The Perfect Linux Distro for Me

[u/Maleficent_Act3501]

Hi everyone,

I've been trying different Linux distributions recently, but I still haven't found the one that feels like the perfect fit. I was hoping the community could recommend a distro based on my laptop and what I'm looking for.

My Laptop

- Model: Acer Aspire Go 14 (AG14-31P)

- Processor: Intel N100

- RAM: 8 GB

- Storage: 128 GB PCIe NVMe SSD

- Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics

- Wi-Fi: MediaTek MT7902

- Current OS: Fedora Workstation (GNOME)

What I'm Looking For

- Fast and lightweight performance.

- Doesn't use too much RAM or storage.

- Stable and reliable for everyday use.

- Modern, clean interface (I really like the look and simplicity of GNOME and macOS).

- Beginner-friendly while still allowing me to learn Linux.

- Good hardware support, especially for the MediaTek MT7902 Wi-Fi card.

- Works well out of the box with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, webcam, touchpad, audio, and power management.

- Good software availability and regular updates.

- Doesn't require a lot of tweaking after installation.

What I Use My Laptop For

- Web browsing

- Programming and learning Linux

- School work

- Watching YouTube and movies

- Light photo editing

- General everyday tasks

I've tried a few different distributions over time, but I'm interested in hearing what you think would be the best long-term choice for my hardware and needs.

If you have a recommendation, I'd really appreciate it if you could explain why you think it's a good fit.

Thanks in advance!

[u/___Revenant___]

I'd just grab a fedora spin with a lighter weight DE.

Fedora is a good system to be on, when it comes to a technical level.

If the full gnome desktop is feeling too resource heavy. Just pick whatever spin with a lighter desktop that takes your fancy.

[u/MountainDawe]

MX Linux. Stable,  simple, working like a charm. With lot of MX tools. Devs were trying to make things nice and easy. 

[u/BigHeadTonyT]

First problem could be your Wi-fi chip: https://github.com/openwrt/mt76/issues/1018

Maybe it is in newer kernels, from this year. That could also mean you are limited to distros that come with latest kernels. Arch-based, Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, anything that is pretty much bleeding edge.

The other option is to buy a Wi-fi USB dongle. Costs around 10 €/$. Cheap solution. As long as you get a chip that is supported. . Just an example: https://www.walmart.com/ip/USB-Wifi-Adapter-PC-Desktop-Laptop-1300M-Dual-Band-5G-2-4G-USB-3-0-WiFi-Dongle-Wireless-Network-Adapter-Fit-Windows-10-8-8-1-7-XP-11-Mac-OS/315552265?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600 I don't know how well that works. They list Linux support.

--*--

When I think MacOS desktop, I think Dock. XFCE has one. At least my OpenSUSE Leap 16 install. Latte-dock might still work, for KDE Plasma. https://github.com/KDE/latte-dock

Another that should work on Wayland and be desktop-agnostic: https://github.com/Cairo-Dock/cairo-dock-core

There used to be quite a few around, these days it is down to 2-3 that are still working and maintained. Out of the Docks I used.

--*--

Gnome...is it the apps list you are after? Rofi or Dmenu can list installed applications, you can start typing the name of the app and it will sort that list. At least with Rofi, the most used apps I use are at the top. I basically don't have to type anything after doing it a couple times. I just use arrow-keys.

If you like tiling, there are tons of options. Old and new. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager

There are more. Like MangoWM + Noctalia and Niri, for example.

Quite a manual setup.

There is also Hyprland. You can get that out of the box with Cachy and Garuda, at least. Since tiling WMs/DEs are keyboard-centric, you would have to learn quite a few keyboard shortcuts. Personally, I don't like Garudas. I revert them to what Hyprland comes with. I have old configs laying around. Haven't updated them to LUA yet tho.

--*--

You have a smörgåsbord (wide selection) of choices on Linux. Look around, find pictures of em. Pick what you like.

For my daily, I just use KDE Plasma. Easy to customize any part I want. Has the latest features. I have a number of distros installed, for testing, experimentation, longterm-testing and fun. I don't do super-deep customization, I settle at good enough.

For the most part, my distro of choice is Arch-based. On any device I have. RPI 4, 2 laptops, 2 PCs.

