A note! the desktop field is completely optional! You can install any other desktop you like, but the listed are the “main” ones, usually recommended by the distro.

Linux Mint

  • Country: Ireland 🇮🇪
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: Cinnamon

Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)

https://www.linuxmint.com/

EndeavourOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

My second favorite :) Arch based, easy installer and updater, friendly community and beautiful themes. I recommend this distro if you are into arch based distros without wanting the painful part of it.

https://endeavouros.com/

OpenSUSE

  • Country: Germany 🇩🇪
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE

It’s mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.

https://www.opensuse.org/

NixOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME

My personal favorite <3 Great for servers. It’s not for the faint of heart, though hah. It’s an immutable distro, where there is no package manager, or manually modifying config files; your entire system is created with .nix files, not commands. Reproducable.

https://nixos.org/

Arch

  • Country: Canada 🇨🇦 (Yes yes, it’s not european but how can you not mention arch???)
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: None

Most popular distro for dedicated users, and for good reason; bleeding edge, full power over your system. Though you have to manually set up everything, from internet to your deskop environment.

Void

  • Country: Spain 🇪🇸
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: XFCE

Great distro if you want something like arch, but without systemd or slightly more stable (Also, musl support). Obscure but amazing.

https://voidlinux.org/

Debian [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global 🌍
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

An honorary mention. Isn’t suited for everyone, but is the golden standard for servers, and the grandfather of a huge family tree of distros.

https://www.debian.org/

That should cover a lot. Please heed the desktop warning, and please correct me/comment suggestions. This is not perfect, so please do criticize where possible c:

  • DaiDactylos@feddit.uk
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Snap is a packaging format for applications that was created by Canonical, the company that makes Ubuntu. Works similarly to Flatpak in that you just download one file and the application still then just run as it includes any necessary libraries, etc. I don’t know how well supported it is outside of Ubuntu, but Flatpak seems to be more prevalent.

    Cinnamon is a UI, one that should be easy to pick up for new users if they’ve had some experience with Windows.

    And FWIW, everyone starts as a beginner!