacking on that front because it’s a server focused distro.

Well you solved that conundrum rightly. Now let’s go linch those dirty Apple and John Deere engineers. Since they’ve designed those machines, they must be the only responsible parties for designing them with their extreme anti-consumer and anti-repair policies. They must get commissions on every licensed repair or something, it’s definitely got nothing to do with capitalists putting restrictions on the design team in order to increase profits, nope…

I thought I would stick with Debian

There’s your first mistake. Don’t run a server distro on a workstation if you don’t want to deal with it’s downsides.

I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it

Read the CUPS Arch wiki page

do you people think Ubuntu will work for me?

Fuck Ubuntu. Use Mint if you want to try something Ubuntu based.

I’ve recently went through a bunch of stable distros and Nobara had the best experience out of the box.

Arco B was how I experimented with DEs and WMs. It’s got the widest support from the installer, but it’s mostly limited to having unified shortcuts.

I suggest using a VM or an install specifically for that purpose, just so you don’t have to clean everything up afterwards.

IÄ! IÄ! CTHULHU FHTAGN!