9 Linux Distros for Beginners 

Upvote this everyone please. There is so much nonsense out there. DJ has a much more practical approach. Almost no one mentions hardware concerns as far as being willing to buy new/different add-on cards, peripherals or even motherboard to have a good experience.

A very nice summary, DJ! Fair and balanced. I am not a Linux beginner and currently use Debian and Fedora. But as both I and my hardware become more ancient, your hardware notes become more relevant and I feel drawn to a distro that is easy to install and maintain.

Really informative. As a small system builder , This was a nice refresh for me. It was refreshing for you to mention Open Suse... I wasn't expecting that. I installed that a lot for small business use and competent windows users. For Grandma and Grandpa's who have very little computer experience I tend to go with mint xfce as it's good on older hardware where people are on a limited income. I personally use slackware and have for many many years. My hardware is pretty old and I definitely get the maximum life out of it. I must say Open Suse is a very good operating system and is easy to convert Windows users. It is also ideal for low budget, small business use where you can pick up an Enterprise class desktop for cheap with good performance and stability. Thank you for all you do and you're clear communication.

Interesting to hear your take on Beginner-type Distros. I think for beginners, the desktop environment is key, especially on first boot, as the vast majority will be Windows users.

IMO, picking DE is more important than distro itself, because DE is what regular users actually interact with. I love KDE, so I have Kubuntu on my desktop and Fedora KDE Spin on a laptop (and tried many more) and honestly there's no real difference between them. I mean, I think people don't really care if it's `dnf` package manager or `apt`, most of the time regular user won't have to use them - they'll have Discover app for updates, installing apps. Thanks for the video, as always. :)

It’s great to see so many easy to use out of the box Linux distros. I’ve been using Debian for over 20 years, I wish I had some of those distros to cut my teeth with back then. In a lot of videos like this, when you see cons about Debian or Debian based distros being outdated isn’t strictly true. Debian comes in 4 different lifecycle formats that rarely get mentioned. It’s its strength that is comes from an ultra stable environment through to the experimental bleeding edge. But I guess a lot of these distros do reflect that. Keep up the excellent work

Thank you DJ ware 😊.your videos are always informational and fun to watch even for a normal linux user.

I quite like Opensuse and use Tumbleweed on my main computer. I quite like how stable it is even as a rolling release system! In the world of Linux systems today, I find Opensuse as a very unique one and highly underrated. I also love how it uses btrfs!

A Great Video DJ. Thank you so much for clarifying the distributions.

One of the few channels I press like even before watching the whole video!

This is the only video that a newbie should watch. All the other RU-vidrs sometimes suggest Arch Based distros for beginners as well. I have been using Linux for 4 years, and I am thinking about switching to Mint, as the philosophy of Arch does not suit a production machine. Powerdevil recently broke on KDE (and I know it is not Arch's fault, it is KDE's fault), and that means other things might break in the future. I can't tell my clients all the time that I can't work as Arch Linux decided to push an update which broke something.

It has been the year of the Linux desktop for the last 12 years at least ... I think. What makes this year any different. :D Excellent summary, I've been a Linux user since Mandrake 7 I think. What drew me to that, was the simple install and the GUI based admin that was really informative when shit went wrong. Aaah Dependency Nightmares, wherefore art thou. Mandrake died and I found SuSE and YAST, I used to get criticised for not using command line even though I used CLI all the time, when it was the easiest solution. These days I run several distros depending on use case SuSE Tumbleweed is my daily driver all rounder, CentOS for Film editing, the DaVinci Resolve version and Ubuntu studio with Mate DE for sound editing and my wife runs Leap 15.4 and I run Debian on my laptop for DIT work on films basically for it's stability and reliability. I have tried many of the later distros, but that's mainly because I prefer distros with a record of development stability. I may have to change that, but I went from Mandrake to Yoper then to Mandriva, all of which just faded away so it's Redhat Universe, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu just because of backing.

