Linux

@bbbhltz @Doodz The truth is you can make almost any distro work like any other. Main differences out of the box are desktops, but you can install virtually any desktop on virtually any distro, I have Mate on ALL of mine despite all the different distros, the other main difference is package managers. There are some outliers that are exceptions, gentoo for example, you compile the whole damn thing yourself, this has a learning curve but the advantage is 100% customization and you can optimize for your particular hardware and needs, arch and manjaro some packages provided as binaries but most things you can also recompile and customize. Then there is kali which is your friend if network penetration is your thing. There are a variety of immutable releases, more pain in the ass than they are worth in my view but that provides a layer of security, but those things are outliers. Probably 90% of distros are either offshoots of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Debian or of Ubuntu which is an offshoot of Debian. And the main difference between Debian and Redhat flavors are two things, package manager, dpkg/apt in the case of Debian and rpm/dnf in the case of Redhat, and of default security which is SeLinux and Debians which uses apparmor. Of the two selinux is probably more secure but is also more ubtrusive being a pain in the ass to change on the fly and requiring re-labeling which on systems with rotary drives is a slow and torturous process during which the machine is unavailable for anything else. The kernel security systems of the two, if you use secure boot, are also somewhat different, the Redhat version is able to use TPM, so of the two flavors I would say in theory Redhat is potentially more secure, but in practice ALL of the exploits I've seen on my servers have been on the Redhat flavor so perhaps practice and theory are somewhat incongruent in this case. At any rate, I agree with bbbhltz, take the time to get to know what you have well before distro hopping is that likely you can customize it to be what you want without changing. I personally find Ubuntu to be a good starting point, it's easy to learn initially and it is flexible enough to bend into what you want long term.