My philosophy having tried many distros over the years:
- stick with what is popular. Niche distros have smaller userbase and developer base. If the distro maintainers broke something, good luck getting support.
- don’t fall into the configuration trap (e.g. no arch and absolutely no gentoo) - you probably bought this laptop for doing productive things, not tinkering (party pooper, I know).
- unless you are going to run Clear Linux (don’t), the choice of distribution doesn’t really matter in terms of performance.
- caveat to the above: there is some minimal hardware compatibility differences but you should choose the distribution primarily based on philosophy. Ubuntu tends to have “the latest and greatest” (debian if you like
aptbut want something a bit more stable), while Fedora and OpenSUSE tends to be a bit more conservative (read: stable) in the software that is available. Worth noting that Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is a legitimate business product. Draw what conclusions you will. - if you are lazy get a rolling release of your preferred distro to avoid having to reinstall (ever).
- desktop environment is all that matters. KDE is beautiful.