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!
Quickly test out Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Arch, Fedora, openSUSE and many Linux distros online for free on your web browser. No installation or
For all the folks wanting to jump off the Windows ship after the latest surveillance nightmare, you can test-drive many Linux distros right from your browser! Go to DistroSea, click on a distro that looks interesting, and you'll be added to a queue (usually less than a minute IME). Then just wait for it to boot up, and you have a running Linux instance in your browser window! Obviously you can't use this to install Linux on your computer, but it's useful for checking out the features of each distro and gettting the general vibe. Most of the distros I mentioned in my distro chooser post are featured here, so you can give them a peek. Go check it out!
What Dual-Booting Is and Why I Don’t (Usually) Recommend It
When the topic of switching from Windows to Linux comes up, the topic of dual-booting almost always swiftly follows. Dual-booting is exactly what it sounds like: having two operating systems on the same computer. Usually in this case, the two OSes will be Windows and some form of Linux, often Ubuntu or Linux Mint. It’s often considered a good way to get your feet wet with Linux, without having to fully commit, and being able to switch back to Windows should you need to. However, having done the dual-boot thing multiple times before finally taking the Linux plunge, I would personally NOT recommend dual-booting in most cases.
The benefits of dual-booting are pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t go into them in great detail. The drawbacks, however, are significant, in my experience, and possibly not as obvious at first glance.
The biggest drawback is that you’re essentially splitting your computer into two slightly-less-good computers, and unless you do all your storage in the cloud, you’re 100% going to run into the situation where something you need (a file, a program, a meme you wanted to show your friends, etc) is on one partition while you have the other one booted. Which means you then have to reboot into the other partition. Rinse and repeat at least a couple times day, over the course of weeks or months. Needless to say, this is a phenomenal pain in the ass, and this “benefit” of dual-booting becomes a huge downside.
Which leads neatly to my next point: because switching between OSes is a huge pain, you will very likely wind up just using one or the other for nearly everything. Either you fall in love with the Linux experience and never touch the Windows partition, or you end up using Windows for everything because it’s more convenient and your Linux partition languishes. So you then effectively only have one OS, and half a computer that you never touch.
What’s worse is that Windows doesn’t always play nicely with other OSes. You will have to mess around in BIOS a little in order to get Linux to boot first, if that’s what you want, and sometimes even that won’t work. BIOS is scary for newbies and you could brick your computer by changing things in it, although this admittedly isn’t likely in this scenario. But the fact remains that Windows doesn’t like to share, and if you add another OS to a Windows machine, you’re going to have to fight it at least a little in order to get it to cooperate.
The final reason I don’t recommend dual-booting is that, in my experience, it’s too easy to fall back to just using the Windows partition for everything, and never actually using the Linux system you spent all that time setting up. I spent several years with Ubuntu partitions on computers that I just never used, because all my games were in Windows, and trying to get games to cooperate in Linux was too difficult (although now, most games will just work in Linux with Proton, so this is no longer an issue). Taking the path of least resistance can be too easy, and if you have Windows to fall back on, you might not ever actually learn to use Linux.
All this having been said, there are a couple of situations where I think dual-booting Windows and Linux might be a good idea. The first is when you have a program on your list of needs that will not work in Linux no matter what, and there are no good alternatives. This is true of some business software, and also some multi-player games that have built-in anti-cheat that doesn’t work in Linux. If this is the case for you, looking into dual-booting might be a good option. The second case is if Windows is OEM installed on your device (it came pre-installed), you can’t make a backup or recovery media of it, and for whatever reason you don’t feel comfortable not having a way to get back to using Windows.
There may also be other situations I haven’t thought of, where dual-booting may be a better option for you. I don’t know your hardware or your computer usage. Only you can make this decision. All of the distros on my shortlist have guides for dual-boot systems in their wikis, if you do choose to go this route.
However, in my experience and observation, in most cases dual-booting is just a lot of headache for not a lot of benefit. Don’t do it unless you have to.
Step 0: Know what you’re working with, know what you need
Before you start installing Linux on your computer, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with your system and to know ahead of time what issues, if any, might arise when you start the install. You should also know: will the Linux distro you’re considering, or any Linux distro, support the programs you use daily, and if not, are there any alternatives or workarounds that will work for you?
I’m writing this making the assumption that most people are going to be coming from Windows. If you’re using a Mac, the steps here will be broadly similar, but the actual install might be somewhat different. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a good up-to-date guide to installing Linux on an Apple computer, and I haven’t personally touched one in over a decade, so I may not be much help here. I will update this section if I can find anything. If you’re on a Chromebook, I’m going to send you over to MrChromebox.tech. Chromebooks are extremely locked-down and incredibly finicky; my one attempt at helping a friend install Linux Mint on their Chromebook ended in miserable failure (couldn’t even get the damn thing unlocked), so...good luck, I guess?
