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.
No i don’t find that site any useful
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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.
No Linux From Scratch? Absolutely worthless.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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The “just works” thing applies to dozens of distros these days. And KDE looks and acts more like Windows 10 than Cinnamon.
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.
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.
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.
If anybody is so clueless about Linux that they need to take a quiz like this, they should probably just use something easy like Mint or Ubuntu.
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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.
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 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?”)
@JokaJukka I took the test and it said I should use Suse/OpenSuse which is what I’m using!
Funnily i tried this as i was curious and it pointed me to the distro i was already using - Opensuse lmfao
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.
