Actually Good Distro Recomendations for Beginners
reggie.re

I grew tired of shitty “Top 10 Linux distros in ${CURRENT_YEAR}” articles so I wrote a blogpost, that I would personally consider helpful when I was starting out, so I can simply link it to people when they ask my opinion on a beginner distro.

Objective criticism is welcome and encouraged.

  • ArcaneslimeEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Great post, saved for future use. I’d say myself that while Fedora may not be aimed at beginners, it is pretty good for beginners nonetheless. It’s what I started on (after dipping my toes in Tails, which also has it’s use cases but more importantly here demystified linux for me and made me comfortable with it. Then windows pissed me off one last time and the rest is history.)

    The fedora community in my experience has been very helpful, though that was reddit, so we shall see what the future holds.

    • hunte@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I love Fedora but since they are no longer shipping the most popular media codecs on install I can’t recommend them for beginners. I myself was a bit blindsided by this when wanted to start watching a movie with family and had to scramble to download the codecs 😅

      • ash@lemmy.fmhy.mlOPEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Afaik no distros ship those codecs by default now, they might prompt you to download them during the installation. Fedora was just the first to notice that “oopsie we are violating a license” and others followed soon after.

        • hunte@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Ah, that’s interesting. I haven’t had that problem yet on other distros but now I’ll keep my eye out for it. Pretty annoying if that’s case tho :/

    • ash@lemmy.fmhy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Fedora is good, but the last time I tried using it it did not warn me about nvidia drivers and if I did not know of this I would keep using nouveau, which is something most new users probably don’t want. It doesn’t explain everything it is or isn’t doing like Mint for example which asks you about updates, codecs and drivers. That’s why I consider it easy to use whilst also not aimed at beginners.

      • ArcaneslimeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Fair, the community is usually the one to help with that, when I did research before installing they told me that non free drivers like nvidia or broadcom would present an additional challenge and told me how to fix it, so I guess I knew going in and didn’t consider people not doing that first.