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’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.
This one is better. Much more accurate and robust.
I tried both. They have the exact same questions.
However the one op posted respects the “I don’t want systemd” request. And I personally prefer to get multiple answers.
But the mobile webdesign on ops posted link was not great. So it’s a wash for me.
The second one is a joke site that always recommends EndevourOS
Webpage literally said it was a joke
And the one OP posted is a joke.
It was pretty accurate though.
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.
@patatahooligan @aswinbenny I once installed kde alongside GNOME and it messed with all the settings. It changed the icons and even the fonts. I couldn’t even restore the settings once I decided to stick to GNOME, but thankfully I had a snapshot ready to rollback.
Out of curiosity, what distro was this on?
I’m not the original person, but I’ve had exactly this happen before on both Arch and NixOS. Long ago when I was on Ubuntu I believe this also happened when I tried installing KDE (rather than wiping and installing Kubuntu). I’ve recently seen recommendations from people saying that if you’re going to try to have both GNOME and KDE installed alongside each other, to keep one user only on one, and the other user only on the other so that their config settings don’t get intertwined.
However right now I’m on Fedora Silverblue, I was on Kinoite and did a rebase to Silverblue (which means I went from KDE -> GNOME) and the only issue I had was a few icons were broken, which was resolved through setting it back to Adwaita in Tweak Tool. I’m guessing the fact that the rebase caused all of the KDE packages to get removed while installing the GNOME packages made it conflict less “violently” so to speak - which also had the nice effect of not having a bunch of duplicated apps as well.
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’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:
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“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.
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“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.
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“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.
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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.
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“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.
I don’t disagree with you.
All I want is for some objective statements about different distros. Like tell me what distro is a full time job to maintain. Tell me what distro is sending me to the command line all of the time. Give me some basic functionality benchmarks (search time, opening a browser and boot time) on a low, mid and high end computer.
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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’ve used Linux before albeit that was like a decade ago playing with Ubuntu but I had no idea how to answer that question. I don’t want an app store and I don’t want to install from the command prompt all the time. I just want to download something from the browser click it and it install it 😂 idk why that isn’t even an option to pick since I’m pretty sure that’s something you can do with Linux.
Either way I’m currently burning a Linux Mint/cinnamon flash drive to live boot and may dual boot it since I have an extra old SSD laying around.
If you just want it to work, and you’re coming from Windows or Mac, use Ubuntu. It’s a nice intro, and the hardware support is excellent.
Well at least at the end of the questions the distro I use (Void) was somewhere near the top of the list (4th).
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.
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.
It’s Ubuntu but without all of the crap canonical adds. It also just works and is similar to windows.
The “just works” thing applies to dozens of distros these days. And KDE looks and acts more like Windows 10 than Cinnamon.
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 agree that it’s a bad recommendation. That was my first distro and the dated look was a huge turn off and a bad first impression for Linux. It just feels like a downgrade from Windows or MacOS, which makes for a terrible transition.
What Mint offers that many other distros don’t is that it generally works well right out of the box, with just the initial install and no other tweaks, because it has proprietary drivers and other bells and whistles pre-installed. But so does Zorin and Pop_OS and both look much better. Those would probably be my top recommendations for a new user. All 3 of those distros have lots of online support (plus the general Ubuntu support that will usually be applicable as well).
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.
Eh I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to know many distros such as Trisquel, Parabola/Hyperbola, EXE GNU/Linux and so on, leading to odd choices. It also has false information here and there, and the “do you want a Windows-like or a macOS-like UI” question is pretty asinine.
I never heard of this distros lol. I think distrochooser is a tool for newbies. If you know your mentioned distros it is not the tool for you I guess.
Trisquel is literally the most popular libre-only distribution, endorsed by the FSF, it is hardly obscure. Parabola/Hyperbola are libre-only Arch derivatives, and EXE GNU/Linux is the only distribution shipping out of the box with TDE.
Trisquel is the only one out of those that is really friendly for newbies, admittedly, but given that it has Gentoo in there out of all things, it just seems like a very “Reddit” distribution list.
Thanks for clarification. I think I heard about Trisquel but to be tbh most Linux beginners do not surf the FSF website at first, they just google stuff and find a ton of blogs and articles and dive into the pretty standard distros like Mint and Ubuntu.
Pretty good, it even has Devuan and Artix.
No Linux From Scratch? Absolutely worthless.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
