From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I appreciate distro chooser but I'd never recommend a newbie to use it. This just increases their choice paralysis, I chose beginner options and got recommended: Linux Mint, ZorinOS, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, elementary OS, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Pop!_OS...
And all of them had pretty much the same check marks. They're good recommendations but this doesn't answer the question, people will just look at the list and say "Okay... Which distro do I choose?"
Yeah it should really only give me 2, maybe 3 options. Distrochooser is supposed to be the one choosing, not the user
Yep, this was me when I first started out. The chooser was cool but didn't really answer the question of which one I should use first.
I eventually settled on Mint. Cinnamon left a lot to be desired imo, but otherwise it worked quite well and I'd recommend it as a first distro.
If someone has to ask the question, just recommend Ubuntu or Mint.
@Obsession @JokaJukka I agree mint is really good for beginners. But I would suggest people to use different desktop environments first and choose a DE.
Then try different distros using that DE. See which one works well.
I personally like Gnome and cinnamon
Just install the DE you want on the distro you want... You aren't limited in your DE by your selected distro, and you can have multiple installed. most of the time you have a drop down when you login that lets you pick your DE.
@Coolcoder360 Installing a DE after installing a distro has often caused me a lot of bugs 🥴. Maybe it is just me
It's not just you. The DEs themselves generally don't mess with each other much, beyond possibly messing with each other's settings. But I've seen the the package post installation scripts cause issues. So it depends on the distro I guess.
I personally disagree. Distrochooser is a great tool for distrohoppers who want to experiment and see what's out there. it is a little less useful than DistroWatch's ranking list, but that requires more reading to figure out if something would be diving into the deep end.
My recommendation is to either look at the top ranked beginners distro on distro watch, or to just recommend mint. Someone's first distro should above all else get out of the way. It should be as stable as possible, have as much hardware support as possible, and be as default as possible (less distro customizations of packages). Troubleshooting info must be captured in an easily indexible knowledge base (nothing is worse than searching for help with something and all you can find is a stack exchange post marked duplicate or a forum post with one reply that says "did you try googling?")
I agree with the other comments that it isn’t a great tool for complete beginners. There’s a question that mentions systemd. A newbie won’t know what that means.
When I see people recommending Devuan or non systemd OS i'm like why? The newbie has no idea what the hell is systemd despite maybe that some people hate it for some reason so it must be bad lol
I'm not pointing a Linux noob to any site that puts a big ol star nex to "suitable for daily use" under Gentoo.
Or Arch. Or Void. Like, I really like Arch and Gentoo sounds cool (although I never tried it), but maybe recommend something you can actually use without getting an aneurism during setup.
All these are fine for daily use if you have the Linux knowledge to use them. By ‘not suitable for daily use’ they mean special purpose distros like Knoppix, Tails, and Qubes. It’s somewhat confusing wording though.
No i don't find that site any useful
There are way too many answers after you finish this quiz. You should recommend, at most, three options after the quiz. This doesn't help narrow down your options much at all.
I think the idea is to rank them from most to least suitable based on your answers, not narrow down. Just pick the "top 3" if you want a smaller sample.
Edit: this is not well documented, but it seems to be the case: the results are sorted based on the number of "reasons" to pick it according to your answers.
Yeah woah, these questions were supposed to narrow it down but instead gave me way to many options most of which weren't all that suitable at all.
If people ask me what distro to choose I say Mint.
Unless you already know what you want and need it is simply the best distro out there to get your feet wet. It is very competent in what it is doing and can be used by anyone no matter the experience.
Even though I believe there are better distros out there this is the only one I would recommend to people new to Linux and it is still a solid choice for experienced users alike. You can use it forever or branch out from there, both are very valid choices.
I kinda feel like this is better for folks who've been at it for a little bit. There are way too many distros claiming to be beginner friendly for a tool like this to be helpful.
I think it's better to just send them to an easy to install, up to date distro that will suit their needs that has a DE that's easy to understand but different enough from where they're coming from to keep them from expecting it to work like windows. Stable updates from a GUI, software availability, and easy to use backup tools are all a plus.
