I Felt That Addressing Some Of These Points Would Be Good For Newcomers, Especially Those Who Are Interested

I felt that addressing some of these points would be good for newcomers, especially those who are interested in/have installed Mint.

@mirqmarq428's impressions and opinions shouldn't be considered invalid. As someone who started using Linux around that time, things were significantly less intuitive and/or user friendly across the board.

While Cinnamon is very reminiscent of Windows 7/10, the welcome screen and documentation encourage the user to customize. I do agree, however, that using an unfamiliar DE is a really good idea for new Linux users. The fun thing about Mint is that you don't have to stay on Cinnamon (or even XFCE/Mate). It's a good platform to experiment and learn.

Snaps are disabled, though it's possible to enable them in Mint (instructions are even in the documentation). Ubuntu does not offer Flatpak support by default, and previously required official flavors to drop support.

Release cycle- Mint is based on the latest LTS of Ubuntu (and on the latest version of Debian for LMDE). It's entirely possible to install more recent versions of packages via flatpak and debs without touching the terminal. Mint's Update Manager can also install newer kernels in a few clicks. If you have cutting edge hardware, there's always the Cinnamon-Edge edition.

Mint also has an update manager that can send reminders, though this can be disabled.

In the end, it's important to use what you enjoy. Despite my concerns regarding Snap, I've been running the same Kubuntu install on my desktop for almost a year now. A handful of the programs I use were either Distrobox'd or built manually. Mint has been just as capable in the times I've used it.

Replying to @fzf

I have no strong personal feelings about mint. It happened to be a good first distro for me, and i like the colors. My disrecommendation of it comes in bullet points:

Mint is touted as a "windows-like environment" on account of the Cinnamon desktop. However, Cinnamon and windows 10 have deceptively little in common beyond the general layout - iv said this before and I'll say it again: don't give people a knockoff of what they're used to, give them something new to learn.

Mint disables, disallows, discourages, and distrusts snap packages. While iv seen a huge amount of hate for these, and the technology had a rough start, they're not any more of a pain than flatpak (and way better than appimages, yikes). In fact, removing them from what was otherwise an Ubuntu system causes more problems than it fixes - for months last year it was a pain to run Chromium on mint because the Deb was broken and snaps were disabled (iirc - might be misremembering. either way the snap war is not a good cause imo)

Release speed - when i got started with Mint in march of 2020, I downloaded mint 19.04 cause that was the version on the website. Mint 19.04 is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which had a 4.18 kernel. Everyone else in 2020 had a 5.2 kernel at least. There is a balance between stable and up-to-date, and Ubuntu has mastered it. Mint, by necessity, lags behind Ubuntu. Heck, there's even the time the mint devs had to beg users to update because of a security issue, and found that most users had never bothered updating!

Ubuntu (gnome) is different from both macos but windows interface in obvious ways that encourage a paradigm shift in desktop usage.

Snap packages are extremely meh, but they ain't here to steal ur freedums (yet).

Ubuntu has the second best software compatibility of any Linux (best is Arch), and a lot of pkgbuilds in the AUR are just extracting debs from Ubuntu ppas anyway so it's really close. Ubuntu tells you to update and makes it easy with the popup which you can close or banish.

So yeah. Mint is just slightly worse Ubuntu

DIY printing is an adventure. One of the covers was printed backwards. 😀 this is going on my coffee table.

+1 Mint recommendation for new users, it’s such a good user experience. Also streamlines installation and dual-booting

Extremely Quick and Dirty Distro Chooser for Complete Beginners

You are a person who might be interested in using Linux, but there’s literally thousands of distros out there and you have no idea where to start. Luckily for you, I am a weirdo who likes to test-drive Linux distros for fun. I have not tested literally every distro out there, but I have tried a fair number (35 according to my notes), and I think I have a decent shortlist of distros for people who haven’t used Linux before.

Note that this is: a) not an Objective List of the Best Linux Distros Out There; and b) not really an objective list at all.  These are just the ones that I’ve tested and that I think would be good for people new to Linux.

My recommendations are as follows:

If your computer is a more than a few years old or underpowered/slow, I would recommend MX Linux or SpiralLinux.

If your computer has an NVIDIA GPU, I would recommend Pop!_OS.

Everyone else, I would recommend Linux Mint or potentially MX Linux.

Honorable mentions: Manjaro, Nobara, AV Linux ,Trisquel

I would NOT recommend Ubuntu or any of its variants, Linux Lite, or Fedora at this time.

My reasoning for each of these is below the cut, if you’re interested. If not, then that’s the post, have a great day!

All of my recommended distros are mainly or fully GUI-controllable (no messing around in the command line unless you want to, or for a few specific things), have a full complement of the software you need pre-installed, and a software center for anything else you might want. They’re also very stable and customizable, albeit some of them require more fiddling than others to get things the way you want.

Linux Mint is probably the best all-arounder for new Linux users at the current moment. It’s what I use as my daily driver on my main laptop, and with very few exceptions (mainly caused by having an NVIDIA GPU and/or trying to run ancient finicky software), I’m able to do everything I want and need to do on it without a lot of drama. If you don’t want Linux to be your hobby and you just need a computer that works, Linux Mint is currently your best bet. Use the standard Cinnamon edition if your computer is fairly new and/or beefy, or try the MATE or XFCE editions if it’s a little older.

