My top 5 distros July 2019

[crosscourt]

List has changed a bit since Im using laptops with docks exclusively now, so your mileage may vary.

1.Zorin OS 15
2.ROSA R11
3.KDE Neon 20190627
4.Mageia 7 KDE
5.Netrunner 19.01

The many issues Ive had in getting distros to work with my Dell E6420 and edock has left me with a much smaller list of distros than
I had expected originally.

[tlmiller]

And as always, just to offer a different perspective, but one that seems to not change very much, are mine!!

1. Debian (who saw that coming?)
2. KDE Neon
3. Arch
4. Fedora
5. Neptune (My irritation at ROSA going months without fixing Firefox finally got the best of me)

[crosscourt]

Neptune 6 should be out soon.

[tlmiller]

Yup, shortly after Debian 10, which releases tomorrow.

[crosscourt]

Tried the Neptune 6 beta and it had a few issues but was still quite good. No issues with Calameres so not sure what the deal is with OpenMandriva.

[tlmiller]

While I'm not a fan of calamares, it works fine. Plenty of distro's use it. Not all of them work fantastically, but enough do to prove that the issue isn't with the installer.

[crosscourt]

Agree as Ive never had any issues with Calameres previously with OpenMandriva.

[crosscourt]

In actuality Im using Neon, Mageia 7 and Zorin 15 the most and I have to say Neon has really improved and is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. Even though I still like XFCE I find KDE overall suits my needs the best even though I still like Zorin 15 GUI very much. Neon can be used on older laptops with 4gb of ram with no issues.

[crosscourt]

Well its interesting so far as Mageia 7/KDE Neon have some issues when I move the hard drive from E6420 to E6420. Im using the dock and it requires me to reclick to get the external monitor. With one of the E6420s and Mageia 7 not only does it have issues getting the right resolution but the mouse suddenly stops working. Mind you if I use Kubuntu 18.04/ROSA in any of these laptops, no problems whatsoever.
My examination of all these E6420 laptops shows identical hardware, including bios versions.

When installing, KDE Neon and Mageia 7 you have to jup thru hoops to get the external monitor to work. Zorin 15 ,ROSA and Kubuntu 18.04 require no action. Its been an interesting experience so far.

[crosscourt]

After a closer look, one of the E6420s has a Nvidia gpu in it and Mageia 7 was trying to enable it first rather than the Intel gpu. Thru the control center I set the Intel gpu as the default and suddenly everything was working fine.