I'm thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I'm wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I've heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don't like Cinnamon all too much.
What's a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?
edit: Woah, it seems that you're able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?
edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences...
On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I'm open to using either.
I'm running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It's one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.
I would say I'm open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don't want to do anything too out of my scope. I don't want to spend too many hours setting it up, I'd rather have something that works mostly out of the box :D
I want a stable distro as in I don't want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I'm open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.
edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)
My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?
edit 4:
Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD
now I’m slowly installing my programs again…
Yeah this is important to know as installing two DE's can and will cause a lot of problems.
I've read, but have not tried, that installing each DE under it's own user can prevent the majority of these problems. This also prevents using apps from different DE's simultaneously, you have to switch users to do so. Session saving makes it faster than restarting constantly but it can still interrupt workflow. Again, I have not tried this myself but have considered trying it.
more like small nuisances that can be easily ignored
what? DEs are usually installed system-wide, i've never heard of an user-local installation of plasma or gnome
some nuisances are not so ignorable. having duplicate apps all over the place, each with their own settings, so if you forget which one you are using, you might find yourself spending more time in settings than desired. then there's browsers. switching DE's can cause browsers to log you out of everything, so switching often and you end up having to sign in to everything repeatedly, which for some can interrupt workflow and be frustrating. then there's the fact that some use gtk and some use qt so title bar buttons and program menu's can become confusing and ununified. can these things be ignored? sure, some people can. some cannot, such as people with ADHD for example, who can easily be sidetracked when the "file > open" menu is in a hamburger menu in one app and a bar on another.
I did say that I read about, but did not try, installing two and setting different users for them. i believe the idea is that they are both installed but don't generate config files until you log in with a user. so keeping two users, one for each DE, works but only if you never log in with the wrong user. from what i understand, i could be wrong. i believe SDDM and LightDM can both facilitate switching DE's from the login screen.
that's subjective, so i'm not going to question your preferences
however, i have both gnome and plasma installed in all my systems and there are some things i'd like to point out from my experience
the defaults are DE-specific, so usually you won't need to think about this, as gnome defaults to gnome apps and plasma defaults to kde apps. it's not common for something like gnome's file browser to open pdfs in okular or vice-versa -- though it can happen sometimes
the one time this was a problem to me was when, for a while, opening the directory containing a downloaded file in firefox while running plasma would open nautilus instead of dolphin. but then it got fixed on its own
i'm not saying problems can't happen with that system, just that they don't happen all the time for everything
i have never seen that happen. the closest i got to this was getting kicked from slack because i forgot the keyring password
but that doesn't have much to do with different DEs being installed, does it? the toolkit choice is entirely up to the application
not to invalidate anyone's experience with adhd, but, for the record, i have adhd and this has never been an issue to me
my point is: having multiple DEs installed is pretty common and fully well supported. nearly every single session manager supports it (the only one i can think of that doesn't support that is xdm). there are some small issues that crop up from time to time which might put you off from doing it (which is fine), but this is not some crazy kind of fringe unsupported configuration
and you can uninstall everything from the other DE anyway, so there's literally no problem about trying it out
Maybe things have changed and it isn't that bad anymore. Doing a search for something along the lines of "installing multiple desktop environments" and you will see there are plenty of people suggesting to not do this. Probably just as many saying it's usually fine. Note that the OP asked for a beginner friendly distro. That implies they might not be experienced enough to understand how some things work.
Saying "literally no problem about trying it out" is incorrect in my opinion and this applies to all contexts I can imagine, whether related to Linux or not. There is always a potential problem when trying something out. Nothing is idiot-proof or immune to wear and tear or perfectly free from bugs, software or literal. I personally am blessed with the uncanny ability to make the wrong choice in the majority of situations where I have a choice. That may even include the choice to make this reply.
Maybe for your use case, on the hardware you have, you haven't had any issues, with the software you use. That doesn't mean the issues don't exist. I'll mention again, do a search online. There are problems that can happen. They have happened recently. They have happened a lot. Not everyone has them.
I hate to come back to this example, since OP never stated they had it, but since you have ADHD, you may be familiar with analysis paralysis and executive dysfunction after being overwhelmed by too many things. Maybe forgetting which text editor worked best and seeing a dozen in the application launcher and start searching for the right one but by the time it is found the short term memory loss kicked in again and the original reason why it was needed has been forgotten. There could be frustration when starting to hyperfocus but an app is not working the way it did and so instead the night is spent grinding through preference menus already configured previously and eventually seeing that an update for one of the DE's rewrote a config file or is using a differsion of python or it could be more than one of these things happening and one program also has a bug that spams the journal so troubleshooting becomes much more difficult... I'm digressing and projecting too much.
Have you ever uninstalled a DE after having more than one installed? Sure, it is possible. It's easier and less time consuming to reinstall the whole OS in my experience. I'm not a professional, far from it. I know it didn't go well. I can't remember the specifics, I think I added a KDE package while using xfce and accidentally hit continue instead of cancel. It brought in all of KDE, which I didn't want so I tried to remove it and everything broke because it removed shared xfce dependencies. It might be better now. I'd prefer not to try until I'm confident I know what I'm doing and what to do when things fail afterwards.
My point originally was, and still is, that it is often not recommended to do, especially for a beginner. I mean no malice towards you and hope this doesn't seem aggressive or angry.
first of all
don't worry, that's not at all how you came across. different points of view, that's all
anyway, i'm not going to have the energy to reply to this point by point. i will say that i might be biased for being a total linux nerd, so things might appear easier to me than they actually are (even when i take that very fact into account, i'm sure there's an xkcd for that). but my main point still stands: having multiple DEs installed is a supported configuration in most linux distributions. it's not a hack or a fringe corner case, even if it might not be recommended for beginner or even intermediate users.
there's still one thing in your comment that confuses me, though
don't you just use the default one? maybe you like a specific text editor and then you'll need to change your defaults, but you wouldn't need to that for every single case