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:
- 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).
- 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.
- 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!
- Their developer communities do real QA to ensure that users are protected from most short-term and major regressions from upstream.
- Their user communities are large, with good documentation and support resources.
- KDE software is well-integrated and offers a good experience, with nothing obviously missing or broken.
- Their core package management systems are robust and integrated well into KDE’s Discover software center app.
- 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, Kalpa Desktop, 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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Even as someone who has used Linux for several years, I find it obscure attempting to add H.264/5 decoding support to Fedora. Until the patents expire for that codec (~2030..?), this will continue to be an issue.
Kubuntu is probably the only good option.
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Fedora has a page in the first-run wizard that lets you do this, while Kubuntu has it in the installer I believe. Kubuntu’s approach is harder to miss, but they both offer it.
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Really? Last I heard (Fedora 41-ish), Fedora refused to do this because it’s illegal for them to provide decoders for H.264 without paying licensing fees to Via-La, as they’re a US entity. And even pointing to RPM Fusion in the installer wizard was seen as too easy.
Oh, wait, I remember now. Fedora includes openH264 for free because of Cisco. That’s…not a good decoder. It actually fails to decode H.264 High 10 profile properly, which is fairly common outside of the web. You’ll end up with a bunch of green bars and flickering in your video player.
I actually did a bit of work two years and one month ago looking at this: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/h-264-support-in-fedora-workstation-by-default/114521
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Hi, friend. To remove non operational (intentional, via Fedora: not only fees, but even plaintiffs) plugins is easy as:$ <code>sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg –allowerasing –enablerepo=rpmfusion* # remove plugins não-operacionais</code>After, one can:S <code>udo dnf install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs libva libva-utils gstreamer-ffmpeg libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd gstreamer1-plugin-mpg123 mpg123-libs vlc vlc-plugins-extra vlc-devel kaffeine xine-lib* flac faad2 sox totem-pl-parser kmplayer smplayer libdvbpsi amarok amarok-utils audacious pavucontrol pavumeter libmad rygel minidlna HandBrake-gui vobcopy plymouth-theme-solar plymouth-theme-spinfinity libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd kget libdvbv5 dvdrip dvd95 amrnb amrwb faad2 flac gpac-libs lame mplayer x264 x265</code>… to have all plugins.As I “sweep” everything, at each Fedora launch, I have a script with all the “Get New Fedora”.
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I use Fedora since its birth, 2003 and ever KDE Plasma as DE. Fedora, besides Suse, seem to have the better KDE “Prêt À Porter”, I mean better polishment, better KDE way ready to use.
I used sometime concurrently Kubuntu, once it was my enterprise authorized GNU-Linux Distro. No way. It is an impolite stone, but I need diamonds to make it happen.
Fedora ever.
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I haven’t looked at Kubuntu in a while, but a few years back my impression was that it was being treated as a bit of a poor relation to Ubuntu, and wasn’t really getting enough love. This seems to be a common fate of a distro’s non-flagship desktops.
At the time, Fedora’s incarnation of KDE seemed more polished; in fact by my lights it was the only real rival to PCLinuxOS. Everything works as I expect.
As a KDE user, that matters to me.
So that’s how I wound up tilted into the Fedora camp.
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If ubuntu were to drop snaps I would switch in a minute. I know you can use the mint method to block it and switch to firefox deb but it is a pain…
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If a person has enough knowledge to dislike snaps or flatpaks, this blog post is not for him.
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Due to issues with Plasma 6 and external NTFS drives I reverted a very new Lenovo lappy to Debian 12 and Plasma 5.27. That was 15 months ago and it hasn’t had a single problem since.
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What issues did you run into? Did you report them?
I hope so, because if not, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll run into them again when you do upgrade — either by choice or necessity.
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I asked about it in KDE Discuss at the time:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/some-usb-devices-stop-working-after-24-04-change/25600
I also had a more serious problem that I didn’t see coming until it was too late. The new installation on my other laptop fried the battery. The result was a cracked motherboard.
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I strongly disagree, but let me explain.
We are going in the wrong way all the time.
We make installation easier, package maintenance easier and so on. Until users hit a wall, with 250mph and have to fire up Konsole. – And the we have ‘appled’ users who can click or swipe, but do not understand anything.
2. The nothing can go wrong dilemma
Secure boot, immutable OS, snaps, containers and nothing will go wrong. Until users are locked out of their own hardware, old libraries are used to break out of sandboxes and no maintainer is left.
The best decision I made while going Linux was fighting with Gentoo on the command line. It was hard, tiresome and worth it!
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This is fine advice for a person whose goal is to become a technical master of their computer. But this article is for a different kind of person whose desires and hobbies run in different directions.
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Yes, that was my way and it was the hard way, but the dilemmas are for everyone. I see this every day at work. People who have no idea how a computer works, but work with it every day. If anything goes wrong, they are completely helpless. And the reason is learned ignorance. The believe that it is okay to know nothing. We should not endorse that. Neither by promising that there are ‘newbie distros’, where they will never see the command line, nor by trying to make everything failproof while discarting proven mechanics.
