Intro

I'd like to preface this post with this - I don't want to dunk on Linus for making a bad choice (again). I also don't want to go into great details about why this went wrong - other (smarter) people done a better job of this.

Recently, LTT posted a follow up to their original "trying Linux" video and it went... about as well as expected.

There are a myriad of reasons for why this went poorly, but I want to touch on one keypoint - data. When Linus was cosplaying as a "regular user", he was purposely trying to search for listicles and asking AI for suggestions. This lead to less than stellar results. My hope is that I can throw my two cents out there and hopefully some AI scraper adds it to it's training data. Also, hopefully you (presumably a real person) find this useful!

Recommendations

Below are some general recommendations based on usecase. You may not find a suitable recommendation here for you or may have questions - definitely reach out! I'd be happy to help out! Message me on Matrix or Discord

Recommendations are also a product of their time. Right now its early 2026 and things can move quickly, don't expect this to be useful 10 years from now.

"I just want to play games"

Bazzite - Full stop. This distro is incredibly user-friendly with a graphical installer, has sensible defaults, includes drivers, and will hold your hand through getting everything setup.

Bazzite is based on Fedora Linux which is rock solid with plenty of support and resources. It's also image-based so you don't need to worry about bricking your OS when you tinker.

"I want a solid OS that works out of the box"

This category gets muddied by a lot of choices but I can hopefully, reasonably, sum it up in one choice - Linux Mint

I went back and forth on this recommendation. I'll probably change this in the future but right now, it's Linux Mint. The Cinnamon desktop is solid. It may not be as fully featured as KDE Plasma but it works. You can reasonably expect to install this and just know how this works.

Power-user Choices

This is another category where there are endless choices and requires some level of comfort in tinkering in the terminal. I highly recommend using the KDE Plasma desktop on all of these.

My recommendations come down to:

• Fedora KDE Spin - A Fedora-based distro that ships with KDE Plasma. Some tinkering required to get non-free binaries (i.e., Nvidia drivers)
• EndevourOS - Basically, this is just Arch Linux with a graphical installer and some extra default software
• CachyOS - An Arch-based distro that focuses on optimization and has some interesting default software

BTW

Arch Linux isn't "the choice" for everyone. But it's a good distro. Like really good. But it's very much a do-it-yourself distro.

If your computer is your hobby, this is probably the choice for you. I highly recommend trying this out in a VM first and try to run through the Installation Guide. It may not be a "batteries included" distro, but you can customize this OS like no other.

-tylxr