Which OS am I talking about? Hell, I have no idea. Fedora? Maybe Vanilla 2 when it comes out? Certainly nothing Arch based (sorry, guys, I love arch too but it's not for beginners...).
The rage-forks (Like devuan) are way to prominent positioned. There should be a question (or fixed filter vor warning) about how stable the development processes are.
I'm using Windows as my daily driver due to prioritising gaming over everything else. But I also have a 8-year old laptop which is stuck with Win 7, and I've been wondering if I should just install Linux on it to try things out. In the past, I've only ever tried Linux for short times, never used Linux as my main OS or longer than a week.
With this context, I've had the "which distro should I choose?" on my mind a few times. There's some obvious and some non-obvious issues with this questionnaire. I'll just go over my thoughts step by step:
"I want anonymous web browsing" and "distro which is supported by game publishers" can't be selected at the same time. Is this really true? I'm doubting my understanding of what "anonymous web browsing" actually means.
"I often need help from others" and "I have already used Linux for some purposes" can't both be selected. Why? The logic behind this is "You have used Linux at some point, so you can clearly solve some problems without asking anyone". Makes no sense, and/or the questionnaire's creator thinks that Linux is impossible for newcomers. I have used Linux in the past and I'm generally good in troubleshooting, but anyway.
"I want to use the default preset values in the installation assistant" is impossible to answer if I don't know which values are given as the default. My general answer would be "give me a default value for everything, but also let me change the things which I have an opinion about". An answer equal to this doesn't exist.
Pre-installed programs: this does feel like it lacks the answer of "let me choose what to install during installation of OS", but I guess I can just skip this question without answering since I don't care.
"There are many way to administrate a linux distribution" -> "I want to avoid systemd". I've never heard about systemd, and the explanation give on the page doesn't really help. For what reasons would I want to avoid it? My actual answer for this is "I really don't care", so I just skipped it.
About the result of the questionnaire: I did answer that "I'm fine with paying something", but it's not really something I aim for. The suggestions seem to tag "There is a non-free version available" as a plus for the distros, which really isn't what I answered - there's a difference between "I'm fine with something" and "I want something".
I also marked "supported by game publishers" with a star, because gaming is what I'm aiming to do on it. I have no idea if this even matters in practice, but it made sense as an answer when asked about. The smoothness of gaming experience will always be the primary reason for any choice of OS I'll make.
The first EIGHT answers on the list have either "Programs versions may not be up-to-date enough for gaming" or "May require additional configuration for gaming" as a downside/warning. The game publisher question is the only answer which I marked as important.
The first distro from the suggestions that included "supported by game publishers" is Linux Mint - which does match what I already had in mind, but I really feel like the ordering of the suggested distros feel off.
Short "review" about this: it really didn't help much. The list of suggestions is practically full of equally good distros, and I'm still stuck with the question "which one of these should I choose?". I only learned about more distros that I had never heard about before.
As for actually choosing the distro at some point later: I think that I'll just find out the top 5 most popular distros, and select from those. My reasoning for this is that it's much easier to find answers if/when I run into issues. Using a niche distro wouldn't really work for me - Linux isn't my hobby, I think OS is just a tool to run whatever programs/games I want to.
But this questionnaire doesn't have any data about popularity, so for my usecase, it lacks some information. I feel like it could use an additional question about "Are you fine with using a niche distro, or do you want to use a popular one?" - this question does have the issue of not being objective though, as there's no clear answer of what can be counted as "popular".
TL;DR good idea, but execution could be better.
At the end I got a list of 29 distros, this is terrible. A user who is willing to go through all pros and cons and is able to compare them doesn't need this website to choose a distro.
I think it gives everyone the same list of 29, but it’s the order that’s important. Gentoo came back as my top. I use Void which came back as 4th in my list.
If they are new to linux I think we should always point them to mint. Then they can use a distro chooser to explore the rest of what linux distro's have to offer.
