this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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It’s always a good time to switch to Linux. Some distributions are super easy to learn, while others require some minor knowledge to really get off the ground. Here are a few of my recommendations.
Linux Mint - https://linuxmint.com/
Ubuntu - https://www.ubuntu.com
Debian - https://www.debian.org/
Fedora - https://fedoraproject.org/
I personally use Debian. It is my favorite of the bunch mentioned. It requires some configuration for me to get up to where I need it, but it runs flawlessly once I’m there.
Linux Mint is really good for users switching for the first time. It is also my recommendation for new Linux users. Its default look and feel is akin to Windows and users will feel right at home out of the box.
Ubuntu is similar in usability to Mint, but Canonical isn’t great and has made some very poor decisions in the past. Doesn’t have a Windows like interface by default, but is really hard to break if I remember correctly (I haven’t used Ubuntu in probably 8+ years so take all this with some salt)
Fedora I have the least experience with. It seems to be a hit or miss distribution, but some may find their home here. Also ships with an interface that windows users would need time to adjust to.
This is my general impression after dual booting with Fedora on an old Macbook. You also need to install a bunch of drivers and codecs since they don't ship by default. I get this impression that Fedora has noticeably less packages than Debian or Arch although there are ways around it by using Distrobox. Fedora comes with Flatpak, so I guess they want people to install apps with Flatpak.
Overall, I think it's a poor distro if you want to introduce new people to Linux. There's a Fedora-based distro called Nobara that seems to fix some of these issues although I can't vouch for it since I've never tried it before. This is probably better than Fedora assuming it works as advertised.
Fedora is a poor distro for absolute newcomers because they do not ship any proprietary software by default*, nor do they keep any in their repos. If you want a free-software-only distro and have (the correct) philosophical inclination for a world without proprietary software, it's an excellent choice.
Fedora is the distro I use, but with support from RPMFusion for things like FFmpeg with proprietary codecs, my stupid Nvidia proprietary driver, and so on.
*https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-approval/#_licenses_allowed_for_firmware Fedora makes an exception for some binary firmware images