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 Endeavouros 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.
Good post. Added you to my RSS reader now.
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.
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.
Fedora is good, but the last time I tried using it it did not warn me about nvidia drivers and if I did not know of this I would keep using nouveau, which is something most new users probably don’t want. It doesn’t explain everything it is or isn’t doing like Mint for example which asks you about updates, codecs and drivers. That’s why I consider it easy to use whilst also not aimed at beginners.
Fair, the community is usually the one to help with that, when I did research before installing they told me that non free drivers like nvidia or broadcom would present an additional challenge and told me how to fix it, so I guess I knew going in and didn’t consider people not doing that first.