Thanks for another great video, I hope that it "reaches" all the "Linux curious" that I think it would highly benefit :)

Interesting choices, DJ. As always, your breakdowns are honest and constructive. 👍

Another great video. I have been using Fedora with Plasma for a couple of months and I have been very pleased with it. I wouldn't call it newbie friendly, but it is stable. However, I just miss Tumbleweed. Like you, I would not recommend Tumbleweed for a beginner. OpenSUSE Leap would be my recommendation if for nothing but the support offered by the community. When new versions are released, there are always very good instructions on the process of switching repositories and performing the upgrade. Plus YAST is such a big plus for the newbie who is afraid of the console. As they get more comfortable with the console, they will find themselves using YAST less and less. It's a good distro to grow into Linux with. If they could just do something about the speed of the installer and Zypper.

gentoo + awesome wm is the best invention of the humankind )

Your summary was great to hear. I do not want anything to do with AI but have Windows laptop and desktop. Years ago I tried Red Hat Fedora as a dual boot on another drive on my desktop. It was a learning process. I plan on going to Linux but am so not sure where to start. I will continue to watch more videos to learn where to start. Thanks.

Kubuntu (I'm on 22.10 with Plasma 5.26.5) is great. Easy to install and use, quick and very stable. Lots of customization options yes, but I don't care about that. I didn't customize much. Been using it for more than a month now and no problems at all. Looks great with Fluent dark theme and Papirus icons.

Nice video, DJ!

I'm not a beginner, but far from an experienced user. Loving your videos. I've recently decided to start up a home server using what I've learned here. I have picked up a 4 node S2600WP intel server last night with 512GB of ram for a steal. Would love to see some more on server management from the ground up.

What a helpful video. My PERSONAL BIAS is towards Open SUSE Leap, Kubuntu, Linux Mint and Peppermint. If I may say so, having used Leap for years I agree that it is Reliable and suitable for beginners and with a bit of getting used to, it is Very Good Indeed for daily use. Thank You DJ..

I enjoy your style of presentation.

Thank you for this. I have been a Linux beginner for over 20 years, and my thought is that the installer is even more important than the DE. They all have a simple option to just erase a whole disk, which looks like it's right for someone beginning; but many possible Linux users are actually experienced on computers (I'd used four OSes before I first tried Linux), and will want to dual boot Windows and Linux, at least at first. Linux Mint won me over because it made it so easy for me to install MInt alongside Windows, and partition the disk. I've tried Fedora recently, and gave up when I could either wipe the disk and give it all to Fedora, or get down to the level of selecting mount points (which I semi-understand and could sort out for myself, but life is short and there are so many distros). I can't be unique, because distros like Gecko Linux (for Open SUSE) and risiOS (for Fedora) seem designed chiefly to overcome this problem.

Love the HAL 9000 live wallpaper in the background...very cool.

Great video man.

Good video, and I appreciate you giving a shout out to Kubuntu. It is my Linux distro of choice, and my preferred way to use Ubuntu Linux. I recently introduced it to an acquaintance by installing it on a PC for him, and he loves it.

I mostly use FreeBSD, so perhaps not the most typical person in the trying-out Linux camp. I do get confused with some of the things that Linux does differently to FreeBSD, mostly SystemD. My preferred linux distros are Debian on the server, and Linux Mint Debian Edition on the desktop. I find that if you are looking for things outside their package management system, you are far more likely to find apt-based stuff that works on Debian/Ubuntu than other distros. FreeBSD of course, if it is not in the ports collection, you are going to have to compile it, and generally have to translate Linux-based instructions into FreeBSD equivalent I don't actually agree that looking like Windows or MacOS is necessarily a good thing, because they only look superficially like those operating systems, and the moment you try to do anything slightly complicated, you will find it is different, because Linux just is different. As an example of that, Windows 11 looks like a knock-off version of MacOS, and I find that confusing because I forget that I'm actually in Windows, and start trying to do MacOS stuff rather than Windows stuff; often very simple things like Cmd-Q to close an application rather than Alt-F4

I'm a Linux beginner and I decided to try out Elive. It is the nicest window experience I've had on any computer. I came from Mac to Windows to Linux. Elive is super stable and very customisable. The other thing is I'm using a 10 year old machine and Elive opens Darktable and Gimp instantly. It's super fast. Definately worth a look if your like a really stylish desktop environment.

