I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
I hate Microsoft and Windows, I want to choose better AND more importantly, see what all this fuss about Linux being awesomest is about
You cant really go wrong, de is more what decides the desktop experience, like theming/look ,etc. Kde plasma, gnome, cinnamon, xfce , etc. or tiling managers like hyprland (id stick to des for now coming from windows)
Ive mostly tried plasma and gnome Kde plasma is windows on steroids, customizable and snappy, tons of settings, most customization built in and not reliant on extensions
Gnome is like chromeos/macos futuristic opinionated, I like it a lot with extensions, slightly better than kde plasma with a lot of extensions imo
Cinnamons like closer to a simple windows experience
xfces lightweight but I think plasmas caught up there?
Deepin and elementary have unique des I think, and pop os with cosmic in alpha
They all come with different preinstalled apps, which are a mix of os and de dependent, like mint with cinnamon may use nemo for files, cachyos with gnome may use nautilus, but I like nemo so on cachyos with gnome I have nemo installed and set as the default.
Kden lives technically kde app, gimp is based off gtk, and so on, but yeah you basically pick a starter for yourself based on what you priortize, I like gaming so cachyos helps me grab packages id otherwise not know about, makes it easy to tweak scheduler, kernel, etc. setup btrfs snapper support and pick different bootloaders grubs, refined, limine, etc.
There are other distros meant to be closer to windows by default, with their theming, de, app picks, etc. just look around distrowatch