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)
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.
OpenSUSE
- Country: Germany 🇩🇪
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE
It’s mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Desktop: None
lmao
Also I never knew NixOS was European! Good post
Isn’t Canonical (Ubuntu) a UK-based company?
There’s Mageia and openMandriva from France !
PikaOS is from UK I guess.
It’s hard to enumerate all of arch based distro but CachyOS is German (not sure ), and archolinux is from belgium.
Europe work on open source in general is strong, I love it !
Whaaat linux mint my beloved is Irish! Awesome!
I’ve been using Mint for ages and never realized it’s Irish
Arch based Manjaro - German: https://manjaro.org/
Seems remiss not to mention Ubuntu, which is British.
I’m currently wondering whether this is going in the right direction. I understand that we are boycotting commercial products from the US, which makes perfect sense to me. But as someone who works on FOSS software myself, I wonder if we are hurting the right people by not using FOSS software that comes from the US. I think these are largely people who don’t support Trump.
If you look at a lot of the other posts they’re more along the lines of “these companies are based in the EU”… and that’s it. Not why they’re better than the US based equivalents or why the US based ones are worth boycotting.
And to a certain extent I understand that. But the signal to noise ratio has lowered considerably in the past few weeks.
Would also mention (have not …yet… tested it myself) PearOS, an Arch Linux flavor from Romania.
You should probably classify a lot of these as global. Like Arch: sure it was founded by a canadian, but nobody in the current dev team is from Canada.
Some weeks ago Mint and GraphyOS seemed to be one of the bigger suggestions.
Is LMDE also the one that would be recommended for beginners or, as one, should I stick to the Ubuntu-based?
Because its been Mint-ified, there’s not a huge amount of difference apart from the positive step of not shipping with Snap. I use LMDE and if you stick with Cinnamon you’re not going to notice much difference at all. You can trial it on a live usb if you want.
Snap and Cinnamon being UIs, right?
Sorry, but I am THAT much of a beginner.
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!
Thank you so much for the explanation and the understanding.
Snap is a way of installing applications (like Flatpaks) but is seen by many as problematic as its closed source and Ubuntu seem to want to make it the default way to install apps.
Cinnamon is a desktop environment like gnome or KDE - so things like (to use a Windows example) File Manager - things like icons, folders, toolbars, windows etc - all the graphical bits that make up your desktop.
What is a better alternative to Snap that I could/should use as a beginner in Mint?
If you use Ubuntu flavoured Mint it’ll come with Snap installed but disabled. I’m not sure if it ships with Flatpak support (I think it does though). LMDE does not have Snap installed at all and does ship with Flatpak. I’d use Flatpak rather than Snaps personally,
Understood.
Best of luck in your Linux journey :) There’s multiple good Linux communities on Lemmy, this one is good for new starters: !linux4noobs@programming.dev
Linux Mint is honestly amazing. I always read about it being labeled as “for beginners” or being “boring” almost as if that’s a bad thing. I just wanted something that works out of the box and not take on a new hobby… And I got just that with Linux Mint. Highly recommended
I’ve been distro.hopping for years. I am now setting up my new home server and because I plan to also use it as a daily driver, Linux Mint is my choice. It just works. I like KDE, but it gives me too much choice, so Cinnamon it is.
Good to know! Being a Canadian, I’m pretty determined to transfer over to linux before Microsoft stops supporting windows 10 but have been pretty intimidated by various horror stories etc.
Canadian person! If you break it, ask me and I will do my best to non-snarkily assist. I am working on becoming less snarky, so it’s practice!
Also, I like Mint. Back in the day, I had an obscure wifi issue, asked Twitter, and Clem himself replied with a one-liner that fixed me right up.
I broke my system several times and probably will continue to do so. Linux really shoehorned it into my thick skull to make backups xD
Apart from that I can recommend saving any important data on a seperate drive or partition from the OS and keeping a thumbdrive with the live OS around. If the system is truly borked, you can boot the liveOS and do some damage control, like getting important data out, before reinstalling the system.
Best of Luck on you Linux journey. :)
If it breaks more is because you are free to do more with it. Just try dual booting or even just via a live “install”. There’s nothing to lose and a lot to gain.
I just wanted something that works out of the box and not take on a new hobby…
That’s it, I have plenty of things to tinker with but, on my laptops and desktops, I really don’t want to have to do much messing about. I just need to install and go. I’m currently on Ubuntu but it’d be rude of me not to try Mint, especially now I know it is from Ireland.
What about Ubuntu? Canonical is based in London (registered in the Isle of Man iirc).
True. I know a lot of Linux people hate Ubuntu but I think it’s a decent distro especially for beginners, and like you say, Canonical is based in London.
I’m guessing because Ubuntu is not as “hip” as it once was. Don’t see Fedora there either and those two would be the largest, right? I know it’s main sponsor used to be red hat and that’s what it is based on, but it too could be in the honourable mentions section.
I really appreciate these lists.
I would like to point out, however, that some of these distros are not that user friendly. Arch is notoriously not beginner friendly, endeavouros is slightly better but I would still not recommend if you are just fresh off the boat from Mac or Windows. Opensuse is great but its very professional based.
Pick a distro that works for you. If they are open sourced thats already most of the way there! Even devs based outside of the EU will likely share our gripes against the US’s authoritarian shift and anti-big tech vibes.
