We often get the same question with

“I’m new, what distro do you recommend?”

and I think we should make a list/ discussion on what is our pick for each person, and just link that post for them to give them an easy recommendation.

So I made a quick flow chart (will get polished as soon as I get your input) with my personal recommendations. It is on the bottom of the text, so you see the rest of the text here too.

I will also explain each distro in a few, short sentences and in what aspects they do differ and what makes them great.

Here are my “controversial” things I want to discuss with you first, as I don’t want to spread nonsense:

Nobara

I don’t know if we should recommend it as a good gaming distro. In my opinion, it’s a highly insecure and experimental distro, made by one individual. I mean, sure, it gives you a slightly better experience ootb compared to vanilla Fedora, but:

  • As said, it’s made by one single guy. If he decides to quit this project, many many people will just stop getting updates.
  • There are many security-things, especially SELinux, disabled.
  • It’s severely outdated. Some security fixes take months until they arrive on Nobara.
  • It contains too many tweaks, especially kernel modifications and performance enhancers. Therefore, it might be less reliable.

I think, Bazzite is the way superior choice. It follows the same concept, but implements it in way better fashion:

  • Just as up-to-date as the normal Fedora, due to automatic GitHub build actions.
  • No burden of maintenence, either on the user or the dev side.
  • Fully intact security measures.
  • And much more.

Immutable distros

I’m a huge fan of them and think, that they are a perfect option for newcomers. They can’t brick them, they update themselfes in the background, they take a lot of complexity compared to a traditional system, and much more. Especially uBlue and VanillaOS are already set up for you and “just work”.
If you want to know more about image-based distros, I made a post about them btw :)

VanillaOS

It’s the perfect counterpart for Mint imo. It follows the same principle (reliable, sane, easy to use, very noob friendly, etc.), but in a different way of achiving that.

The main problems are:

  • The team behind it isn’t huge or well established yet, except for the development of Bottles.
  • They want to do many things their own way (own package manager, etc.) instead of just using established stuff.
  • The current release (V2, Orchid) is still in beta atm.

I see a huge potential in that particular distro, but don’t know if I should recommend it at this point right now.

ZorinOS

I think, for people who don’t like change, it’s great, but it can be very outdated. What’s your opinion on that distro? It looks very modern on the surface and is very noob friendly, but under the hood, very very old.

Pop!_OS

Same with that. Currently, there’s only the LTS available, since System76 is currently very busy with their new DE. I don’t know if we should recommend it anymore.

I made the list of recommendations relatively small on purpose, as it can be a bit overwhelming for noobs when they get a million recommendations with obscure distros.
Do you think that there are any distros missing or a bad recommendation?

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    I think beginners spend too much time and effort on the “choose a distro” quest. Choosing a DE is far more important than that.

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
      0·
      9 months ago

      Just that you need a Distro packaging that DE. I chose KDE and never switched, but I hopped distros as they where either too old, or broken, or unstable.

      5.27 on Kinoite is pretty great though. Would recommend and I think Kubuntu etc. staying with it do the right thing.

      Plasma 6 works pretty well too though, so it was many many KDE problems. But as switching DE was no option, I hopped Distros.

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Here’s a revised flowchart for you:

    • You need professional software like MS Word, Autodesk, Adobe, NI Circuit Design for collaboration with others > Stick with windows;
    • Any other case > Install Debian + GNOME + Software as Flatpaks. You’ll get a rock solid system with the latest software;

    Done.

      • thejevans@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, the Nvidia bug caused me A LOT of headache. I love Debian, but I really only use it as a server OS. On my workstations, I prefer to have easier compatibility with new hardware and software.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Debian 12 has had at least two system breaking bugs in the last month or two,

        What are you talking about specifically? I do manage dozens of Debian 12 servers and run it in one of my desktop machines since the release I didn’t run into any issues so far, stable as usual but I would be interested in knowing about those.

        I honestly don’t understand the love for Debian either.

        Because, like Ubuntu, it’s truly community driven, not subject to the whims of some corporation and more stable than the others.

