Which Linux Distro should i install?

[simonlang]

I am thinking of replacing my current Kubuntu 16.04 with something else and read about a few distros i have heard before but never tried out any longer and would like to know if someone of you has any experience with one or more of them:

 

- netrunner 16 kde

- KaoS linux

- Sabayon linux

- Chakra linux kde

- manjaro linux kde

- antergos linux kde

 

 

i think it was netrunner 14 or 15 i tried in virtualbox and found it ok but nothing special. i tried antergos several times not only with kde DI and found it quite good and i am leaning towards antergos but would be open to something else as well but please don't suggest me open suse as it never works fine with the proprietary nvidia driver in the long run.

[Blue-Vision]

If you're leaning towards an Arch-based distro, I've always heard good things about Manjaro. They're quite popular, and I believe they're also based in Europe. I've run it before and it was rock-solid, fast, and quite a pleasant experience. If I were to switch to Arch-based it would be to that.  

[simplezz]

Antergos seemed pretty good last time I tried it. I have a penchant for Arch so it fits me well.

[+Mirumir Subscriber¹]

If you wanna be old-school about it, you may wanna try Red Hat or Mandrake (now called Mandriva).

[Max Norris]

I've toyed with Chakra a few times.  It's quite good if you're looking for a KDE desktop.  Just note that non-KDE apps are frowned upon, especially anything with Gnome dependencies.  Another one I've had decent results with was OpenSUSE.

 

That said, try them all, that's an excellent use of a virtual machine.  Give you a taste of the distro before installing it for real, see if it's worth your time or not. 

[Ulyses]

Lately I've been unable to properly test Manjaro in a multi-distro environment, after install it doesn't boot, something to do with the fs. After I reinstalled grub from another distro on disk, I was able to start Manjaro, but lost my drive after so many failed install attempts.

 

KaOS has left a good impression on me, but the fact that they have their own repositories gives me a little pause.

 

Antergos seemed sluggish, I'm not sure the numix theme alone is worth it.

 

I don't have extensive experience with the rest you mentioned.

 

I've used Linux Mint 17.2 KDE, now I'm using Linux Mint 17.3 Mate as the daily driver, along with Fedora 23 Gnome, waiting on Linux Mint 17.3 KDE. I've also heard good stuff about Sparky Linux KDE, as a matter of fact is next on my list for testing.

Edited January 7, 2016 by Ulyses

[simonlang]

so i am finished - for now.

first install was antergos but i messed up with the graphics driver and decided to try out manjaro. oh well, it won't even boot. tried with default settings, with safe mode, without dkms, etc. no luck. it did not give an error message it just was displaying the boot screen and that was it. highly frustrating.

so a 2nd install of antergos. and this time everything went fine; i hope it stays that way.

 

as i was busy with insalling the whole day yesterday i could not read your suggestions sadly. 

[simonlang]

so it's been a week now and everything runs perfectly fine. i am seriously considering to migrate my notebook from kubuntu 15.04 to antergos kde in the holidays. only thing which speaks against it is the fact that sometimes i don't use my notebook for weeks and i am unsure how this goes along with the rolling release udpate modell. any ideas? 

[Blue-Vision]

You could always install a copy on a VM, fully update it then not fire it up for several weeks and then update it and see how it behaves. Then it should be easy to judge how it will function on your other machine.

[simonlang]

29 minutes ago, Unobscured Vision said:

You could always install a copy on a VM, fully update it then not fire it up for several weeks and then update it and see how it behaves. Then it should be easy to judge how it will function on your other machine.

good idea. i booted my vm images a few days back and antergos gnome edition had 1.5GB of files to update haha. but it all went fine. just took much longer ofc.