I grew tired of shitty “Top 10 Linux distros in ${CURRENT_YEAR}” articles so I wrote a blogpost, that I would personally consider helpful when I was starting out, so I can simply link it to people when they ask my opinion on a beginner distro.
Objective criticism is welcome and encouraged.
I really love actual content. It feels like the internet has become full of seo-promoted garbage and the real content have just vanished. Nice writeup!
Ignore gimmick distros Forget about cool looking screenshots you saw online. The graphical interface does not depend on the distribution and can be replicated on any distro and most software works on any Linux system.
I hate these YouTube reviews where they review DEs but call it distro review.
I was on Arch for a long time. But I got sick of never ending updates and gave a shot at Void Linux. Very stable and relatively easier to manage.
Pop OS is my recommendation for new users who want to play games, especially those with Nvidia GPUs.
Good write up.
Very nice. I like how you went about telling the user how to make a decision and provided and their various options rather than just spitting out a list of distros you like without telling the user why you did so. One thing I would bring up though, depending on whether you want it to be closer to a one stop shop or a springboard to further research, would be that for a new user touching a few pros/cons of the various aspects you mentioned (e.g. stable vs rolling releases) to maybe point them towards what would be a good fit for them. But that’s more so depending on what your philosophy is on the “what’s good” vs “how to find what’s good” slider of things.
Good point about the “stable vs rolling release”. I will add a section about that once I have time.
As a person who has come and gone as a casual linux user a few times i have had multiple chances to experience being a new user. I have used mainsream distros and niche distros.
Agree popularity is the #1 factor to consider. You need help to get you over the first humps and having a huge existing archive of other people working through issues on forums, tutorials, etc is gold. And innumerable channels to pose questions if you need personal help.
Your first linux install is like your first date. You will probably not marry and spend the rest of your life together. No need to agonize over it passing notes and getting your fortune told. Just go for it and move on.
I think you should add that the arch docs excellent regardless of what distro you use and are beginer friendly because i actually avoided them for a while assuming theyd be written in 1337 speak and only complicated arch stuff.
Noted, will mention that arch docs are great regardless of distro once I have the time.
As far as beginner friendly goes I think so too, but I have seen people complain that they are too complex because of the way they are structured. E.g. the install guide will not directly tell you how to install a bootloader, but will tell you to install one and then link an article about bootloaders. I’ll still edit the part about it and recommend it, people can decide themselves if they wanna use it or not.
Which distro wont send me into the terminal every time I need something?
Probably Mint or ElementaryOS are your safest bets. Personally I think being able to use the Linux terminal is an advantage though, way more reliable and consistent than windows’ settings/control panel/powershell fiasco
I didn’t ask for a distro that didn’t have the terminal available.
I’m using Pop! OS and basically I only need to use the terminal when tinkering with Wine (because I’m stubborn and don’t use Lutris), launching StableDiffusion or doing some wacky shit like trying to install a compatibility layer for android apps.
have you got an 88x31 button? i’d like to link to this
(no worries if you haven’t, i’ll just use a text link)
I do not have one, I am not very artistic so I keep things plaintext and simple. But https://zeusofthecrows.github.io/stadt/ really makes me wanna reconsider, I really like how it looks and it reminds me that I should visit neocities more.
thank you : )
you should! i started out with a much simpler jekyll generated site
Good post. Added you to my RSS reader now.
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The ordering is arbitrary, I did not think about the order as I tried to simply list things people may wish to consider when choosing.
I do not think I will be making a blogpost about advanced distros, I feel like people who want to use distributions like that (myself included) have the knowledge to decide themselves and there would be too many factors to consider.
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I would suggest adding “easy rollback to good state” for OpenSUSE, it is probably the best feature. And while it shares binaries with SUSE now, it is not run by SUSE, it is a community build distro
My bad, I thought openSUSE was ran by SUSE, but you are right and it is simply sponsored by them, will fix it as soon as I can. I will also mention the rollback feature and then I guess I’ll also mention timeshift for Mint.
Ah yeah I forgot Mint had that setup.
Ridiculous to post Arch 3 times. Arch strawberry, arch strawberry but with installer and Arch but-just-a- bit-different.
I said some points about why Arch is good, but also difficult for beginners so I listed two of its forks and said a sentence or two about them.
On an unrelated note, strawberry is a bad choice of fruit to describe Arch distros, since they are usually in shades of blue.
I’d argue that while not beginner friendly, Arch’s “difficult to install” reputation is a bit of a hold-over from the past seeing as archinstall exists on the iso and guides you through everything… but I’ve also not had it work successfully for me the few times I tried it and just had to install manually instead 🤦♂️ 🤣
Archinstall is great but also the wiki itself recommends manual install and I still think for someone who never touched Linux Calamares would be better.
You’re probably right there. To me, Arch really seems like an endgame distro, for when you’ve tried enough options to know what you like and you just want to roll that without any cruft.
Great post, saved for future use. I’d say myself that while Fedora may not be aimed at beginners, it is pretty good for beginners nonetheless. It’s what I started on (after dipping my toes in Tails, which also has it’s use cases but more importantly here demystified linux for me and made me comfortable with it. Then windows pissed me off one last time and the rest is history.)
The fedora community in my experience has been very helpful, though that was reddit, so we shall see what the future holds.
I love Fedora but since they are no longer shipping the most popular media codecs on install I can’t recommend them for beginners. I myself was a bit blindsided by this when wanted to start watching a movie with family and had to scramble to download the codecs 😅
Afaik no distros ship those codecs by default now, they might prompt you to download them during the installation. Fedora was just the first to notice that “oopsie we are violating a license” and others followed soon after.
Ah, that’s interesting. I haven’t had that problem yet on other distros but now I’ll keep my eye out for it. Pretty annoying if that’s case tho :/
Manjaro KDE would be my pick based on my personal experience.
I specifically mentioned Manjaro as not recommended because of all the silly stuff they did. It will most probably not break on you, but forgetting to renew your SSL certificate like 4 times in a row does not really instill confidence.
100%. If this article is intended for beginners to Linux, Manjaro is the only option I’d recommend. (I like Xfce, but whatever.)
Your can’t go wrong with ubuntu. Seriously I think it’s the best for everyone, whether beginner or expert
