I use Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) as my primary desktop operating system both at the office and at home. The core of Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS; and the Cinnamon desktop environment is reminiscent of Windows 7. Software/Package management is a breeze using Synaptic (and/or Apt), and OS updates are tidy and swift.

I've been a "Linux on the desktop" user for about a dozen years and see no reason to return to the Windows/Mac world anytime soon. For the odd piece of software that only runs on Windows, I have a Windows 10 VM set up in Virtual Box.

In all honesty, you can't go wrong with any of the mainstream distributions whether Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, etc. Likewise, many of the mature desktop environments work well: Cinnamon, Mate, Unity, Gnome3, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, etc. Desktop environment is largely a matter of personal taste, however; so choose one that feels "comfortable".

Most distributions and their various desktop environment flavours offer a Live-CD download. Grab a few and give them a try using Virtual Box. You'll know when you find the right distro for you. :)

distrowatch.com is a good starting point for discovery.

It mostly depends on your background and which OS are you currently comfortable with.

A bit of background: You can pick between multiple distributions and multiple desktop environments.

To put it really simple, a distribution can be described as the core foundation of your Operating System, the most common distros are Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, OpenSuse, Linux Mint, elementary os. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of others, but these are for me the common distro. All of these, have different cores and approaches, some of them share the same core but come with drastic edits.

A Desktop Environment is what you actually see, your GUI. Common DEs are Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Pantheon, etc.
You can potentially have whatever distro with whatever desktop environment running on top.
If you used Fedora, most likely you used Gnome DE.

If you're coming from Windows I'd suggest Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop, or Mate desktop. They're both based on Ubuntu, a really common distro based on Debian, with a massive availability of support, software, fixes, etc. Cinnamon and Mate DEs are really familiar looking for a user coming from Windows. They share similarities in managing windows, the file manager, and the overall interface.

If you're coming from MacOS I'd suggest Ubuntu Gnome or Elementary OS. The DEs are really similar to MacOS, and the learning curve is pretty flat.

If you don't know anything about Linux and you don't feel comfortable in tinkering with terminal commands and stuff like that right at the beginning, I'd stay away from Arch based distro, because they require a lot of customization, and also Fedora, because their approach is to include bleeding edge technologies that are not fully stable. Dealing with bugs and spending hours in the terminal is not a great first experience to approach Linux.

ElementaryOS is highly recommended for absolute beginners. Based on Ubuntu, has all the good packages and stuff you can get, but it comes with a strict and highly curated desktop environment called Pantheon. Easy to use, not overwhelming and out of the way. After you get acquainted with Linux and you want to start playing with the command line and heavy customization, you can switch distro.

I know my post is not really accurate, and I'm giving away a lot of average info, but I tried to keep it simple and easy to understand for a new user.

I hope that helps, and apologies for any inaccuracy.

A lot of people are going to suggest Ubuntu or other Debian -variants to you, but please save yourself some trouble and steer away from them. Debian -variants suffer from an incredibly unstable package manager that has consistently over the decades failed to get significant improvements and fixes to issues.

Only a Debian -based distribution is going to end up with you trying to run some updates and it telling you it needs to uninstall your OS kernel (the core of the operating system) before that can be done, but it can't do that because everything else on your system depends on the kernel being in place.

Similarly specifically Ubuntu has a bad history of being one of the few distributions with consistent issues on booting with various kinds of computers without kernel tweaks and such where literally any other Linux distribution just works out of the box.

Some of the other distribution families also have the most mind-blowing issues. I vividly remember my experience with trying to get Arch Linux on a laptop just to realize that the font configuration was made such a huge mess that it wouldn't come with decent font support for LCD screens out of the box.

RPM based distributions are generally much more stable and sensible, and often provide usability far exceeding Ubuntu.

An additional point worth considering is that one reason Linux knowledge is so valuable is that it dominates the server market. However, in the server market there really are only two popular choices: CentOS, and Ubuntu. Though my personal opinion is that Ubuntu is chosen by the people who know very little of Linux administration.