The "beginner" objectives is (as in many discussions) the question. You can have something stable that will not give any troubles, but you will not learn much. These are good for people that don't want to use M$ or Apple stuff for consumer rights/security reasons. For me, "beginner" implies that the user wants to progress till "master". To do that in fastest way possible, a rolling release that breaks from time to time is better. I ditched windows for Mandrake 7.2 because it was the first flavor that I manage to work with my hardware. Then I decided understand actually learn, I spent a few years using Gentoo that would let me customize everything and have a bunch of things to fix. Now, I'm with Manjaro because I'm too lazy for Arch ;).

Great video. I keep coming back to Mint but I may try some of these others more in depth

aaaaand Linux Lite! There- now you have a nice even list of ten!

The only two on your list I can actually recommend for beginners are Zorin OS and Linux Mint.

started with slackware in the early 90s then in order to be able to update the OS between releases and not install, switched to Suse (paid version). I remember communicating with the developers so that it would work on my hardware (usually cheap). Now, been using ubuntu for a long time. But was not happy, in the not so distant past, some updates breaking my nvidia system. That has improved but I still hold my breath when updating. Thanks for your nicely explained videos.

I had started in the late 90's with Slackware. I pretty much instantly fell in love, being able to actually learn how the system works at a deep level was very nice. On windows the biggest thing I've always hated is the poor documentation, terrible error logging, and clusterfuck registry & filesystem. So often on windows when something is wrong, you wind up doing things like rebooting, reinstalling applications, and potentially the os itself. Where on linux this will never help anything, if somethings broken, it's broken for a reason and won't be fixed until you find out why, and doing so is far easier than on windows. Coming from Dos/win98, the hardest thing was just the fact that the whole application ecosystem was different, but I really enjoyed that process.

After taking a decade long break from the Linux world I decided to (re)start my journey with Fedora on my laptop and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (free dev license) on my deskop using VM. The main reason is that I really wanna learn system administration and RHEL seems like a logical choice since its very popular in the business/enterprise ecosystem. It also has one of the best certification paths (RHCSA and RHCE) which provides learning structure. There are plenty of video courses and books on the topic lowering the need to chase wiki pages and forums outside of solving specific errors. After I'm done with Red Hat I'm sure I wont have much issue moving to other popular server distros such as OpenSUSE or Ubuntu/Debian or switching my laptop to OpenSUSE tumbleweed. Heck I might even try FreeBSD since their handbook is praised all over and I'm sure it would be fun to dive in after my Linux journey.

Thank you DJ for making this interesting video. You are right saying that Open Suse can be a Linux beginner distro, even if in my opinion Suser user should be interested in learning and grow with the distribution. Btw, what system are you using on you desktops machines? Best regards from Switzerland.

