When I first began researching Linux, for my needs, I found the number of different Distros to be overwhelming. So I made this flow chart, with the intent to help new users find a starting point for choosing a distribution.
I’m open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.
EDIT: Chart updated based on suggestions in the comments.
That flow chart is overwhelming.
How about, just use what you want? If it doesn’t work the way you like, try something else. Nvidia works fine on pretty much any distro, find a PPA or repo or something and it’s largely OK.
How about:
- new to Linux? Mint or Fedora - pick the flavor that looks cool to you
- not new? You know what you like, use that.
Your heart is in the right place, but imo, this isn’t going to help anyone. For every branch you have up to 5 options. A bunch are dependent on gpu. When you ask half of normal people what their operating system is, their answer is Dell.
Just tell people to use Mint and let them go through this chart if they are in the 1% of people who will ever look for it. The peril of these graphics and this approach is it pushes people away. Make as many choices for them as possible. Remember, we who want this are not the norm.
Disagree. I think it’s fine; most people looking at Linux know what their GPU is.
If OP wants to address your concern they should just put a banner at top saying “UNSURE WHAT ANY OF THIS MEANS? >> LINUX MINT”
There are going to be plenty of potential windows expats. Do you in all honesty think this is going to be helpful to them? There’s a reason I didn’t guve my mom a chart like this and just did it for her.
Per GPU. Yes people know whaf a gpu is, but again you are putting a lot of faith in the average person to navigate all of that information.
This is 100% information overload for anyone who wouldn’t seek it themselves.
It could certainly be simplified.
New to Linux > No > Do you value your mental health and sanity > No > Arch.
New to Linux > No > Do you value your mental health and sanity > No >
ArchDebian.In fairness to me, I mostly run old hardware and don’t give a shit about anything flashy. Arch is my 2nd favorite for desktop use though.
Uh, I just use Base arch. Used it since I was new to Linux. I am not changing.
jumped from macos to arch and love every minute
Bleading -> bleeding
Also what ever happened to Slackware?
Thank you.
I’ll add Slackware.
“new to Linux” is not accurate.
I’ve been using Linux since kernel 1.2.13. I chose a “noob friendly” desktop OS because the last time I used a gui on Linux was Xfree86 in 1995ish with the modeline hell; even while helping build, support, defend and maintain AT&T Unix and enterprise Linux, we were all back to w98se because of the non-fuckery GUI experience.
With w10 dying, I finally needed to kill win7 at home, and I’m back with the “noobie” Linux version.
Point is, I’m no noob. I’ve been on Linux enough that when I went back to a GUI after 30 years, I just wanted a non-fuckery (and SLSA-observant) GUI to work with. Because life’s too fucking hairy to fuck with the GUI and other ancillary shit, some days.
This chart is telling me to use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and here I am on Kubuntu LTS (26.04).
Is it just me or is the distinction between a rolling release distro and one that you have to upgrade on a regular basis important to other people as well? That’s kinda why I went from Mint to Endeavour. No regrets so far.
Yes. I’d rather have small breakage every so often on small updates where it’s easy to tell what happened than large breakage on a release upgrade.
Whats the difference between a debian base and ubuntu base? Just packages? Wouldn’t each distro bring its own repository source anyway?
Call me crazy but I like how debian handles things (apt and deb) but I’m not a fan of ubuntu’s snap everything philosophy. Will a ubuntu based distro bring that as well? Pop for example.AFAIK it is packages but also default configurations. I am not an expert though this is just a guess.
I kind of dont get, why nixos is not a minimalist distro. You can set up a very minimal nixos machine quite easily.
I figured they probably meant a barebones NixOS install needs way more disk space than anything else, due to how it’s set up?! And that’s why we don’t call it minimal? I can’t come up with any other reason… Well… and I tried
nixos-rebuild switchon a Raspberry Pi once and that took like 8 hours or so.That could be. The rebuilding part could be circumvented by building on another machine or using a binary cache.
All this is telling me is that 2025 probably won’t be Linux’ year of the desktop.
No, it’s the year of the Linux handheld.
Such an overcomplicated chart. FTFY
I’ve been gaming on Mint for years without any issue.
I’m open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.
The entire “New to Linux” section should probably just be “Mint” for anyone without an Nvidia graphics card.
For newbies, live USB test and installer experience are key, and Mint is still unmatched.
Out of curiosity, is the live USB / install experience that different than kubuntu? I’ve never tried mint.
I’ve used both, and been very pleased with both.
Mint stood out, last time I installed it, because every decision was easy and factual and about me (what time zone, what keyboard).
I essentially just pressed “next” a bunch of times.
Kubuntu was nearly that good last time I tried it, as well.
Between the two, I generally recommend Mint primarily because it keeps the messaging simple and consistent with the community.
Secondarily, because Mint doesn’t have Snap (and I consider Snap bad, in a way that new Linux users are unlikely to appreciate until much later.)
Ah, gotcha.
I’m not technical enough to understand the functional difference between flatpak and snap, but I know that snaps are centrally controlled by Canonical and thus I assume not as enshittification resistant as flatpak.
But from the end user perspective, they can be a lot simpler to use than PPAs for random software. For me they’re kind of a guilty pleasure.
I’ve only used live USB to install EndeavourOS, and the experience was always super smooth
Is the graphics card really that important when picking a distro? I think most distributions I used over the years had all the drivers available. But I didn’t try gaming ones except Batocera and Lakka and that was on an Intel iGPU. Or is a GPU faster on one Linux and slower on another?!
AMD has released official Linux drivers, while Nvidia has not. So I believe they were reverse engineered or some shit, so some users have reported issues and/or instability.
The reverse engineered drivers often struggle with the more recent cards and they lack features and performance. But Nvidia has official drivers as well. I’ve used them on workstations, my old computer and for Artificial Intelligence stuff. It’s just that they’re proprietary and always come with some small annoyances while AMD has good open source drivers in the Linux kernel.
Nope.