Pop!_OS is another one that shows up on “good for beginners” lists. It’s based off of Ubuntu, the same as Linux Mint, and it’s got a lot of similar features going for it. I haven’t tested this one as extensively as I have some of the others on this list, so I can’t speak on it as in-depth, but I would 100% recommend it if your computer has an NVIDIA GPU. NVIDIA and Linux do not tend to play nicely together, and Pop!_OS has built-in NVIDIA support. Had I known what a pain it would be getting my GPU to work, I likely would have started with Pop.

MX Linux is another good all-arounder, though it doesn’t tend to be recommended for beginners, and I’m not sure why.    It has a very friendly tour that shows you the various features of the OS, and a huge suite of tools so you can manage everything from the GUI. It bills itself as a “midweight” distro, but personally have found it to be much faster on my older laptop than many so-called “lightweight” distros, so it’s a good choice for older hardware. It can be set up to run off of a USB thumb drive with persistence, and I believe there are still programs for managing dial-up connections and old mp3 players/iPods in the repositories as well, if you were to need those. Use the main XFCE edition if you’re installing it on an older computer.

SpiralLinux is the kind of extremely small distro that probably shouldn’t be on this type of list, except it’s “Literally Just Debian But More User-Friendly” so that makes it perfect. The main reason it’s on here is because I am using it right now to write this post on my 12-year-old Dell, and it’s running like a charm. SpiralLinux is the fastest distro I have used on this laptop, except for Trisquel (more on that one later). If you have an older Windows computer that you want to breathe new life into, SpiralLinux is a good choice. Use the XFCE, MATE, or LXQT editions for old hardware.

Honorable mentions: people who know Linux will notice that all of the distros above are based off of Debian and/or Ubuntu. Do I have something against Fedora, Arch, etc? Nope. I just think the Debian/Ubuntu lineage has a real knack for making beginner-friendly distros, which is the focus of this post. That said, Manjaro is also said to be fairly beginner-friendly, though I haven’t tested it extensively, and Nobara might be a good place to start for a Fedora-based distro. Nobara is a little more niche than I would usually recommend, but it is really nice and pretty user-friendly.

If you do a lot of video or audio work, AV Linux may be worth a look. It’s based off of MX Linux, and has the same features, but it also has a lot of audio and video tools built in, and uses a different kernel.

Trisquel also makes the honorable mention list for being incredibly fast and having an interesting premise. Trisquel and all of the software in its repositories are 100% open-source. Normally I wouldn’t recommend this kind of niche distro for newer users, but it is based off of Debian so it’s pretty stable, and it runs surprisingly fast on my old Dell laptop. It’s also a fun crash-course in open-source software and what it can do. I would not necessarily recommend it as a daily driver, but if you want to get started in the Linux and FLOSS worlds and have an old laptop, you could do a lot worse than Trisquel.

What I DON’T recommend:

Ubuntu has historically been considered THE user-friendly Linux distro, and also one of the most popular. I don’t recommend it (or any of its official variants: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc) because of some really poor decisions and doubling-down on those decisions by Canonical, the company that develops Ubuntu. As you’re currently reading this on Tumblr, I doubt I have to tell you why the company in charge making decisions their users hate and then refusing to budge on them is a bad time. That said, it’s not a terrible OS in and of itself. If you really don’t like any of the distros listed above, or can’t get them to work, you could give Ubuntu a shot...but personally, I wouldn’t, when there are so many other options.

I am anti-recommending Linux Lite, even though it often gets touted as a good “lightweight” beginner-friendly distro. In my experience, it’s very slow compared to something like MX or Spiral, and it’s faithful to its Ubuntu base to a fault. Also the app store is terrible. I think the Debian-based “light” distros are almost always better than the Ubuntu ones. If you feel like you absolutely NEED an Ubuntu-based “light” distro, consider Bodhi Linux as an alternative. It’s still pretty slow, but it has some clever features (the app center is browser-based so it’s much faster) and lacks some of the anti-features that Linux Lite has.

Fedora is my final anti-recommendation, less because of the OS itself and again, because of the organization behind it--in this case, IBM. IBM has been pulling some Typical Corporate Fuckery by closing off their source code to the public. Needless to say, this is...bad. Again, assuming that Tumblr users aren’t big fans of Corporate Fuckery, I would advise people to steer clear of Fedora for now. If you want or need a RHEL distro, I would consider AlmaLinux instead.

So that’s it for my recommendations. If none of these are to your liking, then check out DistroWatch. It has thousands of different Linux distros and a few other OSes listed. If you use Ventoy, you can easily test-drive many different live versions of distros without a lot of fuss...but that’s another post ;) Have a great day!

lemme just add an iNdUsTrY sTanDaRd fucking house to this landscape

Issue 4 is now live and being printed! As always, you can access the digital version for free.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/issue-4-now-93529202?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link