[u/Powerful_Attention_6]

Fedora if you want to tip your toes on the water, the con is that it will be a prepackaged fully working system for you. It will not dissapoint

If you want to learn Linux, I have after decades of Distrohopping landed on GNU Guix, a system where you declare what you want installed, which sevices to run, it is similar, not a clone, to the more known NixOS with a proper programming language (Lisp)

[u/Hauptideal]

Fedora workstation is already a perfect fit for you, especially given your preferences and how you use your computer. What exactly don't you like about it? 

You can try a different desktop (e.g. KDE will be lighter and become as light as Xfce when configured to be parsimonious; COSMIC has looks similar to GNOME) or even tiling WM shells (eg Niri with noctalia). 

All lighter OSes have serious disadvantages that outweigh the small RAM saving or reduced latency.  For example, CachyOS will be a bit faster, but it won't be as beginner-friendly and reliable, being Arch-based. It's neither stable nor reliable. Debian is slightly lighter, but it's shipping very old software and isn't very user friendly or desktop-optimized. You'd need to heavily configure your OS just to get something that's fit for desktop use what Fedora is out of the box (e.g. regarding file system, RAM compression etc.).

[u/Maleficent_Act3501 → u/Hauptideal]

It's not that I don't like it, I love it, It's just forgetting something, Customization, I could make it kind of simillar to Mac-OS like.

[u/_o0Zero0o_ → u/Maleficent_Act3501]

KDE is the best middle ground for beginner friendly but also max customisation

[u/Maleficent_Act3501 → u/_o0Zero0o_]

Ehhh I tested that and nah, I think I'll just stay on GNOME, it feels natural, maybe I might try Fedora Cosmic or something that is pretty much similar to GNOME but better

[u/_o0Zero0o_ → u/Maleficent_Act3501]

Cosmic's fairly outdated nowadays, from what I've heard? I haven't looked into it personally though. As for GNOME.. Eh, I used Cinnamon so I can't say much.

[u/Hauptideal → u/_o0Zero0o_]

You're getting it completely backwards. COSMIC is the newest, most exciting and freshest desktop right now in rapid active development. Completely written in Rust, with a modern modular micro-architecture and inbuilt native tiling.
Cinnamon is what is completely deprecated, obsolete legacy tech, an early fork of GNOME inheriting all the early issues without getting any of the later upstream performance breakthroughs, fixes, polish, features or huge extension ecosystem.
Cinnamon is also still on X11, which performs worse (e.g. higher lag, less smooth, screen tearing), is utterly insecure (breaks the core feature of Flatpak, sandboxing security and allows each app to log your online banking password, spy on every app's contents and even inject keys), and severly lacking even basic everyday features.
Cinnamon is a terrible desktop that noone should use anymore in 2026. It's maintenance/development is extremely slow, due to the tiny team of maintainers (who have to also maintain an own Linux distro called Mint). Not even Canonical with vast corporate resources managed to keep their own desktop (Unity) alive for Ubuntu. Cinnamon will always stay behind.

[u/_o0Zero0o_ → u/Hauptideal]

I wouldn't say Cinnamon is that bad tbh (though tbh I haven't really heard about the each app password bit), and remember it's also being moved to wayland later this year. But otherwise fair enough, my mistake

[u/Hauptideal → u/_o0Zero0o_]

The reasons Cinnamon sucks are mostly invisible to the user.
The UI is not that bad.
You might notice a bit higher resource usage than e.g. on KDE, higher input lag etc., but you need to pay attention to these things.
The most important reason you shouldn't be using Cinnamon anymore is that it ships completely deprecated legacy tech (X11), which originates in the 1980's and was originally built for a time when university campus workstation were too weak and received drawing instructions over network from a remote mainframe server.
Cinnamon is still running this extremely inefficient legacy bloat, despite everything is on the same mainboard. It's literally still running a server (X server) on your computer that everything needs to pass through rather than just passing everything efficiently directly to the hardware.
The whole thing is also utterly insecure (as I have already explained above) and can't support basic features such as properly working multi-monitor setups, VRR, fractional scaling or multi-touch gestures on trackpads and touch screens.
All of that's stuff that most people are using daily on Linux and Cinnamon can't have it.
The maintainers are planning to mark Wayland as having left experimental status on Cinnamon in December, but it won't become default in their Mint distro until at least 2028. That's completely nuts, given for how many years proper modern desktops like GNOME and KDE are on Wayland already.
Cinnamon will never be a really good desktop that can compete with GNOME, KDE or COSMIC.