CentOS is basically the open source version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, which has it's bleeding edge of development done in the Fedora distribution. Using Fedora or Ubuntu on desktop will thus give you skills most easily applicable to the server -world, though some of the tools you will run into with Fedora are likely not going to be available on servers for some time still.

Now I've been using Linux on desktop since the late 90s, and I've seen quite a bit of progress happen, however I gotta warn you that if you expect a smooth desktop experience like on Windows or OSX you're going to have a bad time. The Linux Desktop "market" is still incredibly fragmented with a lot of competing platforms, libraries, tools, etc. that seem to mostly focus on bickering instead of interoperability. This means you will regularly run into issues with drag & drop not working between applications, and other such fun surprises, just because you are not using the "correct" file manager of the 20 options available and so on.

Additionally if you happen to run some hardware that the Linux community just doesn't care about you're just going to have an incredibly bad time. I heard that the Intel GPU drivers are among the best for Linux, so when I had an extra computer with an Intel integrated GPU I immediately installed Linux desktop on it to try out how well that works. Turns out with that specific GPU hardware acceleration support would make your computer completely lock up after just a few hours of use, and the only workaround was to turn off hardware acceleration making the computer way too slow for any sensible use.

If you are however willing to risk it, and understand that there are likely going to be issues that you will have to post to Stack Overflow, IRC, and various forums about, I wish you good luck and hope you have fun learning!

Some of my favorite distributions I can highly recommend are:

• Mageia: A very friendly desktop distribution mageia.org/en/
• Fedora: An all-round solid choice, one of the most widely supported distributions out there getfedora.org/
• elementary OS: Ubuntu-based so suffers from many of it's issues, but if you really want something Ubuntu-based this distribution is actively trying to fix many of the issues of Desktop Linux elementary.io/

It just doesn't matter.

I mean, there are some wrong decisions. I would steer you away from Gentoo, because you build all the things, but beyond that, not much.

They present about the same with user space, with some superficial change with defaulting to Unity or Gnome or ... I don't even know the good window managers these days. But you can install the other ones.

And installing is similar too. Either apt install foo or yum install foo, which is not a big enough difference to really get hung up on.

It wasn't always this way. in the 1990s, I went Red Hat (before Fedora existed) because I could not complete a Debian install. I couldn't figure out how to get to "Yes, these are the initial packages, so install now, please". The problem then was that you didn't have yum, so you went to RPMFind to get the packages you wanted.

Then I found Ubuntu, which allowed me to say sudo install this package on the command line and gave me an easy installation, so yay. I stay because 1) I know how to have it tell my code my computer is locked, and 2) because it does The Right Thing with notify_osd. And, of course, because I'm used to it. This means I'm odd, not that it makes sense to you. This is not meant as a recommendation.

I'm hearing Red Hat is common in enterprise situations, including the systems my code runs on that I don't admin, and Fedora is based on that. I know people who run it and, as far as I know, they like it. I see stickers and t-shirts on occasion...

If Bioinformatics is going to be your regular gig, I'd double-up on knowing the Fedora side, even if just it's being used to having /bin/env python pointing to /usr/local/bin/python instead of /usr/bin/python. But it will be much more important to you if you get into systems administration than just developing.

And even then, kinda not, because with Puppet and Chef and Ansible -- are those the only major players in that area? Am I forgetting any? -- you're seeing large systems on which Bioinformatics is done, the admins want to have scripts saying "This machine has sshd, the message queue, NFS mounts to these file systems and that's about it". A Puppet developer told me about a system that caught a rootkit, but every time the kit tried to install the malware server, Puppet said "Nope, not on the manifest" and wiped it. So, installing the packages and keeping it up to, honestly, many generations back for most tools, is a Puppet/Ansible/Chef thing, not a distro thing.

So, if you know people who are strongly Fedora or Ubuntu or Mint and you can ask them questions, go with their preference, but the differences will be small and superficial. It really doesn't matter.

Personally I use two different versions of Linux on two different machines. For development I will Debian, I've found that it has a lot of prebuilt in tools that allow me to improve efficiency, the interface is wonderful. If I need to test my server for some changes or weaknesses I'll use a Kali machine, Kali was built for the soul purpose of penetration testing, it works wonders if you're testing on yourself or need to find a weakness in your own code. It has a lot of built in applications to do this (some a bit fiddly) but all in order those two are the ones I've found to be the best.

