A note! the desktop field is completely optional! You can install any other desktop you like, but the listed are the โmainโ ones, usually recommended by the distro.
Linux Mint
- Country: Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช
- Experience: Simple
- Desktop: Cinnamon
Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)
Ubuntu
- Country: Britain ๐ฌ๐ง
- Experience: Simple
- Desktop: GNOME
Good distro, but has some controversies. Though itโs the most popular beginners distro by far.
EndeavourOS
- Country: Netherlands ๐ณ๐ฑ
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE
My second favorite :) Arch based, easy installer and updater, friendly community and beautiful themes. I recommend this distro if you are into arch based distros without wanting the painful part of it.
OpenSUSE
- Country: Germany ๐ฉ๐ช
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE
Itโs mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.
Manjaro
- Country: Germany ๐ฉ๐ช / Austria ๐ฆ๐น / France๐ซ๐ท
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE
Added because of popular recommendation. I recommend EndeavourOS more, since manjaro has aโฆ history.
NixOS
- Country: Netherlands ๐ณ๐ฑ
- Experience: Advanced
- Desktop: KDE/GNOME
My personal favorite <3 Great for servers. Itโs not for the faint of heart, though hah. Itโs an immutable distro, where there is no package manager, or manually modifying config files; your entire system is created with .nix files, not commands. Reproducable.
Arch
- Country: Canada ๐จ๐ฆ (Yes yes, itโs not european but how can you not mention arch???)
- Experience: Advanced
- Desktop: None
Most popular distro for dedicated users, and for good reason; bleeding edge, full power over your system. Though you have to manually set up everything, from internet to your deskop environment.
Void
- Country: Spain ๐ช๐ธ
- Experience: Advanced
- Desktop: XFCE
Great distro if you want something like arch, but without systemd or slightly more stable (Also, musl support). Obscure but amazing.
Debian [Honorary mention]
- Country: Global ๐
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE
An honorary mention. Isnโt suited for everyone, but is the golden standard for servers, and the grandfather of a huge family tree of distros.
VanillaOS [Honorary mention]
- Country: Global ๐๏ธ
- Experience: Advanced
- Desktop: GNOME
VanillaOS is a debian-based immutable operating system, which can install packages from any other distro and is very hard to brick.
That should cover a lot. Please heed the desktop warning, and please correct me/comment suggestions. This is not perfect, so please do criticize where possible c:
Iโm currently wondering whether this is going in the right direction. I understand that we are boycotting commercial products from the US, which makes perfect sense to me. But as someone who works on FOSS software myself, I wonder if we are hurting the right people by not using FOSS software that comes from the US. I think these are largely people who donโt support Trump.
I completely agree. I think FOSS software is way harder to control by a corporation (especially licensed copyleft) Personally i donโt think itโs harmful to use OSS software from any country at all. Whether by chinese, belgian or american as long as it is open source, itโs fair game i think.
I shared this post since i thought this community might enjoy it, but all distros are fine.
If you look at a lot of the other posts theyโre more along the lines of โthese companies are based in the EUโโฆ and thatโs it. Not why theyโre better than the US based equivalents or why the US based ones are worth boycotting.
And to a certain extent I understand that. But the signal to noise ratio has lowered considerably in the past few weeks.
Linux Mint is honestly amazing. I always read about it being labeled as โfor beginnersโ or being โboringโ almost as if thatโs a bad thing. I just wanted something that works out of the box and not take on a new hobbyโฆ And I got just that with Linux Mint. Highly recommended
Good to know! Being a Canadian, Iโm pretty determined to transfer over to linux before Microsoft stops supporting windows 10 but have been pretty intimidated by various horror stories etc.
Canadian person! If you break it, ask me and I will do my best to non-snarkily assist. I am working on becoming less snarky, so itโs practice!
I broke my system several times and probably will continue to do so. Linux really shoehorned it into my thick skull to make backups xD
Apart from that I can recommend saving any important data on a seperate drive or partition from the OS and keeping a thumbdrive with the live OS around. If the system is truly borked, you can boot the liveOS and do some damage control, like getting important data out, before reinstalling the system.
Best of Luck on you Linux journey. :)
For anyone who wants a system that doesnโt break, look into immutable distros (unchangeable base OS and libraries) with atomic updates (which donโt replace anything until they have been fully installed and confirmed as working).
I donโt know where Vanilla OS is officially headquartered but I do know several of its key figures are Italian.
If it breaks more is because you are free to do more with it. Just try dual booting or even just via a live โinstallโ. Thereโs nothing to lose and a lot to gain.
Oh, I think youโre completely correct in a world where time is infinite. I justโฆ Iโd love to take up linux as a hobby and all the hours that entails but I have a lot of hobbies already. There are so mamy things I want to read before I die and fighting through Linux technical manuals to get my weird triple monitor/tv/receiver set up correctly, well, that isnโt really up there in my top 50 life priorities.
The honest truth is that it takes some time to get to an โexpertโ level where you can be confident about what youโre doing, but simply setting it up and using it for basic tasks (following some guide) is pretty darn straightforward. Most people that have issues tend to have them with use cases (eg. someone wants to edit photos but canโt get the same results as with Adobe Lightroom with alternative applications) or with specific bits of hardware (maybe they have a laptop which requires specific windows-only drivers to get the full functionality out of the trackpad, WiFi card or battery optimisation). So if you set it up and the hardware all works, youโll probably be fine for all the basic tasks most people need, and you will gradually pick up advanced knowledge as you go along.
It will be an adjustment, but for most people itโs really not a difficult thing to get used to. Just need to wrap your head around different installation methods, different file system layouts, and just the fact that you have so much freedom available to you.
Feel free to DM me if you have any questions about adopting Linux! Even if you think itโs a stupid question.
I just wanted something that works out of the box and not take on a new hobbyโฆ
Thatโs it, I have plenty of things to tinker with but, on my laptops and desktops, I really donโt want to have to do much messing about. I just need to install and go. Iโm currently on Ubuntu but itโd be rude of me not to try Mint, especially now I know it is from Ireland.
Mint really is simple to use. Other than the desktop (layout, look and feel), and a few changes in system apps (the backup app, etc.), you wonโt need to change much about how you use it. Even the bare, raw internal config files would basically be the same (if you copied your user profile over), because Mint is Ubuntu under the hood.
Iโm pleasantly surprised by the country origins of Arch and Mint.
Whaaat linux mint my beloved is Irish! Awesome!
Iโve been using Mint for ages and never realized itโs Irish