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In general I agree, but this has no limiting principle. Should people who drive cars also become semi-pro mechanics? Should people who own houses become semi-pro plumbers, electricians, masons, carpenters and roofers? Should we build or refinish our own furniture instead of buying Ikea junk? Grow our own food?
Ultimately there aren’t enough hours in the day for even a committed person to become an expert in everything they interact with in the modern world.
Those who can succeed at any of this or can even try in the first place are the best of us, and I admire them. But I feel like I can’t blame anyone who isn’t able to, and that it’s not realistic to expect it of everyone.
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It is not about becoming an expert, it is about becoming capable. To drive a car you have to learn to drive and it was once common to do some maintenance yourself. People also usually know how to drill a hole into a wall and that you should not grab the head of the drill and power it on… But nowadays all this is fading and we as experts and builders should stand against it.
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I agree that Kubuntu works well, is simple, stable and offers a great entry point for those new to Linux. I don’t currently use it at home, but I’ve been using it at work for many years. It is incredible how such a powerful tool can work well for both developers and inexperienced users. Plasma works extremely well.
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Hi Nate, what do you think about KDE Neon? I always thought it was the best distribution for KDE, and to my surprise you never mentioned it in this comparison. I’ve been using it for more than 7 years and it works wonderfully. Greetings from Argentina!
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KDE neon has essentially been “relegated” to act as a showcase/test-bed. Out of necessity, KDE Neon upgrades QT (and other libraries) from what Ubuntu LTS ships, and that can cause incompatibilities (to outright dependency issues) when using PPAs/3rd party repositories/even some software in official Ubuntu repos in rare cases.
If you only care about KDE software and not much else (or are willing/able to use snap/flatpack/AppImage apps for most anything outside KDE software/default Ubuntu LTS repos) it’s probably going to work fine, but it’s not meant for a “general user experience”.
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KDE neon was a good idea, and a good first step for KDE to take in the journey of building our own OS.
neon has technical flaws that are not easily solvable, though. Updating the base to make newer KDE software build on it breaks the base distro’s LTS promise and requires a lot of QA and packaging labor to re-stabilize. Providing KDE software through distro packaging is also very laborious. There are also base distro decisions that KDE neon wants to undo, but can’t fully undo.
Overall I would say that over time, the drawbacks of neon’s approach became clear and caused the project to lose enough contributors that it no longer has enough labor to keep it going stably, let alone develop it in new and better directions.
The person currently maintaining it is doing a heroic job. But he’s only one person.
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@Nate
Can we say that KDE neon is dead? Is it a walking dead, so to speak? This really saddens me as a KDE neon user 😦 “The person currently maintaining it is doing a heroic job. But he’s just one person.” I extend my deepest respect to this person.
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I guess it depends on how you view a state of “best effort maintenance”. This isn’t stagnation or neglect, but it’s also not going to provide much forward momentum, and I would say we can’t expect all packaging or integration issues to be resolved before they hit users.
In the end, the project will continue until its level of contribution rises or falls. I don’t think anyone can predict that future!
This is one of the things that distinguishes KDE, honestly. There’s no central authority that can declare, “KDE neon is canceled; everyone move away from it” and redirect personnel accordingly. Free people are free to work on what they want to work on.
Does this somewhat anarchic state of affairs fill you with positive or negative feelings? I think that’s going to be the factor that determines how you view situations like this.
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Yes for me, O revered blogger! Because I should ideally be involved with (and become the sherpa[a] of) 💫my hypothetical friend who’s currently using Windows💫 and should at least try to think like free software curious person trying to switch (and get ahead of the messaging they are likely to receive; if nothing else, the tens of thousands of dollars earned by LTTMedia reach said conclusion implicitly[b]).
And this is something any “neutral” (i.e., not a dev/marketer for Distro X) should really take into account when doing recommendations (esp. if they’re using something unsafe and/or weird enough). The state of this comment section already is proof we’ve a loooong way ahead of us 😔️.
[a]: There is a risk you may generate an expectation of becoming their free support/educational guide, but for the world domination goal this is the way (something the LTT video(s) take as an axiom, and why they refuse this route).
[b]: Haven’t seen the previous round (other than the mention in Debian Bookworm’s NEWS.Debian for apt); but the one thing I will criticize this time around is that they barely talk about the installer experience, and how nearly anything short of Arch[c] is leaps and bounds better than the Windows installer.
[c]: Which I use with KDE plasma on all my machines, btw 😎️(and the last time I installed it, it was no worse than Windows’s install experience).
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There’s a lot of truth to the idea that if you’re guiding someone else through the start of their Linux journey, both people will feel a pressure for the two of them to standardize on the same Linux-based OS.
This can be tricky when the more experienced person has chosen something esoteric like NixOS or Gentoo. But if they’re using a mainstream OS — even a non-KDE one — I think I agree with you that they should guide the learner towards that one.
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Hi, did the recent announcement of Fedora Hummingbird (rolling release) make you reconsider Fedora+Bootc as a base for KDE Linux instead of Arch?
