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 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?”)
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
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.
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.
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.
