About every 2 years I try to adopt Linux full time. This might be my time.

Most likely to work seamlessly on Sony or Asus? Ubuntu or Centos?

Ubuntu is better suited for the desktop IMO. CentOS is stable as a rock but many of it's packages are out of date to keep it stable.

I’d say Ubuntu

Pop!_OS is based off ubuntu and built for developers. I've really enjoyed it on my laptop. Deepin is also pretty sweet

Not to sound too neckbeardish, but if you really want to go full time Linux then why not just try Arch? No I'm not just joining the Arch meme, I have reasons:

Windows is my daily driver but I've found that I like Linux a lot more once I installed Arch on a separate system than when I installed Ubuntu.

Support wise, Ubuntu is the best, but it tries to make you retain your habits from other OSes. Arch doesn't. It forces you to make new habits. Linux habits. Which you need to have if you want that transition.

That being said, I'd still recommend Ubuntu if you don't want to go Arch, 18.04 is a solid OS. (CentOS is crap for anything apart from server use, massively outdated stuff).

@RememberMe thanks for the heads up, definitely a new angle I hadn't considered. I was wondering about Centos because I do a little bit with servers and I thought it might help me with that.... But if it's likely to annoy me on a daily basis then hell no!

@nzeetee I tried to use CentOS for daily use after I found out that CentOS and RHEL are the only distros that Autodesk supports for Maya (fuck you, Autodesk).
Please, don't. It's just painful. Installing almost anything is a huge problem because the packages are so old. They backport patches instead of using later versions, for stability, which makes it good for servers.

@RememberMe I’ve used centos as a daily driver and never had issues with it. I’d go with Ubuntu even though I personally dislike it.

KDE Neon’er myself right now

@linuxxx you're a Linux server engineer, way more competent than I xD (or OP, for that matter)

Well to be fair I did get CentOS working and used it for a few weeks, but then again, having to fuck around with my system's packages just because Firefox needs something and it's too outdated in the system and the new version of the package isn't available via yum doesn't sound like what I'd want from a daily driver.

@RememberMe I never had that stuff, it all worked seamlessly:)

@linuxxx interesting. Did you use CentOS a couple of years ago, or recently? I used it a month ago.
If it was a longish while ago that could explain this, FF would've upgraded its dependencies while CentOS stuck with the older versions for stability.

@RememberMe Last year so quite recently!

@linuxxx well, lol me, then. I probably fucked something up somewhere.

Actually, one question I should be asking is about front end window manager. Last CENTOS I used looked like shit, but then I hate the Ubuntu layout. Any advice in these matters? Is it easy to switch, or should I factor that in?

@nzeetee I used CentOS with Cinnamon, worked well.
It's pretty easy to switch with almost any Linux distro (including Arch, Ubuntu, etc.)
There are also prebuilt flavours of distros which come with different desktop environments, for example, Ubuntu has flavours for KDE, Mate, Xfce, etc; Antergos is a popular Arch derivative that allows you to pick which desktop environment you want at install time (I think?)

Also you can easily switch after installation too, just look up the required commands.

I like Cinnamon, it's a simple, good looking, no-nonsense environment with sane defaults and easily switchable themes.

Btw, they've ditched the old Unity desktop in Ubuntu 18.04, their new GNOME desktop looks nice.