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One can hope. My impression is that Arch is more for tinkering, while Fedora is more for production PCs. Tinkering is useful and fun, but it’s not a good base when you need reliable.
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I think it’s not a good idea to recommend Fedora, which has a very short support window. Total newbies need something that provides years of support the way that OpenSUSE Leap or Kubuntu do.
Expecting totally new Linux users to have to figure out how to do an upgrade between releases is a bit much. Give them time to get used to using Linux and then they could use a more advanced distro like Fedora.
And honestly, if you want pure simplicity, it should be Kubuntu since many software products are only distributed as .debs. Fedora and SUSE users have to jump through a lot of hoops to use those.
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You can upgrade from one major Fedora version to another one using Discover, same as with Kubuntu.
IMO, “years of support” is kind of a lie in most cases. Who’s providing the “support”? In most cases it’s the upstream developers of the software — but only if you’re not using years-old versions. If you are, they won’t give you any support, and it’s up to the OS vendor. But will they support you? In most cases, no, not for how most people would define the word “support”. If you want the conventional definition of support, you’re going to have to pay for it via a RHEL or SLED license, and that’s not what we’re talking about here.
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I’m curious why KDE Neon is usually forgotten. I’ve used it daily for the last 5 years and it’s very solid. It has the excellent stable Ubuntu base, but with a more up-to-date KDE suite and ecosystem than Kubuntu.
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«I think it’s not a good idea to recommend Fedora, which has a very short support window.».
— Linux Teacher
Who needs to “sweep everything” is the techie guy; Fedora has a EOL of 1 year and two months.
And, for sake of truth, I do not recommend; but I install Fedora, once it is about to ease GNU-Linux experience. Believe, a number of users is aware o Fedora EOF cycle, but does think this as a matter itself (including Linus? I really do not know how he thinks about this).
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IMO, “years of support” is kind of a lie in most cases. Who’s providing the “support”? In most cases it’s the upstream developers of the software — but only if you’re not using years-old versions. If you are, they won’t give you any support, and it’s up to the OS vendor. But will they support you? In most cases, no, not for how most people would define the word “support”.
Outside of GNOME, which loves breaking things and removing features, most bugs are longstanding. On the Windows side, while people are technically entitled to support from their PC manufacturer, most personal users don’t avail themselves of that. Instead, they do what everyone in Linux-land does–look things up on the internet.
It’s important to have a stable release target for these people, because edge cases usually ever only have a handful of people that encounter them. Additionally, major OS or desktop environment upgrades often put in new features or shift UI elements around, making it very confusing for new users.
Getting noobs to stick to a distro that provides a stable environment which they can rely upon for years is important. Most people loathe the idea of having their panels shift around, the window decorations tweaked, or the icon theme modified–even if that provides new features. It’s why Windows XP was popular for so long, and Windows 7 after that.
Advanced Linux users seem to generally be migrating toward rolling release distros, because they have no such qualms. But for most unskilled users, the simplicity of a Kubuntu LTS or something like Alma Linux is a much easier path. The Fedora way is too close to rolling for a noob (and too slow for a power user who needs the latest libraries).
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Don’t ask AI is bad advice these days, I spent multiple weekends trying to fix my Bluetooth over the years, didn’t work reliably, searched and found solutions to part problems on the arch wiki, Ubuntu Websites and stackoverflow sites. But it was chatgpt that guided me through the process to get it work.It is pretty good for getting Bluetooth or Smartcard drivers of external File systems Work. I learned how to get around the dirty bit Problem of NTFS external hard discs in dual Boot. It was an amazing guided learning experience.
I don’t want any human, so you try to get X work, why don’t you use Y instead kind of advice.
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I have been around for a couple of decades and I have email addresses from at least KDE and Debian.
I often will not help ‘new users’ with their user issues because I know that the way I would fix the things is very different from how it is ‘user friendly’-expected to be done nowadays. I can guide in general terms, but given ‘command line’ is my go-to for 99% of things, it is not where I want to guide new users.
I did recently give my self a challenge:
Install fedora on a computer and *don’t* use the terminal for system administration stuff. That unfortunately failed in several ways several times
So we do still have a way to go.
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HI, I agree that Kubuntu is a great distro for a first timer – I have been using it since 5.04 when I got a live CD shipped – I did consider going to KDE Neon when that came out – but have always stuck with Kubuntu.
Yesterday I installed 26.04 – what a dud!! The graphical installer has gone backwards in terms of quality – it looks quite amateurish and then using the system for the first time – KDE produce some really great backgrounds – however the background for Kubuntu is a blue ‘K’ gear – it really does look naff and does not show of the beautiful KDE plasma.
Then using the system – who on earth thought that it was a good idea to relive the 2000’s and enable wobbly windows – it makes it look like your driving a clown’s car!
KDE Plasma can be made to look stunning and I appreciate all of the hard work that the Kubuntu team put into making a great distro – but 26.04 looks on first impressions really bad – and this is an LTS!!
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