Choosing A New Linux Distro

Well, after spending the better part of a year learning how to love Linux while running on Pop_OS!, I’ve decided that it’s time to look around the distros and see if there is another which suits my needs. This is mainly driven by:

1. I’m using Pop!_OS 24.04 and it works fine, on GNOME.
2. But I’m not convinced of the need for their new desktop environment, COSMIC. At least, not for me.
3. I am thinking that I want to look at moving to KDE Plasma.
4. But my attempts to get KDE Plasma working on my existing system have been a mess. It’s not stable, or functional enough for me to use as a daily driver. There is something I’ve corrupted or it requires Ubuntu 25.x or something … but I’m just not that interested in spending time digging through logs and forums to try and sort out the problems.

So it’s time to reformat the system to find something that uses KDE Plasma so that I can use it for a while and then decide if I prefer GNOME, Plasma, or even COSMIC. Since I have to reformat the system anyway … might as well do some distro shopping.

My criteria for this is both short and a big ask:

1. The distro has to work, for me, pretty much out of the box. I’m just not interested in playing around with customisations and tweaks and hacks to get things to work and special console commands to properly install basic system components so they work for me and stuff like that. I don’t have the time or patience right now for this.
   1. This includes built-in / works out of the box, or very easy to enable and maintain, support for my NVIDIA discrete GPU. This is the reason I ended up on Pop!_OS in the first place, as it was advertised as one of / the best for out of the box support for NVIDIA.
2. Must support and work out of the box with Wayland. My docking and multimonitor configuration, it turns out, only works with Wayland.
3. Has to be able to dock and undock without crashing the OS. This was a big problem for me initially when I moved from Windows to Pop!_OS – turned out to be a problem with the version of the OS being 22.04, and the upgrade to 24.04 fixed it. I’m not going back though. And because of how this problem affected me …
4. No LTS version of the underlying distro. The problem I had with the docking was exacerbated because I was using a distro based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which was nearly three years old when I force upgraded it to 24.04. I want to be on a rolling release system now, or one that at minimum updates once per year.
5. I need to be able to offload work to the discrete GPU, with a context menu click and not through forcing on the dGPU for all tasks and rebooting, or entering in some console commands to launch the application.
6. Has to run KDE Plasma 6 out of the box, so I can evaluate whether or not I like it over what I’m used to in GNOME and COSMIC.

So I’m going to download some ISOs and test things out on my secondary laptop. These are the distros that I have targeted for evaluation (edit: or that I later added to the process):

1. Tumbleweed
2. Kubuntu
3. Fedora KDE
4. Mint (Ubuntu, Cinnamon)
5. Mint Debian
6. Debian
7. Ubuntu
8. Fedora KDE Atomic
9. Nobara