My current favourite distro

[Quadophile]

I had been tinkering with my computer lately and trying out most of the distros on 3 of my machines with different specs. I had very interesting results and realised each distro had something unique to offer.

I installed and uninstalled following distros on three different machines in the last few months, this is the main thing I have been doing due to lockdown besides listening to a lot of music and playing with my granddaughter.

MX Linux (xfce)
Manjaro (xfce, kde)
Kubuntu
Ubuntu
Linux Mint
Puppy

The general specs of three different machines

Desktop: i7 4th generation with 8 GB Ram 1 TB HD
Samsung Laptop: i5 3rd generation with 8 GB Ram and 750 GB HD
Laptop IBM T43 Pentium M processor (32 bit) with 2 GB Ram and 40GB HD

By installing each distro a few times and configuring it has helped me learn the behaviour of each distro. For example, if anyone were to ask me which is fastest or easiest or stable or elegant I am able to give that kind of info as of now based on my three different machines.

After all of this and having spent hundreds of hours which I have no record of, I finally settled on one Distro of Choice for myself. Manjaro KDE edition it is.

Why Manjaro?

In my case and for my machines (not for IBM laptop) it is by far the most elegant looking, fastest (full spec), cutting edge, stable, with least amount of issues, worked out of the box, has a very nice grub implementation (always gets it right), the only distro that does partition replacement with another OS, updated regularly (weekly).

I have created this thread not just for myself but for all members of the forum to share their experience as well. I will be happy to answer any question you may have about my experience with the above mentioned machines and distros.

What do you like?

 

[Quadophile]

 

[Abarbarian]

Great way to fill in lockdown time.

I am surprised that you chose Manjaro as being the easiest and less problematic operating system. I have never used it myself or tried it out as I am a pure Arch user.
I have used MX linux since the 2016 version and have found it to be the easiest distro to put on a usb or install to a drive of any of the many distros I have ever tried. For anyone considering trying out a linux os MX would be the os I would recommend.I have even installed MX on a very old CF-19 Tough Book,

Mark 2

• Intel Core 2 Duo U7500 1.06GHz Processor (64-bit)[1][2]
  • 2MB L2 cache
  • 533MHz FSB

it runs quite sweetly on this old pc and I have even managed to get the touchscreen working. I run MX-19 from a usb stick as my backup os and have it running from ram. Using it this way on my Skylake build it fly's along faster than a speeding bullet. In the few years I have used this distro I have never had a problem with any of the updates and this is one of the reasons I chose it as my backup os.

If anyone is feeling adventurous then playing with Fedora Silverblue could be informative and fun. I have never tried out any vanilla Fedora which is a stable and well regarded os with a decent helpful community. The Silverblue version is still in development but seems to be pretty stable and is a much different sort of linux os.

What is Silverblue?

Fedora Silverblue is becoming more and more popular inside and outside the Fedora world. So based on feedback from the community, here are answers to some interesting questions about the project. If you do have any other Silverblue related questions, please leave it in the comments section and we will try to answer them in a future article.

Another os worth a try out is EndlessOS, see my post on it here,

https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/linux-world-a-smorgasbord-of-penguins.4071658/post-14274553

There are a whole heap of different linux distros out there so why limit yourself to just the buntu's. Be an adventures penguin, take the plunge.



P.S. I like the conky in your screen shot.

 

[Quadophile]

P.S. I like the conky in your screen shot.

Thank you!

I actually forgot to mention that MX Linux is the one I chose for the IBM Laptop as it is very lightweight and works very nicely.

I played around with MX Linux creating the Live USB and it works beautifully as a complete OS in the shirt pocket with your files on the go.

I am not a big fan of XFCE but prefer KDE or Gnome environment more. I guess it is just personal preference.