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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
@Franzia @SpacePirate Don’t hate it, learn it!
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?”)
No i don’t find that site any useful
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
This is why I recommend Mint with Cinnamon DE. Same reasons. It’s always interesting to see someone come to a different conclusion with the same reasoning. 🙂
I’ve stopped giving a choice because invariably newcomers I turn onto Linux pick the distro with the default wallpaper they like the best. Even within “don’t worry about distros, pick a DE” that’s still meaningless advice to someone who has only seen Windows. If you want me to install Linux for you, you’re getting Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. Because it’s what I use, and it’s what I can help you with the easiest. I can find my way around KDE or xfce but I already know my way around Cinnamon.
Plus one for Linux Mint Cinnamon. Easily the best beginner distro, IMO. If you’re technical enough to advance past Mint w/Cinnamon, you’re probably technical enough to not need a service like the linked website.
It’s still nice to see tools like this coming out, though, as a show of support for newcomers to the ecosystem.
I took the test and it told me I should use Zorin. I’ve never even heard of that distro
It’s a fairly popular noob distro, it’s stylized to be very similar to Windows, to help people transition to Linux more easily.
Hey me too, even tho for the past few weeks i’ve been using Arch with no issues, i just suck at ricing and i alway end up imploding the os