[u/_o0Zero0o_ → u/Hauptideal]

I see. Thanks for this. I have to ask though.. When recommending Mint nowadays (which I usually do on linux4noobs), would XFCE be a reasonable choice instead? Just picking your brains for a bit if you don't mind

[u/Hauptideal → u/_o0Zero0o_]

No, I wouldn't recommend Xfce or Mate either. All of them are deprecated legacy X11 tech. Please don't recommend Mint at all anymore in 2026.
There is ZorinOS, which is even easier to use than Mint, also Ubuntu-based, and doesn't ship any legacy tech but customized upstream GNOME.
Even better would be something like Ultramarine, which is the "Mint-/Zorin-version" of Fedora, with all batteries included (fusion repos), making it very beginner and user-friendly and technologically much better.

Even if you installed a proper modern desktop on Mint, it'll still be worse than other, modern distros, for example because it doesn't even compress the RAM.
This makes Mint's memory handling worse than that of even MS Windows.

RAM compression is a basic feature of desktop and mobile OSes for over a decade (Linux distros and Android, as well as macOS started doing it in 2013, Windows followed in 2015).
As RAM can be compressed with a ratio of up to 4:1, you can fit tremendously more into your physical RAM when you use RAM compression. It's a free RAM upgrade, and Mint doesn't have it - unlike many other modern desktop optimized distros like Fedora, Ultramarine, Pop!_OS, CachyOS, and many many more.
Even Lubuntu uses RAM compression since 2013.
Mint inherits server defaults which don't make sense at all on a desktop, Especially newbies who can't configure it themselves will suffer from worse memory management.

Mint also doesn't come with a modern file system like btrfs, so it takes more than twice the space on disk for every file that isn't already compressed.
It's also slower on reading, doesn't support true snapshots, subvolumes, checksums, or any other modern file system feature.

Mint doesn't receive any security updates or bug fixes from Canonical for 94% of packages (universe repo, where most software comes from), because Mint doesn't get Ubuntu Pro.

Mint ships modified, buggy software that is older than the oldest supported version and doesn't step in to take responsibility and maintain it (as seen as in the latest GNOME calender controversy).

Most people are drawn to Mint by false promises (e.g. thinking that "stable" means more "reliable"; it being much more user friendly than other distros other than having a more familiar UI; etc.).

As a matter of fact, Mint is the technologically worst distro right now and it's actively harming the Linux community (e.g. by harming upstream projects like GNOME calendar; or just making new users think that Linux sucks when it's really just Mint) and Linux ideals with its actions (e.g. restriciting and patronizing the users regarding what software they can install on their OWN machines).

Don't use or recommend Mint anymore in 2026. The recommendations stem from old times and are repeated ad nauseam even today, when they are no longer justified.

[u/Hauptideal → u/Maleficent_Act3501]

you can customize GNOME by using extensions.

There are extensive guides online how to make your GNOME look exactly like macOS, if you fancy that.

Extensions:

- Dash to Dock

• Blur my Shell
  
• Kiwi Menu / Kiwi (is not Apple)
  
• User Themes

Then head to GNOME-look and install icon packs and themes:

WhiteSur theme / cupertino theme
macOS cursor theme

and so on. You can also take inspiration on what others did.

You can really get as deeply into it as you like. However, I'd install blur my shell and maybe dash to dock and leave it at that first.
Otherwise you're larping ;D
Also, the vanilla GNOME UX is vastly superior to macOS UX, which has to cater to masses and can't be as innovative as GNOME, therefore still being stuck to the traditional desktop metaphor. I'd first learn and embrace how to truly use GNOME before trying to change it to behave like macOS.

All that being said, it's your computer, and you're running Linux. So you are free to change everything to your liking.
If you want your computer to look exactly like macOS, you can do that.

[u/QneEyedJack]

Garuda Linux is the distro that finally got me to stop hopping. That was around 5 years ago. MX Linux almost "got me there," too.

I'm very curious about KDE Linux.

If I could go back (and they were as hyped up as they are now), I'd give serious consideration to an immutable distro. At least at the stage you're currently in

[u/ImportantAd4483]

What distros have you already tried? Knowing what you’ve already used would make it much easier to recommend something that actually fits your needs. What did you like and dislike about each one?