I just recently migrated to Linux, so my experience could be useful to you.
I tried Manjaro, Fedora, Elementary OS, Ubuntu 20.04, Mint Cinnamon, and MX Linux.
First I realized that even though very clean and polished, Manjaro and Fedora are not my choice because 1. I don't want a rolling release distro (cause it means tons of updates every month) and 2. I am more comfortable with the software ecosystem of Debian based distros.
I didn't like the Ubuntu and it was a little laggy on my laptop. Then there was elementary and mint. Because I came from windows, Linux mint cinnamon was more familiar and I really liked it. I used it for two weeks and everything was great except sometimes my laptop overheated. The Cinnamon environment was eating my ram! So I switched to Mint xfce but the environment was too simple and lacked some of features I wanted. Finally, I found MX Linux KDE! It is perfect for me. KDE is not hungry in ram usage yet I found it prettier than xfce and feature rich. MX Linux is lightweight and stable. It's not as clean as Manjaro or as beautiful as mint cinnamon but I have all my favourite apps and my laptop runs cool!
Sure!
HP 14
Intel i5 1035G7/ Intel Iris Plus graphics
8 Gb ram/ 256 Gb SSD
Not that I experienced any lag but one day I was watching a movie with VLC player and fans were running in a noisy situation which was annoying. Since I was just watching a movie, it was strange. I expected Linux to run cool and be more efficient than windows. When I checked, cinnamon itself was responsible for my CPU and ram usage. I don't know what was the problem and asked a friend of mine and he said maybe because the cinnamon is based on GNOME 3 it is memory hungry. He suggested XFCE but after a bit of searching, I concluded that KDE suits me better.
Fedora isn't a roling release distro, however you really have tons of updates weekly (sometimes daily) just because it's the most updated distro out there, if you ask me if it's a good thing, I'd say: I don't think so, I felt like a Tester while running Fedora, always reporting small bugs or searching why something suddenly stopped working after a "dnf update"...
I just recently migrated to Linux, so my experience could be useful to you.
I tried Manjaro, Fedora, Elementary OS, Ubuntu 20.04, Mint Cinnamon, and MX Linux.
First I realized that even though very clean and polished, Manjaro and Fedora are not my choice because 1. I don't want a rolling release distro (cause it means tons of updates every month) and 2. I am more comfortable with the software ecosystem of Debian based distros.
I didn't like the Ubuntu and it was a little laggy on my laptop. Then there was elementary and mint. Because I came from windows, Linux mint cinnamon was more familiar and I really liked it. I used it for two weeks and everything was great except sometimes my laptop overheated. The Cinnamon environment was eating my ram! So I switched to Mint xfce but the environment was too simple and lacked some of features I wanted. Finally, I found MX Linux KDE! It is perfect for me. KDE is not hungry in ram usage yet I found it prettier than xfce and feature rich. MX Linux is lightweight and stable. It's not as clean as Manjaro or as beautiful as mint cinnamon but I have all my favourite apps and my laptop runs cool!
You said Cinnamon was eating up your resources. Can you tell me your laptop/pc specs if you don't mind?
Sure!
HP 14
Intel i5 1035G7/ Intel Iris Plus graphics
8 Gb ram/ 256 Gb SSD
Not that I experienced any lag but one day I was watching a movie with VLC player and fans were running in a noisy situation which was annoying. Since I was just watching a movie, it was strange. I expected Linux to run cool and be more efficient than windows. When I checked, cinnamon itself was responsible for my CPU and ram usage. I don't know what was the problem and asked a friend of mine and he said maybe because the cinnamon is based on GNOME 3 it is memory hungry. He suggested XFCE but after a bit of searching, I concluded that KDE suits me better.
Fedora isn't a roling release distro, however you really have tons of updates weekly (sometimes daily) just because it's the most updated distro out there, if you ask me if it's a good thing, I'd say: I don't think so, I felt like a Tester while running Fedora, always reporting small bugs or searching why something suddenly stopped working after a "dnf update"...
Exactly! I needed a stable distro to keep focusing on my daily tasks.