My main system has been Debian-XFCE for 5 years, mainly because I'm down to one good machine and not in a place to make major changes, but I recently had a chance to try SUSE-leap 15.x with KDE and found it very nice. Certainly the most functional installer of all the major distros, it even detects the NFS volumes of my NAS. The PopOS installer by contrast wants to force reformating of every block device it touches, very irritating when trying to preserve partitions that you want auto mounted for /home or bulk storage archives.(Work around is to give the installer only the / partition then manually edit fstab.) Fedora Anaconda is just terrible 6 ways from Sunday, also has some of the desire to force reformating of block devices, esp swap. Manjaro and Debian graphical installers are not too bad but lack a few features so more manual config may be needed after install than with SUSE. I use two screens, somedays both landscape other days one turned portrait, and multiple workspaces. XFCE and KDE both seem to work well with that combination. Gnome3 was nice with one screen, back when I used Fedora 17, but it seems a bit funky with two, I may just need time to aclimate and get it setup but I don't want to spend that time. SUSE-enterprise is also one of 3 distros directly supported by AMDs "pro" graphics drivers if you need the proprietary features for gpu compute.( I don't know how many new users would need this, but it's an option.) RHEL and Ubuntu are the other two supported. I would assume direct derivatives of those three, like Rocky, CentOS, SUSE-leap would also have good compatability. (Grew fond on YUM/DNF when on Fedora and CentOS-7; APT and Pacman will get the job done but they feel like a lot of secodary tasks and finer grain controls are obscure work arounds.)

The Year of the Linux Desktop is always next year, whenever you are. Either way, nice video. For myself, I prefer Manjaro KDE to anything you mention, but I *do* recognise it's a distro and flavour that's directed rather at intermediate users such as myself.

Few words about the state of COSMIC. As of now COSMIC is the name of System76' modified GNOME DE (with all the extensions and adjustments) and it is a final product by itself. However it is also the name of a future completely independent desktop environment written in Rust that they're developing (currently codenamed "cosmic-epoch") which is a work in progress and still in pre-alpha state.

The video could have a special mention about Ubuntu Studio when you talked about Kubutu. Otherwise, another great video.

I decided to give Linux a try a couple of months ago. I bought a super cheap mini PC (€130) - Celeron N2840 2.16Ghz, Atom graphics, 8Gb RAM, 256 Gb SSD. I've tried several distros, at the moment I'm using Linux Mint 21.2, Cinnamon 5.8.4. This runs a like a dream I use it mainly for Ham radio. Some distros just didn't suite me, some just refused to install or were buggy.

Not saying that Salix 15.0 is a beginner distro, but it is easy to set up, and works great. I don't bother with Arch or Debian based distros anymore after using Salix since September 2022.

I personally use MX Linux. Not saying it's the right distro for anyone else. But here are some of the reasons I use it because it's lightweight. I like their backup tools where you can create a iso . I use this feature because I have three or four laptops and this way they can all have the exact same settings. If I update settings on my main laptop I can make a new iso and install it on the other laptops

Linux distros, the neverending topic :)

Thank you What are your thoughts regarding slackare?

I have tested the easiest Linux distro and it is not on your list. It is based in Brazil and it doesn't require you to use the terminal. It is Big Linux. It is lightweight too. I've install it in my 10 year old laptop HP15 (2010 version) and it works with very low delay time. And at the same time. I've also tried the latest laptop release in late 2022 (Q1 2023) and all of the function keys are all working. I've tried Ubuntu LTS in the latest laptop that I have and didn't expect that some of the keys functions are not working. As a fellow Linux content creator, I recommend to check it out Big Linux.

I run Ubuntu on my system, I have used a number of different distros but I have used Ubuntu more than the others. I use Ubuntu budgie now and I like the budgie environment with Ubuntu, it is a fairly lightweight version and is a clean and fresh looking design.

Thanks DJ for great video. I am now still a Windows user but about 90% of my daily work are running on WSL (Ubuntu) and the UNIX/Linux servers. I am searching for a new laptop as my daily driver (plan to install Fedora or Ubuntu). one of my concerns is about the network adapter driver. As you mentioned, if the driver issue is fixed, moving to Linux will be much easier for a newcomer.

Very good. I would have thought fedora is quite good

MX Linux is amazing! It's fast, stable and you can rice it to look good! I use it on a 10-years old desktop and everything works great!

please reminde me how-to/learn elementoryos.#linux #security

Siempre el consejo de este señor tan sabio es importante.

@DJ Who would be the hardware makers that are known for being Linux friendly? Like with the graphics card issue?? Did you do a video on this already?