What does Mint offer that other distros don't? Cinammon DE? KDE is just as easy to use, and looks modern and doesn't look like it's from 2004. Why has Mint specifically become the defacto "beginner" distro?
It's just another Ubuntu derivative with a DE nobody else seems to be using.
Ubuntu derivative
Is one reason.
DE nobody else seems to be using
Cinnamon is easy to use though. Seamless transition from windows to linux for people who don't know what they are really doing. When they get the hang of it, you can do some neat stuff with it.
Cinnamon is also an in house thing from the Linux Mint developers which is why it's most common there. There's a few other distros that have spins on it. Namely Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Fedora, etc.
I dont know what if offers. Other than its very stable and if you ask for help and say you're on mint people are more inclined to help.
Linux on boarding has the same problem as the fediverse. When people first join they dont know where to start and its overwhelming. Thats why its nice to give them a landing pad where they can go and then after using it for a week or so they can move on to other options if thats what they want. Thats why I point people to mint.
That's pretty much what I do now. Choice paralysis is a thing, and Mint is solid for people to dip their toes. The exception I've made if it's someone more techy to begin with, then I might recommend Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi as a starting point. But that's only if it's someone already into networking or Powershell scripting or similar.
"I prefer a distribution which is supported by game publishers." feels like it sets bad expectations considering it's just "do you want a stable Debian/Ubuntu distro?" and 'game publishers' might be a little out of date with their wording/justification
While I appreciate this, there were far too many questions, which were pretty technical for a layperson. And even after picking the most basic options, I was still presented with like six variants of Ubuntu, including Mint and Elementary.
How about something like:
This put a minus on Debian because updates are slow but didn’t have one on Devuan or RHEL. I would not take these results too seriously. There is also no reason to rank Devuan and Artix as high as it did when I said I don’t care about systemd. The only reason to pick those over the upstream distros is for the init system.
It did recommend Arch as my top choice though which is what I’ve been daily driving for years.
Not enough curation. People can use whatever they want but you should never “recommend” many of these distros.
For example, with apologies to fans, nobody should be pushed to ElementaryOS anymore—especially not new users. I say this as somebody that loves the “idea” of it and find it beautiful.
I think they should have gone through the candidate distros, disqualified many of them for various reasons, and then mapped to the remaining ones with their questions.
The intent's great, but I agree with the sentiment that if a beginner has to ask which distro is good for them, that questionnaire only cause them more trouble through choice paralysis.
I answered it in the mindset I had when I was just first installing my first Linux daily-driver, and I got a lot of results, with Linux Mint, Zorin OS and Elementary OS being the top three. Haven't really gone through the distro-hopping phase (nor do I think I'd have the patience to), but I'm intrigued with the other two. It also says something about me who uses Arch, btw, but "gravitating" towards Ubuntu-based distros (or at least, that's what the results seems to be telling me).
I just did the questionnaire for shits and giggles, not expecting much. The top two suggestions were fedora and debian. I'm actually running fedora and debian on different machines. I wonder how much of a fluke that is, or if it really is that good. Anybody else, who's already happy with their distribution(s), tried it?
Yep, for me Arch was top of the list, followed by Gentoo and Void. I was completely expecting Arch or something like EndeavorOS to be at the top, so I'm totally unsurprised. Seems pretty good to me!
I tried it and it recommended gentoo, devuan, and artix in the top 3. Which happens to be the 3 linux distros running on my computers.
I recommend Kubuntu for people coming from Windows because a lot of the keyboard shortcuts are the same besides, the default behavior is more or less like Windows. And since it's based on Ubuntu, they're more likely to find answers to any issues that they run in because of it's popularity. After a while they can choose to move to a distro of their choice once they are comfortable.
I took the test and it told me I should use Zorin. I've never even heard of that distro
@JokaJukka I took the test and it said I should use Suse/OpenSuse which is what I'm using!
In my opinion taking your time to find the Linux distribution you like the most, is not only a great learning experience, but also allows you to learn more about your own preferences.
