My ongoing adventures in using Linux on the desktop landed me on Pop OS, and I must say I like it. A lot more of a "just works" vibe to the basics (as in, getting it installed with sound coming out of the speakers and whatnot), and I've been using it pretty comfortably for a few days now.
Never really stuck with using Linux for my main desktop because of one thing: The time and energy investment for trying a new thing was always just that little bit higher. And one of my #ADD traits is shying away from anything my brain thinks is too energy-consuming to get started, so that's always clashed. But that's all a lot better now, big distros have more welcoming interfaces and I know more things.
Also, the font rendering doesn't look quite as much like ass these days. Used to be a pretty big gap compared to Windows/MacOS on this one.
You're getting the story of my linux adventures because I REALLY don't want the people at my new job to know just how little I know about using and setting up linux for a desktop PC. Trying to make up 20 years of neglect in 2 weeks over here.
@spanksandsnacks
I used to be quite a distro hopper. I was super into configuring all kinds of weird things, getting it set up just right, and then wiping it all and starting over. It was a miracle if I had the same OS on my computer for more than 3 months haha
But I lost the patience for all of that once I started working. Pop OS is great because, like you said, it just works. And it is actually able to set up the NVIDIA graphics card on my laptop without too much hassle.
The other one I like now is Fedora. Getting the GPU working was more difficult (which is why I switched to Pop OS), but otherwise I find it very stable and nice to use right out of the box. Vanilla Gnome is a lot nicer these days too. Pop OS and its custom version of Gnome is a bit less stable, I find.
@ftmsub Yeah, the GPU stuff is an important bit. If you don't get the graphics and performance right, it's useless and this shouldn't need to be hard or leave room for doubt.
Regular Ubuntu seemed nice too, and big plus for LVM and encryption being part of the installer UI (had to fiddle a lot to get this right in Pop, and for my future work PC full disk encryption is a must), but overall I got a more "basics done, go play" vibe with Pop. It didn't feel like a tedious chore with the only payoff being "at least it's not windows and now the fonts are ugly".