I realise and know that. I was being nice 
OK.
I don’t reckon for one second that’s it’s his ‘requirements’ that are the only usual. 
Hello earth calling Daniel
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And I’m not really the least bit bothered (well not “overly”) I’ve trashed a computer I barely have a use for…
Considering taking PopOS for a test drive… I think I’ve tried it in the past… Can’t remember what stopped it being a keeper… Was going to take a look at ZorinOS but not really keen on paying for it - doesn’t seem to be a way to test drive the “Full Pro” version…
Bugger REL8 or 9, just reading some stuff - RPMFusion is needed for gaming and GPU acceleration, and support for RPMFusion on RHEL (vs Fedora) is dodgy at best…
Also going to give PopOS a test drive on one of my Pi4 machines (I have 3, and the only one in use is my 4 GB “headless” server - the other 2 are 8 GB models).
So I will probably start a new thread “Day 3 with PopOS 22.04”…
It would be a big learning curve, but OpenSUSE might be the thing for a power user like you. I have been tempted a few times. It would be more like Debian than anything else, but there is a rolling release which should be uptodate.
After Slackware being my “goto” distro in the 1990’s I then flirted with SUSE, but not OpenSUSE - SLES (7? 9?) - I ran SUSE everywhere, desktop (dual boot with Windows XP) and headless server - for a good 3-4 years or more… I used to put Red Hat 6 (NOTE “Red Hat Enterprise” this was the free version) in customer sites that wanted Linux…
But then I accidentally came across Ubuntu “by chance” - I’ve mentioned it before, how that happened.
VMware released VMware player around 2004 - and also a “marketplace” to download pre-built “appliances” (relatively common place these days) - one of them was called “Browser Appliance” - turned out it was Ubuntu 4.x and the only application installed was Firefox… Was impressed with how it looked and felt. So took a look at Ubuntu 4.x on a spare Toshiba laptop I had - and - EVERYTHING worked - I mean EVERYTHING - wifi, ethernet, graphics - OUT OF THE BOX! Installing XP on this thing was a drawn out experiment in torture (find driver X, attempt to install driver X, at nauseam) - but Ubuntu was 100% plug and play…
The rest is / was history… I’ve distro-hopped every few years or so - but always end up back at Ubuntu… The luxury of having a spare device I don’t need - lets me distro-hop… I actually ran elementary for 18 months or so on a “gaming” laptop (it wasn’t a big clunky one - but a streamlined one, only “gaming” 'cause it had an NVidia GPU - but an extended period of involuntary unemployment forced me to sell it for 1/3 what I paid) and it was okay… This Ryzen Thinkpad is “nearly” a gaming laptop (not dissimilar specs to the SteamDeck) - so - Borderlands 2 was okay on XFCE on MX AHS…
I did try the SteamDeck SteamOS 3 (arch based) on this device, but wasn’t happy with the experience.
I reckon sticking closely to a Ubuntu experience makes sense in my case, and PopOS kinda fulfills that… and quite a few Linux gamers use PopOs… and I’d like to see how it files on Pi4B with 8 GB of RAM…
Also - I’ve tried nearly all of the DEs… I would have stuck with Unity, but Canonical dropped it (and no - I don’t want to try the community run remixes - I want the backing of a vendor, not some teenage backyard hobbiest) - and everytime I’ve tried KDE, or LXDE (this is why I LOATHE RPi’s Pixel desktop) I’ve HATED it… So I reckon I’ll stick with Gnome… for the time being…
- Gnome 4.x (there are things I hate in it - but it’s the best compromise)
- XFCE
- Pantheon (elementary - but booting out the founder I reckon means they’re doomed)
NOT in the running :
- MATE
- Cinnamon
- Gnome 2
and I recently read somewhere, that PopOS are going to eventually have their own DE… Wait and see I guess?
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OK, I was just thinking of good reliable distros
You are lucky having a spare box go try things on.
It is really about the quality of the people who make the distro… hard thing to pin down and it changes.
I’ve been satisfied with Pop!_OS for the past couple months. There are times I am bugged by some little thing I liked about Ubuntu (Gnome) that is missing here or just acts differently. So far I haven’t been bothered enough to go back to Ubuntu. Some of the default theme looks cartoonish to me, but I’ve changed a few things and it doesn’t bother me now.
OpenSUSE is something I haven’t touched yet, but maybe I should do that at some point. We had a few servers running SLES several years ago. At least one is still running.
If I had my way all our servers would be Ubuntu. It runs well, it’s a popular platform developers use as a target so most any piece of software is available and supported, and we can get official support if we want to.
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I use the Fedora-Cinamon spin here. I like it a LOT! In fact, I switched from LMDE to Fedora-Cinamon because I liked the Fedora spin so much after an experiment on one of my older laptop PCs. You may want to check it out, then you get what I think is a great combination of a recent kernel (currently 6.1.12 following the most recent upgrade IIRC), a very stable and solid OS, and a great DE.
My2Cents,
Ernie
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