NixOS has a cool logo.

There, I said it.

I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.

OpenSUSE just feels all cool and enterprisey and I feel like I’m doing important things when I use my computer

If you want to create a Hannah Montana branded version of ublue kinoite plasma 6, that would be as neat as it gets.

Also there is Cosmic, I am just gonna say

Rust

I currently use pop-os which is an Ubuntu derivative. I use it because it works well, is easy, and it’s smoother than Ubuntu. My second choice would be Kubuntu if I wanted to commit to KDE. My reasons are that I’m doing important business on all my computers and I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot things that don’t work. So I stick to the LTS releases nowadays.

A downside of my approach is that it’s less customizable, not as up to date and slightly constraining.

Over the years I have used a lot of different distributions. I’ve had many success and even more failures.

So many people have strong feelings about their favorite distros. The big differences are about ease of installation and configuration, stability, open source vs. proprietary code, community support and ability to customize. Other than that, they are all basically Linux.

Arch is not for the faint of heart but it is awesome if you can get it installed. And they have a great support community. There are a lot of Arch variants that are easier to install.

I use Arch because it makes installing almost any software package trivially easy via the AUR and if you run into issues, the wiki is there to help.

I wouldn’t suggest arch unless you know it’s issues. I love the distro, but I understand many might not.

It’s the quickest rolling release for most things. When you update, things sometimes break, and break bad. Like the grub issue we all had where you restarted to get a “grub rescue” screen with no way to boot. Like the linux 5.17(I think?) Kernel that had some intel laptops backlights go flash from max to zero, possibly destroying the machine.

You’ll also have some software or drivers with major bugs like the nvidia driver a while ago that stuck brightness at 100% (or 50, in my case) requiring a downgrade of both the kernal, and nvidia driver.

Arch is the first place where new software gets to meet a large userbase and their hardware. The first place it might interact with other new software.

Sometimes you need to manually intervene and change stuff, and this means keeping up with current arch events via their mailing list, lemmy, or reddit (reddit sadly is the safer bet)

If you’re ok with this I’d highly reccomend arch if not only for the AUR. If not, PopOS and Fedora are also pretty sick and, there’s also tumbleweed.

opensuse always had a special place in my heart. it was the first “linux” i successfully installed 17 (welp) years ago. with kde desktop, wich became my goto desktop. both are based in germany, which makes it easy for me to support local open source organisations.

my notebook is running tumbleweed for over 2 years now and i had no problem at all.

for the switch, tho, i’d stick to an ubuntu based distro. there are ubuntu tutorials for litterly everything. i guess mint might be a solid choice. the debian edition is also cool. for the moment, you don’t need a rolling release. you’ll install another distro before eol either because you wrecked your current one, or you want to “try something else”.

if possible, have a sepperate disc (at least partition) for your home folder.

and always keep in mind:
no backup, no merci. =]

Okay, you asked, we deliver ;-) I tried OS/2 and BSD, but did stick with Linux (Using Debian and Arch currently).

"No. That’s it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say “OS/2? Hah. I’ve got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.” – Linus Torvalds

For me it’s just Linux itself that’s cool. I mean, I get the different distros have different opinions and things that make them neat, and that in and of itself is what’s so cool. FWIW I use Ubuntu (server) and desktop.

Fedora just documents itself incredibly well, plus all the pushes they’re doing with immutable distributions and somehow making it seem simple is a wonderful thing.

I installed Arch because I liked the idea of building everything from the ground up, choosing all of my utilities, and gentoo would take too long on my laptop. Still haven’t finished my DE 2 computers and 3 years later

Just gotta crank the desktop effects up to 11 on kwin

I think what you mean with “neat” is the desktop environment (DE), which hugely defines how a distro looks like.
Most major distros (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) have have the most major ones.

Here’s my post about distro choices if you’re interested, since it’s mostly more about DE choice: https://feddit.de/post/9087676

Let me start with my unbiased opinion. There’s something for everybody in the Linux land. You have to try different distros out and settle with the one you like most. I usually advocate for the path of least resistance - ie, to start with the easiest distro. Mint is a good first distro. Fedora and Debian are also reasonable choices. But I have also seen a rare few cases where people start directly with a high effort distro like Arch - so it’s not impossible.

For a lot of people, Mint may satisfy their needs - a user friendly distro that needs no tinkering and meets all of their needs. Some people though, like to tune everything. Such people can eventually grow into something like Arch.

I personally like Gentoo. Not because it’s compiled from source, but because it’s easy to work with its Portage package management system. Another one worth trying out is QubesOS, if you’re into security.