        Also recommending GNOME to anyone used to Windows is just going to frustrate them if they’re already hesitant.

        While I get your point and I like XFCE very much, the “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out that while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Word I think is the easiest to give up, there are other word processors that are at least as good, they’re only “problem” is they aren’t MS Word.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        there are other word processors that are at least as good

        Their only problem is that this isn’t true. :P LibreOffice and friends might work for quick jobs in isolation and whatnot but once you’ve to collaborate with others and use advanced features like macros it’s game over.

        For what’s worth LibreOffice can’t even keep the default spacing on a bullet list consistent with what MS Word does and this is an issue if you share a document in works with someone else and then things appear in different places / pages.

  • trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    9 months ago

    You forgot “I want those cool socks” for arch Linux :P.

    I think it’s also worth noting that not everyone’s coming to Linux for an easy time. Or essentially sometimes people are looking for the full experience like I did when I was younger. So it might be worth including path ways for those who want to compile everything themselves or even run so minimalist they essentially just using a terminal.

    • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
      0·
      9 months ago

      I quite like your idea, but I’m very afraid that if I also include Nix, Arch, Gentoo, etc., we increase the chance that some “I just want to play some games and do my school stuff”-person decides to go the route of frustration and pain.

      I think we should mainly focus on “just works” and beginner friendly choices to give a good first impression, and if that’s too lame for them, they can always go the other route.
      But those cases are relatively rare I think?

      I don’t want to make the list of choices too big, as that could be overwhelming.

      What do you think of including them completely separate and as honorable mentions with a big disclaimer?

      • trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        9 months ago

        It’s up to you, I haven’t touched the Linux community for a long time (only came back last week to fedora) so it may just be that I’m out of touch.

        When I was younger though, the biggest reason to change was because I wanted something different. If I was purely looking for playing games and homework I’d stay with Windows because it does work great for that and there would be no point to change.

        So the question is, what is it that grabs me onto Linux, and part of that is implied in your your graph, but part could be seen as these aspects.

        In saying that, I do get your point too, and for beginners it may be the better recommendation. In fact I may just be the outliner now that I think about it lol and maybe people don’t try to set up Gentoo “just coz the community said it’s hard and I took that personally” lol so an honorable mention may be better.

    • Hiroshi@pawb.socialEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Yes, I think it should end with a desktop environment (and why it was recommended), and then distros with good support of that DE (with one of them being the recommended distro for that category)

      I really like the bottom Linux Mint recommendation tho, I would keep that

  • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    9 months ago

    BTW you got a bunch of weird distros no one has heard of and you don’t have the champion of distros. “Do you know how to read and follow directions and do you like the stack overflow answers that are the shortest -> arch”

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    Not to discourage, love the idea, but it can be hard to choose an OS based on yes/no questions. Debian an Ubuntu have a lot of similarities for instance and maybe there are things you really like about Ubuntu (e.g. newer packages) and also things you hate about it (e.g. proprietary packaging with Snap).

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 months ago

    Is your computer weird or old (<x86-64v1, arm, etc) branch.

    You’d be amazed how many 32 bit systems or core systems are out there. People have tons of arm shit now too…

      • Luis Norambuena@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        My own example. I still have an ancient netbook lying around. It runs on an Intel Atom N270, which is only 32bit / i386. It came with Windows XP and I quickly switched to Mint, when it was still supporting 32bit.

        I think the last Ubuntu release supporting i386 was 18.04 (around 2018) and all other distros started to drop i386 support after that.

        AFAIK Debian is the only major distro still fully supporting i386. And a Debian based distro that still supports i386 is MX Linux. My ancient and crappy netbook is running MX Linux right now.

        My ‘weird’ example. I have a Raspberry 5! It’s ARM and very new. It runs its own distro, Raspberry Pi OS (Debian based), and Ubuntu does also fully support it. Right now if you try some other distro, it probably won’t even boot unless you start tinkering a lot with it.

