I’ve been asking myself for a while now what to recommend to people when they show interest in Linux. Given the issues with Canonical and Red Hat, I believe that it would be best for me to recommend something that is community driven.
The current major non-corporate binary distributions are Arch, Void, and Debian. Void doesn’t seem to have a user friendly installer and also lacks friendly derivatives afaik, so that leaves Debian and Arch.
Linux Mint Debian Edition seems to be the more friendly debian distro, though Cinnamon relies on X11 it is probably fine since beginners won’t bother sandboxing their apps anyway, and GUI isolation by itself is not very useful. Though Debian packages are old, LMDE enables flatpaks out of the box which should make it a usable distribution for the desktop. If the user decides to actually care about security, they can also always replace Cinnamon with GNOME.
Arch has a bunch of derivatives but I’m not sure what is good now other than EndeavourOS. Please suggest me a few more distros to look into. Some good features to have would include shipping a software store that allows for updating the system and installing packages (though it should never run pacman -Sy for the user), and timeshift enabled out of the box for snapshots and easier recovery in case of breakage.
Are you sure? On what page do they recommend against Endeavour? I could only see their recommendations against Manjaro and Garuda (which I agree with).
Like I said, I’m only looking for community based distros to recommend. These are corporate distros.
Do you daily drive it? I’ve been using it for a few years and there was only one time that I had to manually type a command to fix something due to a broken update. I think it’s probably fine to recommend for computer people/gamers… as long as the distro nags the user for updates.
Yes I do daily drive it, and while my experience has been good, I also know that it is in no way what beginners expect or want. Also Arch Linux updates sometimes give messages or warnings that users have to act on. From my own experience with hardening Arch Linux: its a pain and it probably isn’t as comprehensive as something like Fedora. I tried to set up one of my family members with Arch and it didn’t go well at all… However, when I set up a different family member up with Fedora, things have been going great. Fedora hits all the requirements you listed.
Also i once had a bug where an update stopped me from even booting up correctly, I had to use an Arch Linux live usb to fix it. For anyone who isnt very proficient with computers and Linux, that is an unacceptable experience.
Yeah that’s fair. I’d only recommend Arch-based for windows power users/gamers who are already somewhat savvy. Fedora is fine and was my usual recommendation but I’ve decided to no longer recommend it since it ultimately still is a corporate distro (redhat evil etc etc, you know the story). Now I probably recommend LMDE for complete beginners.
Even then I wouldn’t recommend. I started using Arch Linux after a few years of using Ubuntu and I still found the transition quite difficult. Before using Ubuntu, I had been a “somewhat savvy” Windows user. In my experience, even savvy Windows users don’t have the knowledge needed to set up and maintain an Arch Linux system or the desire to learn how to use all the different components (especially anything involving the terminal in my experience [which is most of Arch Linux maintenance]). Sometimes I think us Linux users can forget how confusing all this stuff can be at first. Most people, even gamers and power users, just want a usable experience out of the box that they can customize later with GUI tools.
While I have heard some concerning things about Red Hat, isn’t Fedora an independent project? Until (if ever) Red Hat’s actions begin to directly impact Fedora, IMO it’s premature to stop recommending it, especially since it is the most usable out of the box distro in my experience.
While you are right that having support for flatpaks mitigates some of Linux Mint’s problems, not all software is available as a flatpak and lack of updated software is 1) a security issue 2) really frustrating for beginners (one of the reasons I switched from Ubuntu).
Also, it is possible that beginners won’t even understand the concept of a DE as a separate entity from the distro, so telling them to simply replace Cinnamon with GNOME if they are concerned about some kind of abstract security threat is not going to be effective or understandable to many beginners.
The amount of polish put into Fedora and the fact that it is a somewhat rolling release distro just puts it above almost all other options in terms of beginner friendly distros
They may not officially own the project, but all the money still comes from Red Hat and a lot of the people working on Fedora are from RH. I agree that Fedora is a fine distro for now but I have concerns.
New people won’t do any hardening at all to their system, which means that they are fully exposed. There’s no way to protect the users from malicious packages if the users aren’t savvy/actually want to put some effort to protect themselves. Fedora may be more secure but it doesn’t fix the desktop linux security model.
That’s why I’m looking for something else to recommend for more experienced users who want more from their computer. There’s gotta be something else that is suitable.
I would look at immutable distros based on those 2 distros. Should be technically unbreakable for beginners with automatic updates configured out of the box. All you have to do is train the user to use Gnome’s Software Center to install flatpaks and show them how to downgrade (afaik a GUI hasn’t been built for this but nothing a script can’t fix). Just my 2cents.
I’d also add that another major community distro is Gentoo, but I’ve never used it myself. You could also go all-in with a single BDFL and use Slackware, the polar opposite of a corporate distro.
Arch itself and not a derivative is probably the way to go for most people concerned about corporate distros though.
Personally, I don’t really think the concerns about Fedora I’ve heard are warranted, so I’ll just stick with Fedora myself
Using Gentoo as a daily driver OS is crazy, I have done it in the past. Unless you don’t compile all of your packages, but at that point, why use Gentoo in the first place?
What are the called active maintenance things that need to be handled by users, or what are one or two of the most important ones? It seems that those are maintenance things that don’t need to be handled by users on openSUSE and Fedora.
Please do not ignore the concept of volunteerism when considering the companies where the people who have roles in these two projects work.
There are sites for choosing distros, sites that have distro news, reviews, and user submitted evals like distrowatch.com (don’t hold the popularlity rank with any grain of salt), etc. And piles of distro reviews on YouTube (although expect roses).
Arch is a DIY hobby type of distro. One should be comfortable with the command line and reading a wiki to do something. This goes for derivative Arch-based distros. I see many broken configurations in my net travels.
I’m trying to get my dad, a Windows power user, to switch to LMDE, which also has a nice community. Peppermint Devuan might be good for him, but it’s boutique.
Others may find MX Linux (Debian based) to be suitable, or Mint (Debian + Ubuntu). Or Fedora as previously mentioned. Do not underweight the community behind the distro, especially for new users.
It really depends on the user and their experience/interests. I did Arch for years but got tired of the maintenance, minimal kernel support, Grub bad commits, and migrated to Void Linux. However, it’s not a end user distro either.
These days on Arch or an Arch based distro the issues are system updates and black screens at the next reboot, usually involving a Nvidia card. Occasionally a rare wifi driver or touchpad fails in the latest kernel line due to a regression. Or telegram/discord stop working due to updates, or manual package migrations which occur about once a year. Often times users did a partial install, or removed a key package (icu, curl or similar), and have a borked system and don’t know how to chroot in from a USB.
Right, it’s not on the website. But doesn’t Endeavour trust the AUR by default ?
They are community-based distros. They are both sponsored or somewhat associated with a company, but they are definitely not corporate distros. Redhat and SUSE are the corpo distros.
I thought this might have something to do with the testing process of the updated packages not working well enough. System setups can be made where users can rollback to snapshots that are stable. Snapper - ArchWiki, Snapper - ArchWiki
Users may one day have to change-root even on Fedora.
Why? I think that skipping on compiling the web browsers would probably save more than 50% of the time spent compiling. Most things should compile relatively quickly depending on your machine.