Thank you DJ!

Wish we were neighbors. Not because I need support, but to exchange ideas and results. I suspect we have similar outlooks and maybe backgrounds.

I had Windows crash on major upgrade on a dual boot system. I think you should either use a virtual machine or 2 separate physical computers.

👍👍

No manjaro or nobara included... i kinda disagree with mx and suse for begginers because of the dificult instalation of programs and OS. Tnx for the content anyway and happy new year

Just to add... Linux Mint (and most other 'common' distributions of Linux) comes with Long Term Support (LTS) lasting a few years too. Not just MX Linux.

sir plz mention every distros support period.🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

"The year of the linux desktop" , is just a meme. Anyways, I prefer Slackware, but I am obviously a more seasoned user , been using Slackware since '05.

I'm curious as to why fedora didn't make it to this list. What makes it less suitable for beginners?

Hi, can you please make a video explaining when and why these files are used in simple terms /etc/resolve.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/named.conf if you can show a practical usage it will be great. Please its a request. Please do reply

I tried MX Linux, booted from a USB drive. The user is prompted to update the system, but it freezes before the updates are completed

Peppermint has a Devuan based release and it's faster? Can't I upgrade from Devuan to Peppermint? I'm running on terribly aged hardware and trying to make the most of resources. I've already done some fine tuning on Devuan but hoping for more.

Mageia is for new users. Megeia Control Center for management system and no console is needed.

I’m an experienced Linux user who had been away from anything computer related for quite a while until recently. In the past month I’ve tried every distribution on your list, so far, except Peppermint. Might have to take a look at that one. I’m currently at the point in the video where you’re talking about OpenSuse. That was the last distribution I tried before the one I have currently installed. I can tell you why I dumped it. After enabling non free software and multimedia codecs during installation, I was repeatedly confronted with dialogues that halted whatever I was doing and informing me that some software component couldn’t be included, but I could opt in and then go find whatever I needed to install and configure in order to continue. First of all, yes you can include all of that stuff because literally EVERYONE else does. (Except maybe Fedora. I excluded Fedora from consideration because of Red Hat’s decision to close source.) When this happened the third time I made the decision to move on. The only thing I could have forgiven would have been Nvidia drivers, which, if most distributions don’t offer directly, usually they provide a fairly quick and easy way to get and install the drivers. I’ve done it myself so many times that it’s just not a problem, so I don’t consider that a reason for rejection. All the other multimedia stuff, though, is. These things are so common as to be considered ubiquitous. Imagine having to jump through those kinds of hoops to make an internet connection or install a browser. I dealt with all that stuff in the early/mid 90s I’m not wasting any time or energy on that in 2023. Might have been ok if it hadn’t been for that.

Hola estoy instalando vanilla y no acepta ningún password? No me permite avanzar...

I like colorful icons so prefer Linux Mint to MacOS and its confusing barely-legible menu bar.

Regarding MX Linux, you should have mentioned the tools - they're really worth talking about. Nice video, regardless.

👍DJ!

What distro and/or DE are you recommend for using with Nvidia GPU?

arm compatible distros only ?

Since I have a nvidia GPU on my desktop, at first I only messed around with Mint in a VM for a few months and then later manjaro. so when I actually decided to buy a thinkpad for linux I was already ready for using base arch/artix. Its funny having started using linux in 2021 and seeing all of the bullshit about pulse-audio and jack etc that I never had to deal with (but what the older users suffered through lol). also side note: never install manjaro it has went downhill significantly, just installed endeavourOS or arch/artix.

I'm surprised you recommended SUSE for beginners. Every time I tried it at least 1 driver did not work. Also "The Linux Experience" channel tried it & ran into problems. Although, they do make nice parody music videos.

