I found this site a while back - basically it will ask you a bunch of questions on your usage of your PC, and will came out with a list of recommended distros, and a list of reasons why YOU could like or not like it.
There are some similar sites to this one, but since I’m not familiar with them, I won’t post them. They are simply DuckDuckGo-able though.
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 ran through this survey like questionnaire; deliberately skipping questions that would pigeon-hole me into Arch or some DE based decision (which is meaningless). [FYI I skipped the ‘User Experience’, ‘Distribution: Scope’ and ‘Software:Updates’ questions]
The useless thing ended up suggesting LITERALLY every linux distro. Here’s a link the the results for a laugh https://distrochooser.de/en/d5fb48e83643/
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?
How bad is really bad?
AntiX is a good choice. Other option is a usb3 drive for each family member so everyone has their own portable AntiX on a stick.
MX is the related project with a more standard install and could be worth a look, the Fluxbox option should be quite light.
Each user could have a personal AntiX system on persistent usb3 and each system could have a bare metal MX Linux install. Just see what wins out via natural selection over time.
LXQT is another option for a full desktop environment that will run on a potato. If family members are mainly just users and you are admin, the base OS may not matter much. They could switch between a potato running Alpine and a good system running Fedora and if they are just logging into LXQT to launch browser, office, email etc the internal system plumbing is not gonna concern them.
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
It should display the distros just like stemwijzer (Dutch site) displays its results in the end.
Showing all results it’s fine IMO, they just need to make obvious the results are ranked with the “best match” at the top, so if the user doesn’t know better or doesn’t have any objections, they’ll pick the top one.
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.
I’m not pointing a Linux noob to any site that puts a big ol star nex to “suitable for daily use” under Gentoo.
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.
how would you compare Mint to MX Linux? Whats the biggest difference in your opinion?
When selecting a distro to mess around with, i just checked distrowatch to find the most popular distro and chose that (MX). My reasoning was that the resources like wiki/tutorials/forum posts would be most easily available with a more “popular” distro.
I think the biggest difference is that it is based on Debian and is a bit more conservative. I prefer cinnamon over xfce and in its default even over KDE.
Really, I just assume better hardware compatibility and slightly newer packages from Mint and that’s just about it.
Don’t read too much into it. There is nothing wrong with MX, Debian or just plain Ubuntu either. In my opinion Ubuntu fixes a few problems Debian has and Mint does the same with Ubuntu. Because apt is widely supported the Debian family is a great choice anyway.
thank you! more up-to-date packages sound good to me, will have to check out mint, then.
The main thing a newbie would benefit from with Mint is their extremely polished software appstore program, which is essentially a nice frontend to their repository that provides categories, reviews, and easy installation and management of your programs wrapped up in a polished, non-techie UI.
MX linux has a similar program installer for common apps, but it does not offer reviews, and does not give access to the entire Debian repo, eventually requiring you to use Aptitude, which is not newbie friendly at all.
Mint’s Cinnamon interface is also extremely easy to use for a new windows convert.
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
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.
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.
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.
Mint requires you to use the terminal the least of any distro I’ve used. I’m very comfortable with CLI but for people who have only used Windows or MacOS and never ventured beyond the GUI, Mint is the easiest transition because of its plethora of well-integrated GUI tools.
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.
This one is better. Much more accurate and robust.
Webpage literally said it was a joke
And the one OP posted is a joke.
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…).
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…).
I honestly think it’s Ubuntu. If we put aside the biases many of us “experienced” users have against Ubuntu/Canonical/snaps, Ubuntu seems like the best choice. Well supported, wide community, sane defaults.
I’d agree if it weren’t for the Snaps bullshit. Because of that, I don’t want to recommend it to anyone because I don’t want to encourage Canonical.
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 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.
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:
- Do you use your computer more for games, or for work?
- How much do you care about open source?
- Do you know what a makefile is?
What is a systemd and why do I need to hate it? /s
Unironically, you can hate it in one of the answers. I’m not even sure how why it is there.
