this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
1288 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2144 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ignore all the “this distro is the best”
Just use Ubuntu to start until you know what you wish was different
I agree with the first part but Ubuntu is pretty much the worst distro you can recommend.
It’s what proprietary software tends to target, so for someone just coming from Windows, it’s a decent first choice.
OpenSUSE/Fedora don’t support media codecs without knowing you need to add Packman/RPMFusion
Debian just released Bookworm, so it might be an okay recommendation for now, but as a general rule it’s probably not the best first distro
For someone used to Windows staying the same for years, jumping straight to a rolling release like Arch or its derivatives is a massive change
NixOS is too much configuration for a first time user
Linux Mint is maybe a better first recommendation, but it’s still downstream of Ubuntu (I wouldn’t recommend LMDE for a first time Linux user)
Your response is exactly why people find it so difficult to pick a distro to start. Ubuntu may not be the perfect distro for you or I, but there’s a decent reason it’s one of the biggest, and it has conservative defaults
Until that user knows what things bother them about it or what more they need, we’d just go back and forth all day about upsides and downsides of each distro