One of the things that can be off-putting when a user contemplates switching to Linux is the sheer volume of choices available. My wife likes to shop at Ruler or Aldi stores because there isn’t much choice. Want shredded wheat cereal? There’s only one brand, or maybe two, to choose from.
Similarly, although there are a few different options available if you want Windows (Home or Professional, for example) the number of different available Linux Distributions (henceforth, “distros”) can be overwhelming.
The excellent site DistroWatch lists the top 100 distros in terms of Hits Per Day, calculated over a variety of time spans from the last 7 days to a year at a time. Mind you, there are many other distros that don’t make the top 100, perhaps ever.
So, what are all of these distros?
Linux, as an operating system, is a pretty bare-bones “core”. There isn’t much to do, and not much way to do it. People add other software to show windows, type text, find out what files are where, and so on. They then bundle these other programs with the Linux OS to make a “distribution” – the files are distributed together, and presumably have some way to maintain themselves after installation.
Many of these other programs are distributed under the Gnu General License (or some variation thereof) and some software purists insist that no one uses “Linux”, but “Gnu / Linux” is quite popular. Whatever.
Things are made somewhat simpler by the fact the vast majority of distributions are actually based upon other distributions. Chat GPT informs me that there are essentially 7 major Linux distributions (8 if you count Android), plus many other “one-off” distros.
- Debian
- Red Hat
- Slackware
- Arch Linux
- Gentoo
- SUSE
- Alpine Linux
There is a “framework” of sorts, called Linux From Scratch (LFS) that can be used to “roll your own” distro, but it is not, in itself, a distro.
You may be surprised to see that Ubuntu, one of the most consistently popular distros around, is not in that list. That’s because Ubuntu is itself a derivative of Debian. If you can manage Debian (by which I mean, install and remove software) you can probably use Ubuntu. Linux Mint, which I have used as my daily OS for about seven years, is based upon Ubuntu, which is based upon Debian. See how this works?
There’s more to it than distros, however.
When a person uses Windows, they expect it to look a certain way, depending upon the version. Similarly, macOS looks like macOS, allowing for changes as it ages.
This “look and feel” in Linux is generally determined by what we call a “Desktop Environment”. There are roughly 6 DEs, according to Chat GPT, and countless variations.
- GNOME
- KDE
- Xfce (this could be seen as a derivative of GNOME since it uses the Gnome Tool Kit)
- LXQt
- LXDE
- Enlightenment
Of these, all but Enlightenment have been around for a long time, and there are incredibly stable versions of them. Even Enlightenment, the new kid on the block, has been around long enough to smooth out most of its lumps.
What makes this particularly confusing is that different distros may use different DEs, but most DEs can be used with most distros. For example, Ubuntu uses GNOME as its Desktop Environment (or a derivative thereof), but you can also download Kubuntu which uses KDE. So, Ubuntu with GNOME and Kubuntu with KDE will work in very similar ways, but may look very different because of the different DEs.
So, how do I choose?
The good news is that it’s really easy to try out different distros. Most of them will run very well in a Virtual Machine (VirtualBox is available for free on Windows, macOS, and Linux), and you can do at least some testing that way. Also, most Linux distros that I’ve played with have a great Live Boot version, which allows you to reboot your computer into Linux, test it out, and then reboot back to the OS you were previously using.
One reason you might want to do that is that driver support is different between distros, even those based upon the same foundation. Drivers are the small pieces of software that make various sorts of hardware work with our computers. Many things are pretty universal now, so a USB or Bluetooth mouse will probably work with just about any computer, but some things are trickier. WiFi (wireless connection for Internet) can be tricky, as some companies use non-standard hardware to try to save money. I’ve also seen some laptops whose trackpads were not supported by drivers in Windows 11, although they worked fine in my Linux distro. We had to attach a USB mouse to use the computer to install the drivers.
In any case, testing out the distro can give you a feel for how it works, and how well it cooperates with your hardware.
My choices, so far
So far, I’ve been very happy with Mint. I install it on every computer I have control over, unless I have specific reasons to prefer something else. For the most part, it just works. It includes proprietary drivers to make my nVidia graphics card work well, and I like the look and feel of the Cinnamon Desktop Environment (built on GNOME).
In contrast, I installed Arch Linux in a virtual machine early this week. Arch has been hovering on my radar for a while, partly because the documentation for Arch seems to be really good. In many cases, when I’ve looked for help resolving a problem, the Arch Wiki was able to help me even though the package manager and library for Arch is different. When I saw that Arch has native support for a new Desktop Environment I want to try, I quickly installed it in a VM.
Wow, what a pain. I fiddled with it for some time, and finally gave up. I couldn’t get it to come out of terminal mode to show me a DE, I couldn’t install a DE, and it seemed to have many conflicting software requirements right from install. In contrast, when I install Mint, I always immediately run the software updater to get more recent versions of the software that came on the installer, and it always “just works”.
I still wanted to try out this new DE, so I found that Manjaro Linux is a derivative of Arch that is considered much more “user friendly”. I downloaded the image and installed it in a VM. While I immediately got to a pleasant DE, I wasn’t able to update the system software to prepare for installing a new DE. It kept blocking itself with competing requirements, and finally I just shut it down.
In other words, newbies to Linux often find themselves at the mercy of poorly integrated software. The Linux community, although potentially helpful (viz. the Arch Wiki community) nevertheless can come across with a sort of, “well, it works for me, so you must be stupid” attitude. In contrast, it seems that installing a distro and then trying to apply the suggested updates should not put you in a lock situation of competing requirements.
(Perhaps I should note what a requirement is: most Linux software is not completely “standalone”. Rather, it takes advantage of functions provided by other software. Windows does this, too, and the other software was traditionally referred to as a “dll”, or dynamically linked library. If a Linux package manager wants to install one package, but installing that package would cause an incompatibility with another package, that can create a lock on the package management, preventing forward, and even sometimes backward movement.)
I will probably continue to experiment with other distros as time goes on. That said, I like the cautious, conservative approach of Linux Mint. While I don’t always have the fanciest, flashiest, or newest software, most of the time it “just works,” and that’s pretty much what I want a computer OS to do.