Choosing a Distro

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Page status: outline

To-do: Flesh out descriptions and shit, add photos of DEs

Before researching and choosing the right distrobution for you, you must have in mind what you want to use it for. Facebook machine? Programming? Gaming (lel)? A secondary consideration is hardware. Linux generally tends to play well with underpowered or aging computers, but you may want to try lighter distros.

There are three things you want to compare when distro shopping.

1. Distro quirks

2. Desktop environment

3. Application library

Distro families

For more information, visit each distro's homepage, Wikipedia, and DistroWatch.

Debian

A community-developed distro focused on stability. Has the biggest user base if you include distros based on it. Comes in various releases with different tradeoffs of stability/up-to-datedness. More or less the most important distro.

Ubuntu

Takes Debian Testing, makes sure its packages are usable, adds drivers, adds handholding, and adds spyware. Not to fear, it's easily removable ([fixubuntu.com]). Comes with Unity by default. Repo is supplemented with user-maintained PPAs, so if it's available for Linux you can probably find it here. The most popular desktop distro with the most guides and solutions on various forums.

Developed by Canonical, the evil empire of the free software world.

Mint

Takes Ubuntu, removes spyware, adds proprietary shit like Flash right in the iso. Developed the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. Uses Ubuntu repos.

elementary OS

Takes Ubuntu and makes it look like OS X by developing the Pantheon desktop environment and in-house programs. Uses Ubuntu repos.

Crunchbang

Takes Debian Stable and rices it for you. Openbox, Tint2, the works. Comes with drivers. Uses stable and backport Debian repos.

Fedora

Developed by Red Hat, probably the biggest corporate backer of GNU/Linux, as a testing bed for its commercial RHEL distro. Bleeding edge - usually the first major distro to start shipping with new developments such as Wayland.

OpenSUSE

Developed by Novell as a testing bed for its commercial SUSE distro. Best implementation of KDE, and great GNOME integration. Has a well-regarded integrated configuration tool called YaST.

Arch

A community-developed distro focused on simplicity and vanilla-ness of its underlying parts. No handholding or preconfigured defaults - setting up the system is left to the user. Has the most bleeding-edge packages, so be prepared for the possibility of things breaking when you update. Great for learning how a GNU/Linux system comes together.

Manjaro

Takes Arch, preconfigures everything, and gives it an easy graphical installer. Also maintains its own repo of more stable packages in addition to the Arch repos.