The first thing you’ll want to do here is get your system information. The info that will be most relevant here is your computer make and model, the CPU, your RAM, storage space, whether you have a 64-bit or 32-bit system, and GPU. In Windows, use the Windows search bar to look for “system information” or “msinfo32” (more info here). Take screenshots of the relevant information, and also make sure you save this information somewhere that is NOT on the computer you’re going to be installing Linux on! Taking a picture with your phone or writing it down are probably the easiest ways to accomplish this.
If you haven’t done any physical modifications to your computer (adding or removing RAM, changing any of the graphics cards or anything, etc), the make and model might actually be enough to go off of here. Do a search (use DuckDuckGo or SearxNG, don’t use Google, for the love of all that is holy do NOT use ChatGPT for this) for “[make][model] linux” or “[make] [model] [specific distro].” For example, for the computer I’m using right now, I would search “Dell Inspiron N5010 linux,” “Dell” being the make and “Inspiron N5010” being the model. Look at the results and try to sift through to see what, if any, specific issues people might be having with it, and any solutions or workarounds people might have come up with.
The CPU, RAM, and storage are necessary to make sure the distro you’ve chosen will work on your computer! That said, Linux hardware requirements are much smaller than the comparable Windows version, so if your computer was made in the last ten years or so, any of the distros I recommended in my distro chooser guide should work for you. Likewise, if your computer was made in the last ten years, it’s almost certainly a 64-bit system. If it’s not, your distro choices are much more limited. MX Linux is the only option I’m aware of from my shortlist that still supports 32-bit architecture.
The GPU is mainly an issue if it’s NVIDIA. NVIDIA is still very much a thorn in the side of Linux users. I highly recommend using Pop!_OS as your OS if you’re new to this and have an NVIDIA GPU. Nobara also has built-in NVIDIA support, and MX Linux has an NVIDIA driver installer. My daily driver has an NVIDIA GPU and runs on Linux Mint, but it was a pain in the ass to get it working and it’s not something I’d recommend for people new to the whole Linux thing, if you can avoid it.
The second thing to know before getting started in Linux is what software you need and whether it’s supported in Linux. Make a list of all the software you use on a daily or near-daily basis. Fire up DuckDuckGo again and search “[name of software] linux” and see what comes up. There are four basic outcomes here:
There’s a native version for Linux! This is usually the best option, because it’s likely to be feature-for-feature compatible with the software you’re already used to using, and you don’t have to fiddle around with WINE or anything. Internet browsers (Firefox, Chrome [NOTE: don’t use Chrome], etc) and chat programs (Discord, Skype, Zoom) usually just have native Linux versions. You might even find that a program you already use is open-source! This is true for VLC, Blender, Audacity, OBS, and others.
There’s no native version, but the software does run well in WINE. WINE is a compatibility layer to run Windows programs in Linux. It works very well for some programs, and others...not so much. Check WineHQ’s app database to see if your chosen program will run in it. If the program is a game, check ProtonDB as well. Proton is Steam’s compatibility tool, and there’s a version called ProtonGE that’s community-maintained that works very well for most Steam games. There’s even a tool called ProtonUp-Qt that will install it for you! Gaming on Linux has literally never been easier.
There’s no native version of the software, and it won’t run in WINE, but there is a good open-source alternative! This is often a better solution as WINE can be somewhat finicky. LibreOffice, for example, is a very good alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. Photoshop tends to be a sticking point for a lot of people, because the most often-used alternative, GIMP, works very differently and has a steep learning curve compared to PS. Take a poke around AlternativeTo and see if there’s anything that works for you. One really nice thing about open-source programs is that they’ll often have a Windows version that you can download and check out before you commit to using it. Do note that programs tend to run better in their native OS, so the Windows version of a program might not give you an accurate picture of how well the software will run on your computer in Linux. It should still give you an idea of whether the program will meet your needs or not, though.
The last, sad option is that you might just be SOL. There’s no native program, it won’t work in WINE, and you can’t find a good alternative. In this case, you might have to find another workaround (using a couple different programs to achieve the functionality of the one you currently use), or ask yourself if this program is a “need” or a “want.” If it’s a “want,” can you live without it? Are you willing to live without it in order to switch to Linux? These aren’t questions I can answer for you. If it’s something you need for work, say, you still have a couple options. You can look into dual-booting Linux and Windows (having two OSes on the same computer, a post about this is forthcoming)...or you could get a second computer (probably not feasible for most people, but it IS, technically, an option!).
Unfortunately, if dual-booting isn’t an option, or the software or feature you need is an accessibility tool that you can’t use your computer without, your Linux journey may have ended before it started. That’s OK. Linux is a technology, and just like any other, it has its limitations, and won’t be a good solution for everyone. You can still use open-source alternatives to many other programs, though, and there are ways to generally decrapify Windows if you’re interested.
On the other hand, if you’ve gone through these steps and you’re satisfied that Linux will work well on your system, and that you’ll be able to do everything you need to with it, you can move on to the next step: actually installing Linux. Another post about that will be coming up shortly.