        So Debian is definitively a choice for very old hardware. And the odd ARM SoC has usually at least some custom Ubuntu build that runs with it.

      • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 months ago

        The big differences in architecture are arm, x86-64(soon to be split into v1 and v2+ if it hasn’t been already), i686 which is almost all 32 bit intel and i386(no one is actually using this!)

        Not to join the chorus of model train enthusiasts itt, but Debian still maintains i686. Gentoo from source is another great option. There’s arch32 as well which I think requires that you be at least a p3.

        Arm is still in a weird place and it depends on the particular implementation more often than not:

        There’s Debian for arm sbcs, and there’s a different, less normal armbian that is more cheap/weird sbc oriented but also sucks in various ways. Theres also arch and gentoo for arm as well.

        M1 Mac users will probably want asahi.

        Actual factual i386 needers (pre-pentium) will want to run either the gentoo or bsds maintained specifically for that purpose.

  • matlag@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    9 months ago

    I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

    It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

    You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      0·
      9 months ago

      Don’t drop the chart! It’s really helpful for some people, and it’s fun, even for people who are looking to branch out rather than start fresh.
      Maybe have it start simple, eg. the very top choice is “First distro?” and Y points to a giant friendly MINT endpoint that takes up half the real estate, then N points to the regular cloud of options.
      But don’t ignore the benefits of graphical representations. If newbies make it all the way here, they’ve already waded through hundreds of vast, incomprehensible walls of text expounding the virtues of sysv and runit.
      I’m not saying dumb it down. There’s plenty of time to dig deeper, let’s ease the initial option paralysis.

  • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    You need to seriously up the contrast on those colors. Pink text on a slightly lighter pink text block is virtually unreadable.

    • AWildMimicAppears@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      i agree, my eyes are pretty good, but this is not useable. funnily enough my chosen lemmy frontend (alexandrite) would fix the colors, but its too small to read; and when you open the image in a new tab to zoom in, the colors are unuseable.

    • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
      0·
      9 months ago

      The graph was just a quick sketch in my note-taking app Logseq.

      I mainly wanted to know if the flowchart made sense. When I do it properly, I’ll use a different software :)

      • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        I’ll let you know if it makes sense when I can read it 😁

        Right now this is literally what I see:

        • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
          0·
          9 months ago

          I’m very sorry! This is just a sketch for discussion, the final version will look WAY better and be more legible :)

          • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            Ohh no apology needed. I think doing it as a flow chart is a good idea. I just included the screenshot to make sure there wasn’t something going on where the colors were different for you vs everyone else.

  • kronarbob@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    I would stick to basic recommendations and go from easiest to more and more advanced distribution, to avoid scaring beginners :

    • graphical installation + easy to setup (nvidia + codec )+stable : basically Ubuntu based distribution (but not Ubuntu, some snaps, i.e. steams, are more bugged than the flatpak and the .deb . I wouldn’t recommand a distribution that force bugged app for beginners ) + others

    • graphical installation : user will have to install nvidia drivers, codec or other useful things manually. The distribution can have several update a week with more risk to break, but is still considered solid and has a preconfigured way to roll back (snapshot) or more lightweigth and stable depending of the choice : fedora, opensuse tumbleweed, Debian+ others…

    • do it yourself distributions : for advanced users or motivated people that want to learn it the hard way. Distributions are up to date and have either a risk to break or user has to manually configure about everything (or both ) : arch, void Linux, gentoo, …

    “Gaming” distributions could be placed between the 2 first categories as they are a kind of out of the box distribution but more up to date than the stable distributions.

    Low ram/CPU consumption could be a side option at every step (easy, mid, hard)

    I didn’t tried immutable distributions in a while, so I don’t know how to place them. My experience one year ago (kinoite, silver blue, blend os), was that it was more complicated than a regular distribution to do what I needed, but it was 1 year ago, so I wouldn’t know where to place it.

    I’m quite a beginner in Linux, I love to test distributions to see how far I can go without using the terminal, and without breaking the distribution. So my vision can be quite narrow comparing to more experienced users.