If you really want to learn to use Linux, I would use Arch Linux.

Pros:

• Best Wiki in the world.
• After installing Arch (with the help of said wiki), you are already pretty good in using the terminal
• Newest Software, I hate when i have to somehow install a deb if no new version is in the repo on ubuntu/debian
• From my experience, despite being bleeding edge, I had more problems upgrading Ubuntu than just having Arch
• you can find everything in the AUR. Every software available for linux is most likely in the AUR, no manual building from source needed

Cons:

• Takes some time to step through the installation guide
• You have to decide how you want your Linux to look like

I personally recommend the gnome desktop with (at least) dash-to-dock. For pretty icons you can install numix-circle.

Problem with a general suggestion

The problem I encountered with diving into the GNU/Linux world is that you cannot just "do stuff from scratch and understand everything" (i.e. learn C by writing a simple webserver).

Most distributions I consider practical for production are also those that need little maintenance after an initial configuration.

So I'd recommend you boot up a "beginners" distribution first though.

If you follow these steps, you will spend a few weeks or so with the process from start 'till the end of "Production System".
This will yield a lot of knowledge though.

Systemd

Due to the added complexity (and also the opposition to the Unix philosophy inherent to most of GNU), I'd recommend against anything with systemd at the start.
As soon as you understand what an init does, what services are.…
Let's say after you naturally discover what double forking is (so don't just straight up google it).
.…then you might very well look into it and see for yourself.

How about Slackware?

afterboot(8)

As soon as you can use the shell, including:

• traverse the directory tree
• be able to find out more about a command (--help, man)
• edit files (nano is fine for starting, but as with systemd, when you know what your editor should be able to do, choose the one right for you ;-) )

I suggest you go through the Gentoo Handbook.
This will show you how to install a distribution from scratch with most of the configuration done by yourself, and lots of verbose explanation.

Why not LFS?

Suggesting LFS here would be a mistake, IMO, as this adds too much overhead (compiling, compilerflags,.…) that are not needed to understand a GNU system.
As soon as you understand GNU/Linux, you should already have a general idea on how building an LFS yourself could be accomplished.
This by far does not mean you must be able to do it of course.

Underlying Tech

I suggest having a look at the following man-pages:

• read() and write()
• traversing further by use of the "See Also" section

Then make sure you understand:

• what file descriptors are
• how processes communicate

Have a look at wait().

Production Systems

Learn how to use general purpose production systems.

Now that you know how it works, put it to use (this will be the easiest part).
Install e.g. a Debian Stable, configure it to the point where it hosts a static website (need not be anything special, a "Hello World" in HTML is enough).
Hints: nginx, Apache2, caddy are your friends.

Done?

You are never done with GNU/Linux (unless you switch to BSD).

If you still feel like it look into containers (e.g. LXC/LXD), automation (e.g. Puppet, Ansible) or whatever you feel like.

You should try openSUSE. Its have much packages in its official repositories, a great Installer and YaST as a powerfully graphical configuration tool. From this base you can learn down to low-level configurations and system interfaces.

For an initial distro, go with Ubuntu's Xubuntu. Package management is much easier, documentation is plentiful, and 99% of the time problems were hit on before by others.

After a few years, if you get the inkling, switch to a source-based distro like Gentoo. This gets your hands a bit dirtier as you'll be knee-deep in the command line, recompiling kernels. This gets you more deeper experience.

I like fidling and reinstalling a lot so I've tested different distros (more or less) successfully.

• I started with Debian which I found was very good but a bit complicated to figure out at first. I can't really pin words on why though. Maybe it was a bit too serious for what I was doing with it.

• I then switched to Linux Mint because it was Ubuntu based but lighter and worked pretty much the same way as Debian but felt more user friendly, especially when installing.

• Lastly (for now), I revived a small i686 acer with Arch Linux ( aka Hipster Linux). I did it because I was looking for a challenge and I wanted to understand better how Linux works. Don't go there straight away if you're a beginner I'd say but definitely check it out on day !