“What distro should I choose?” is a very common question on a lot of Linux forums. The answer is always twofold:
- Depends on what you want to do with it
- Just install a lot of ’em untill you find one you like
Both those answers are very true. I am going to give you a couple guidelines, but in the end, if you really wanna get into linux and computers, you just need to try out a lot of ’em.
So, first, take a couple minutes of your time and think about these questions:
- What do I want to do with my computer?
- How much do I know about computers, operating systems etc?
- How much am I willing to learn about all this?
- How much effort do I want to put into configuring and tweaking my computer?
If anywhere during question nr 1 you thought “Gaming!” you’ll need Windows, so you’ll at least need to dualboot. If you just wanna use your computer for web browsing, watching movies, watching porn, taking notes in class and basic office stuff, you can do that all in Linux. Open office’s functionality can be compared to Microsoft Office 2003, so don’t expect any of the advanced features, the amazing new intuitive layout or the advanced formatting options to be available. Also, some documents made in the office 2007 and later formats will not be opened correctly in open office, meaning the layout will be messed up if it uses the more advanced features. Other than that, pretty much anything a non-gaming person does can be done with most major distro’s without too much of a hassle. Most software development apps are available in any major distro.
If you’re not very tech-savvy and not willing to learn about computers, you need to pick a “plug and play”-distro. Otherwise your computer will be unuseable.
If you know how a computer works but don’t wanna put too much effort in it, you should lean towards the “plug and play” end of the spectrum, but you don’t have to.
If you wanna learn about computers and linux and are willing to put a lot of time in your installation, the more advanced and technical-minded distro’s are what you’re looking for. Beware however, with some distributions it can take a week or longer to have a working desktop system.
Now I’m gonna tell you about the major distro’s I’ve ran long enough to give a valid opinion, ranging from highest “plug-and-play” factor to most technical. Not the order in which I started using them, btw.
Linux Mint
Unless you’re running very old or exotic hardware, this is the plug-and-play distro of choice for complete newbies who don’t want to spend any more time configuring their system than absolutely necessary. Ubuntu-based, however, so that means it’s kinda slow and not the most stable distro available. Linux mint is meant to be installed and ran, not installed and tweaked. Configuration files contain non-standard code without proper comments, making it dificult to edit them yourself. The big advantage to this is that on most modern computers it will “just work”, the disadvantage is that if it doesn’t work for some reason it’s not easy to fix. Kinda like Mac OSx
OpenSuse Linux
This is my personal recommendation for a desktop distro. It’s “just works”-factor is lower than Linux Mint, but it’s a lot easier to start tweaking and changing things under the hood.
Crunchbang Linux
A Debian Testing rolling release (everything is constantly updated instead of only updating most apps when a new release comes out) derative. Considered beta-quality by it’s developers, but I haven’t had any more trouble with Crunchbang than with the two distro’s mentioned above. On the contrary. A bit less than OpenSuse concerning plug-and-play factor. Very lightweight, so good for turning that old laptop / desktop that has been collecting dust into a useable web-surfing and simple word processing box. Images are available for i486, i686 and AMD64 processor architecture.
Non-technical newbies, your section just ended.
Slackware Linux
Very stable, conservative and very unix-like distro. Not a very newbie-friendly distro. All configuration is done by writing / editing textfiles. Applications are well-tested before they are added to the releases. This results in a very stable and relatively bug-free system. However, Slackware does not like advanced package managers. Basically it comes down to this: if it’s not in the standard installation, you’ll have to download the sources of the application and it’s dependencies, compile and install them all from source. This takes time. A lot of time. A HELL of a LOT of time. And you need to keep up to date on security updates of your extra packages. This has one huge advantage however: installing / updating one application is very unlikely to mess up other parts of your system. You can spend a week installing a couple applications and their dependencies and configuring your system, but once it works it will keep working untill you start messing with it again. And then only the parts you’re messing with can be broken, the rest will keep working. This is a huge advantage for mission-critical servers which run several applications and need to keep running, but if you want an up-to-date desktop distro with easy package management, Slackware is not the distro for you.
Arch Linux
Hands-on, lightweight, rolling-release, DIY, great package management, great wiki. Those are the keywords of Arch Linux. After the installation is finished you are left with a console-only distro and an awful lot of howto’s on the wiki. You’ll have to install and configure everything else yourself. If you do it right (I.E. if you follow the wiki) you’ll slowly build a system suited to your needs and likes as you go, while always updating to the latest stable packages.
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo Linux is basically the even more geekier elder brother of Arch Linux. The biggest differences are that the installation is harder on Gentoo (but far from impossible for newbies, Gentoo was my third distro) and in Gentoo everything is compiled on your computer. This means every package will fit your processor architecture and will only contain the parts you want it contain, but this also means installing larger applications and large updates can take a couple hours. Gentoo shares a lot if similarities with Arch linux, and you’ll notice a lot of people run both of them or switch now and then. A lot of former Gentoo users have moved to Arch however, because it takes less time and it’s documentation is a little less chaotic. I still feel a lot of sympathy towards Gentoo and often browse the forums, but I don’t run Gentoo anymore. The advantages of compiling everything from source are not big enough to make up for the disadvantages IMO.
