Start with Fedora KDE or Kubuntu

I regularly read questions from new users on Reddit and KDE’s discussion forum asking what Linux-based operating system they should start out with, or asking for help after choosing an unsuitable one.

Inspired by a recent example on Reddit, I decided to write this post for them.

Not for you, O advanced reader who is happily using NixOS, Gentoo, or Hannah Montana Linux! If you’re content, I’d encourage you to do something more useful with the next five minutes of your life. These minutes are for for your friend who’s currently using Windows.

A major problem our corner of the world faces is that there’s absolutely terrible information about which Linux-based operating system to choose when you’re ready to make the move:

https://distrowatch.com/ shows approximately five billion options and provides no real guidance for making a decision.

Asking “what Linux distro should I use” to a search engine, an AI, or YouTube returns a veritable graveyard of bad advice, link-spam blog posts, and interactive “help me choose a distro” websites that will steer you wrong 100% of the time.

Famous YouTuber Linus Sebastian has probably made tens of thousands of dollars repeatedly and somewhat hilariously choosing bad options in front of a camera.

With so little to go on, people can be forgiven for making bad choices. So today I’d like to share my personal recommendations — at least for KDE-centric options! KDE maintains https://kde.org/distributions/, which includes four pretty good ones. But I’m going to be bold and recommend only two of them:

Choose Fedora KDE or Kubuntu

Both Fedora KDE and Kubuntu share a lot of positive traits:

1. Secure Boot is supported, so you can install them on devices that ship with secure boot enabled (which is most sold in the 15 years or so).
2. Included software repositories are large, so you’ll probably be able to get most or all of the apps you need without having to add third-party sources.
3. Software from their built-in repositories is updated reasonably quickly, meaning newer hardware and software are generally well-supported. For Kubuntu, this is only the case if you upgrade every 6 months rather than sticking with the LTS versions, so do that!
4. Their developer communities do real QA to ensure that users are protected from most short-term and major regressions from upstream.
5. Their user communities are large, with good documentation and support resources.
6. KDE software is well-integrated and offers a good experience, with nothing obviously missing or broken.
7. Their core package management systems are robust and integrated well into KDE’s Discover software center app.
8. Popular proprietary software and media codecs are easy to make available during initial installation or setup, and don’t de-stabilize the system as a result of doing so.

There’s just a lot to like here.

But are Fedora KDE and Kubuntu perfect? No. In particular, both are made from mutable packages assembled on your system. This means:

• If a system upgrade gets gets interrupted in the middle by a power cut or hardware failure, the system can end up unbootable without intervention by an expert.
• Without manual maintenance, long-term installations can end up drifting out of sync with what a new installation would provide, introducing weird issues that are hard to debug.
• Adding third-party software repositories is tempting but unsafe, and can introduce package conflicts that render the system unable to update without intervention by an expert.
• If you tinker too deeply without knowing what you’re doing, you can accidentally damage these systems in a way that requires intervention by an expert to repair.
• Major system upgrades take a long time to complete, with multiple reboots (as long as you keep the “offline updates” feature turned on, which is at least a bit safer than in-place updates).

So, not perfect. But, I think, good enough.

What about the immutable OSs? They solve those problems!

Indeed they do! For whose who aren’t familiar, there’s a new crop of operating systems on the horizon, so-called “immutable” OSs — a terrible term since it implies they’re completely locked down and unchanging, which are not the case.

These operating systems offer some form of a read-only core OS, plus various mechanisms for overlaying software on top of it while preventing the core from being damaged over time. This improves safety around system updates in particular.

Practical options here include Aurora, Fedora Kinoite, Bazzite, openSUSE Kalpa, and KDE’s own in-progress KDE Linux. Valve’s highly-successful SteamOS is also in this category, though as of early 2026, it’s not yet intended for general-purpose usage on arbitrary hardware the way the others are.

I feel as strongly that this model of operating system represents the future as I do that said future has not yet fully arrived for everyone.

The truth is, while these OSs solve many longstanding problems in traditional package-based operating systems, they also also introduce a plethora of difficult-to-avoid rough edges and paper cuts for general use. Those who work on these OSs need to smooth out those rough edges before their work can go mainstream. I’m personally involved in an effort to do so for KDE Linux, and I’ll be the first to admit it’s not there yet.

But I don’t like Fedora KDE or Kubuntu!

If you already have a preferred OS, you’re not in the target audience for this article. 🙂 You’re opinionated and competent enough that you can probably make anything work, and whatever you’ve ended up using likely perfectly suits your own personal tastes.

New users have none of your skills or opinions; they need a general recommendation for something that’s good enough, safe enough, and not too weird. That’s what I’m writing about here.

To be clear, I’m not saying other Linux-based OSs are bad. On the contrary, many are great, and better in a lot of ways than the two I’ve mentioned. Fedora KDE and Kubuntu have other annoyances beyond just “being made of packages” that I wrote about earlier: neither sets up any kind of emergency rollback system by default; their tentative forays into the realm of Snap and Flatpak as additions to their traditional packages complicate things unnecessarily; and I don’t love their goofy wallpapers. These operating systems could be even better for sure.

But whaddaya gonna do, nothing’s perfect. What I’m saying here is that I think these two are good enough to be the best choices for new users in the KDE world.

Well OK, but why should I listen to you, anyway!?

Ideally you shouldn’t; you should do your own research and make your own decisions. But that can be hard if you’re starting from square one and you don’t know what to look for!

So I’d say the important part is to look for other options out there that share the same traits I wrote in bold text in the “Choose Fedora KDE or Kubuntu” section. Those are what will make a Linux-based OS easier and more comfortable to adopt.

But no matter what you choose, have fun and see it as an adventure! Switching your operating system out for another one is something most people will never do; you’re automatically an interesting person for even making the effort.

If you run into problems, ask humans for help. Don’t ask AI, and don’t go looking for personal workarounds that will only benefit you and might break in the future. Be a part of the community; learn and grow, and help others do the same.

Good luck!