This one’s a bit of bugbear. None of them are that great
Ubuntu family:
(+) sort of works out of the box some of the time
(+) very large community
(–) fragile outside of basic mainstream use cases
(–) badly documented downstream changes
(–) most in the community aren’t particularly knowledgeable or helpful (matters because upstream documentation is useless on ubuntu, so best effort support is all you really have)
Examples: Ubuntu, Elementary, Mint, KxStudio
Good choice if you want to get up and running without thinking about it, bad choice if you want to learn how linux works instead of how to trick ubuntu into working.
RHEL Family:
(+) documentation is accurate and actually makes sense
(+) They set the standards for most cert and production related practices, so learning their flavors can help with learning ‘employable’ linux
(+) stable and functional (outside of fedora which is essentially free QA for the next RHEL)
(+) Excellent commercial software support in 3d, vfx, CAD, dataviz, etc.
(–) some quirks make it less flexible than community distributions
(–) Their ‘bleeding edge’ releases are breaky, essentially just a testbed for RHEL
(–) less outwardly “user friendly” than ubuntu, CLI necessary much sooner.
(–) Stable versions aren’t the most up to date out of the box, good for workstations and servers, not so much for home desktops
Examples: Centos, ROSA, Fedora, RHEL
Probably the best for “learning linux” in a way that will be useful to you in a work setting, not necessarily the best desktop OS in general
Solus:
(+) Incredibly good user experience out of the box
(+) software up to date
(+) devs hyper focused on improving UX for desktop users, gaming, etc.
(+) ‘just works’ tools that actually just work.
(+) very involved and knowledgeable best effort community support
(–) nonstandard package manager
(–) hard to find third party repos
(–) anachronisms like budgie and raven make for a better desktop experience, but prepare the user for the weirdness of linux poorly
This is an excellent desktop OS, but it gets out of your way so much that you probably won’t learn anything fast, because it doesn’t break nearly as often as other “user friendly” distros.
"Friendly" Arch/Gentoo Spinoffs:
(+) working installer, GUI out of the box
(+) excellent software support, widest range of working available packages
(+) always up to date
(+) very customizeable
(+) excellent documentation (except manjaro lol)
(–) without a foundational knowledge of linux systems you may run into problems you won’t know how to fix
(–) mainline community best effort support is hostile to these spinoffs because they’re “cheating”
(–) some of them (manjaro again lol) change things down stream without good documentation or reasoning behind the changes, making matters worse
(–) first days will be somewhat trial by fire despite the friendly face
(–) if you pick one that makes a bunch of downstream design changes you lose most of the benefits of this style of distribution (see bad examples)
Examples: Antergos, Anarchy, Sabayon, Netrunner, Redcore, CloverOS
Bad Examples: Manjaro, Chakra
These offer a lot of interesting choice and modularity without being completely impenetrable to newcomers, but you have to be careful to read documentation on the changes you do, and pick a distro as “stock” as possible to start.
Vanilla Arch/Gentoo:
(+) all the benefits discussed above
(+) community support becomes friendly
(–) varying levels of completely impenetrable for newcomers to install and get running.
Don’t jump in on these, but don’t rule them out later on either. They’re definitely the best VFIO distros.
There’s also a bunch of other weird niche ones that aren’t really worth discussing outside using linux as a hobby.
Examples: Void, Nix, Puppy, Sourcemage
might be getting ahead of yourself there. You’re definitely going to need to be careful about bios versions and know how to patch the linux kernel to get this working on thread ripper. Start there.
