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- It’s severely outdated.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?
What do you think about something like this?
Never SuSE again. #UnitedLinux
You need to seriously up the contrast on those colors. Pink text on a slightly lighter pink text block is virtually unreadable.
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 :)
I’ll let you know if it makes sense when I can read it 😁
Right now this is literally what I see:
I’m very sorry! This is just a sketch for discussion, the final version will look WAY better and be more legible :)
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.
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.
If a user does not like CLI or is not comfortable fixing anything, then suggest OpenSUSE. Built in snapper rollback for problems and YAST2-GTK GUI apps to configure anything, no CLI skills needed.
Do you hate yourself, if yes then Solaris is the OS you’ve been looking for.
Something I don’t see mentioned often is what OS they are coming from. Linux mint is often recommend and assumes they are coming from Windows. MacOS users will probably feel more at home with a Gnome DE.
I think Mac users feel better with KDE. Gnome is too unique to compare it to either Windows or Mac.
If you move the dock to the top and add another dock on the bottom, you basically have the UI from MacOS.
You can replicate everything else with a few clicks too.
Very nice. I did not know that. I came over from macOS and Gnome felt very natural to use due to its similar UX approach but I understand others may differ. I may give KDE another try to test it out what’s new since I used it last.
I mean, Gnome often gets compared to MacOS and KDE to Windows, but I find it to be only similar on the surface.
In reality, Gnome is totally unique in its own way and KDE has nothing to do with Windows, being more similar to Mac than anything else, especially after minimal customisation.
Ah shit, I’m 13.
As long as Mint is at the top I don’t care what’s underneath 😁
I use Zorin OS for my laptop that’s gotta be at least 15+ years but still kicking it. Outlasted the newer laptop I bought that was only 5 years old.
As someone who is only mildly into tech, Zorin is certainly familiar and I would probably recommend it to people.
I downloaded Gallium OS for my mom on her Chromebook, that’s perhaps another important consideration to make…what laptop someone has.
sorry if this is harsh but this seems like kind of a waste of time when distrochooser.de exists? I think it’d make a ton of sense to link that in the sidebar but a wall of text (or a huge flow chart) is just gonna be skipped by the type of people who are asking what distro to use first instead of researching it themselves anyway. if someone’s asking in a forum like Lemmy or even in discord servers, they usually just want quick answers. if we’re gonna link them something instead of just saying “mint” or whatever, it should at least be something easily digestible like distrochooser.de
People who think its too complicated won’t make it to the bottom of the flow chart.
tl;Dr needs to go at the top, not the bottom. That’s the point. They won’t make it to the bottom.
Came here to say this too
Do you think that there are any distros missing
Yes, my easy to setup and use Debian-based daily driver, Q4OS.
IMHO any distro recommendation chart for new users that lacks Ubuntu LTS is not credible. Downvote away.
I feel like that might be Debian stable now? With Ubuntu adopting snaps and Debian containing firmware in the installation iso.
Could be, I haven’t tested it in a while on a desktop or a laptop. Snaps are fine for new users. In fact they are a net benefit. I’m speaking from point of view of availability of software and function, not technology or ideology.
Yeah Debian 12 made Ubuntu LTS obsolete.
Sleeping on it: major version upgrades. In Debian there’s no automatic way to do it as far as I know?
For people with little technical experience, this could be a substantial hurdle or even problem.Apt-get dist-upgrade is a Debian invention. From before Ubuntu existed.
apt-get dist-upgrade instead of apt upgrade is debian’s way in reconstructing a system victim of the shortcoming of poor package management that can not be healed otherwise.
But it doesn’t do any custom upgrade steps? For a correct upgrade, you need to follow Debian’s manual. Otherwise you will break things afaik
If you’re asserting dist-upgrades are not supposed to be unattended, you’re right. By design. If it’s something else, then I don’t follow.
Ubuntu and KDE was a horrible experience for me. They theme GNOME like hell which is very controversial too. Their snaps are basically a one-company-project nobody really likes.
