Pop os or garuda

Hey
I want to switch to linux but I am confused which distro should I
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Pop os or garuda
I am reading articles but they are increasing my confusion

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Linux Mint.

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Try them both, and maybe also others!
The reviews and articles can be useful when you get a bit more experienced. At the beginning you have to try.
Read mainly for general Linux aspects, such as the difference between released-based distros (like pop os, mint and most of the others) and rolling distros (like Garuda). Normally the former are better for beginners, but if you are willing to learn, it should not be a problem to start with the latter...

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I agree, Pop OS is good as well, especially if you are a gamer, but Linux Mint is another outstanding newbie option. What they both do well is gut the horrible parts of Ubuntu...cough, Snaps, cough.

I would not recommend Arch or Arch based distros for beginners. Even though Garuda is by far the best newbie friendly Arch distro out there (easy GUIs,) the rolling, cutting-edge, release environment can cause issues where you will be forced into troubleshooting eventually. A moderate to experienced linux user would regard this as a challenge, where a newbie might become frustrated. Things to consider. Good luck...and at least you are on the right path. :wink:

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My experiences (for what they're worth):

Personally I haven't had great experiences with Pop_OS, with things not working as expected - especially when it comes to the new Gnome 40 desktop. And I'm quite familiar with the 'buntu-sphere. Pop_OS is very pretty, but I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

For a newbie, I agree with others here and recommend Linux Mint, every time. It's got reasonable (not great, but good) aesthetics. And the chances of anything going wrong and having a bad first experience with Linux are probably lower with this distro than any other. It's the Toyota of the Linux world - reliable, plain, and boring. 100% start here.

MX Linux - Also reliable. But ugly. So ugly.

Ubuntu would be a great distro if not for the fact that Canonical can be real dicks.

Garuda Linux is surprisingly newbie-friendly (if you leave it alone) but I really don't think that is its focus. There are still things which would trip up a newbie: the Setup-Assistant is a huge time saver for experienced users but I suspect the choices might be overwhelming for someone migrating from Micro$oft. Ditto the Settings Manager. The KDE partition manager shipped with Garuda isn't quite fit for purpose in my opinion. Some of the FireDragon customizations and pre-installed extensions might cause problems for a newbie. Personally, I still haven't been able to complete a successful encrypted installation with Garuda for some reason. My take on Garuda after using it for over a year now is that it saves me, an intermediate user, doing all the customizations I would make to pure Arch - they've been done for me.

(Edited to remove references to a distro which apparently must remain nameless.)

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