Help Me Choose a Distro

Grahf

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Linux drives me a little nuts because Linux is just a hodgepodge and I'm indecisive. Trying to find the best distro for me and a certain laptop. I've usually used KDE with arch based distros (manjaro, chakra, etc). But I can't do KDE. The amount of customization you have to do is insane and with my laptop it didn't scale well with the 3:2 aspect ratio. Every time I would switch to the NVidia card the scaling would be different than the intel GPU even though the settings were the same. So I'm trying to find the right distro and I can't.

I think I'm going to settle with either Pop OS or Manjaro Deepin. What I like about both of them is how they handle NVidia optimus. In Pop you can just click a button to switch between NVidia and Intel. In Manjaro you can run a command (optimus-manager --switch NVidia). But there's a few pluses and minuses to each distro.

I've had no issues with Pop OS. Nvidia, blue light filter, and everything else worked right out of the box. The GNOME desktop is amazing on it. There are different performance modes you can select (high performance, balanced, battery saver). Being able to install .deb packages is nice too. Snaps didn't scale right to the 3:2 aspect ratio but all other apps did.

What I don't like about Pop is the bar at the top of GNOME (so ugly) but I think you can remove that with a GNOME extension. GTK isn't really my cup of tea either but I've found ways to make QT apps look decent in GNOME. I use a single app in wine and it has never worked on Ubuntu or Mint. Haven't tried that app in Pop but I doubt it will work. And last of all you can only scale GNOME at 200 or 300 percent. Fractoral scaling would be amazing and after a quick DuckDuckGo search apparently there's a way to make GNOME do fractural scaling.

Manjaro Deepin is beautiful. All of the apps look amazing. The dock and control center looks amazing. It scales to the 3:2 aspect ratio perfectly. I also like how Manjaro is an independent distro whereas Ubuntu is from a company (silly, I know). I know my wine app would work in Manjaro.

But since Deepin is so much eye candy....I don't think it's as functional as GNOME and I'm not sure why I like it more than GNOME other than just to look at. Some apps don't actually scale correctly (Krita, Dolpin-emu). Enabling an option to exclude those apps from scaling, ironically, makes them scale perfectly. So that's just weird. I also had a couple issues with Deepin. The blue light filter stopped working for a while but seems to be working now. Also, when I boot Manjaro Deepin the logo for my laptop blinks three times and takes a little longer to boot... The logo only displays itself once with windows or Pop.

I really feel like Pop is the way to go but I'm looking for input. The only thing drawing me to Deepin is the aesthetics and I think that's the wrong reason to like a distro. GNOME is more functional and would keep me focused.
 



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