DJ, I love your videos but you really don’t know how to talk to Linux noobs. You assume knowledge and interests that most, in my experience, don’t have. Your whole commentary on snaps in Ubuntu is an example. It presupposes knowledge of snaps and even knowledge of the speed issues with snaps. If someone has done that much research into Linux, then I’m sure they can decide on which distro is best for them. Having said that, this is another excellent video though I wouldn’t say that the Opensuse install would be easy for someone who has never installed an OS before. I’m sure that plenty of others will disagree with me. This is just my opinion for the little bit it may be worth. Take care and have fun. ❤

POP or Feren(kde)

Zorin Core + Chrome. Like a less bloated Windows or better Chrome OS.

Is there a dist that will run Fusion 360?

LFS!

Anyone have any thoughts on why Ubuntu doesn’t have an official pantheon flavor?

Zorin?

How do people feel about Debian?

I keep banging on about this but I feel I have to keep repeating it like a broken record. Most mainstream distros are NOT stable. Or at least, not in the professional sense anyway. Unless it's based on Debian Stable or Red Hat, it's just not. Even Ubuntu "LTS" is based on Debian Unstable/Testing.

I bet that people that don't LOVE KDE Plasma also don't like pineapple on pizza.

I have to disagree with you Elementary os is not for beginners End also opensuse not for beginners Opensuse is a good distro but I had nothing But problems with elementary os it so bad it's not even funny peppermint os is based on Debian that's also not for beginners thanks for the great video

I did install Ubuntu for friends on a 2008 HP dc5850 (Phenom II X4 B97 (3.2GHz) and 8GB DDR3) in 2022. I used that machine myself till April 2019 without any issues, while also running ZFS and a Win 7 VBox-VM. Your performance remarks are irrelevant for GUI desktops. The type of performance measurement of DJ Ware have nothing to do with the responsiveness of a system using the GUI. They are basically very low level performance measurements without any test of GUI or its IO functions. They are useless for the normal GUI user, but great for terminal using engineers interested in number crunching.

Peppermint is NOt for beginners---MINT and ZORIN are GREAT--- I'd also add SPARKY (I'm running it now-- and it's the ONLY one out of 40 i've used that I've NEVER had an issue with-- NEVER.. and it's FAST, LIGHT, and I'm using KDE.. (which overwhlmed me at first).. Elementary is good- too much crap in it.. POP OS is WONDERFUL-- Love the tiling-- but I don't like gnome, so can't stay with it.

Linux - Live free or die

Gnome Desktop "beautiful"??? Maybe, usable? maybe if all you use is the browser. The Gnome desktop (for a long time Linux user) has been unusable. It is not obvious which window has focus because of the "nice looking" title bars. The Gnome apps steal the title bar from the desktop and force their weird theme and style which looks "nice" (if you like that sort of thing) but is harder to use unless you only want full screen single app use. Very hard to use with multiple windows open on one desktop and hard to modify to suite the user. It is no wonder people choose to use Kubuntu as the representative of Ubuntu, It actually has an applications menu (that works) so one can find the application they are looking for. The Gnome desktop is responsible for more fragmentation in Linux than any other one thing I can point to. I do understand some of the reasons KDE is not liked by some of the "diehard" Linux community... of course Gnome which was originally an answer to KDE's license (at the time) has now alienated those same diehard people. I think many of the DE designers have forgotten what the DE is supposed to do. I think between the CDE (Motif?) set of window decorations and the win95 applications menu, both of which were made for business users, almost everything since then has been steps backwards away from usability and productivity.

I stopped using Peppermint 11 after I did not receive any update after 4 to 6 weeks. Later I detected, they had a new release and stopped updating this one. During that time and even now I still receive updates of Peppermint 9 and 10, I expect through the Ubuntu repositories. I loved Peppermint, when it was based on Ubuntu and I installed it a few times for friends and family. I never really liked the Debian based version and I will not install it again.

I'll tell you.which Linux distro you.should use: Arch (with KDE Plasma). There, I just said what everyone secretly thinks... You're welcome! :trolling:

Ubuntu would be a lot better without GNOME and snaps.