9 Linux Distros for Beginners

I am sure many of us have been asked: "I want to try out Linux, but I don't know which one to choose, which Linux Distro do you recommend?" That is one of the hardest questions to answer unless you know. more about what that person uses their computer for. I could say ok here are 9 distros and this is the one I recommend, but that would be an incomplete and in all likelihood a wrong answer. I'd have to know what that person uses their computer for. Also, I did not include gaming in this list, why? Simple I'm not a gamer and therefore not qualified to answer that question. So here is my list of 9 in alphabetical order, and I am not going to pick the best one, that detail I leave up to you. If you think I left one out: put it in the comments below. One I almost chose was Chrome Flex, I think I will do a review of that one on its own.

Chapters
00:00 - Intro
01:39 - Linux Overview
02:27 - Linux Parts
04:35 - How I evaludated the Linux Distros
09:11 - Elementary Linux
11:08 - Elementary Pros and Cons
12:16 - Linux Mint
13:25 - Linux Mint Pros and Cons
15:29 - MX Linux
16:12 - Pros and Cons of MX Linux
17:47 - Peppermint Linux
18:57 - Peppermint Pros and Cons
21:02 - Pop!_OS
22:36 - Pop_OS Pros and Cons
24:46 - OpenSUSE Leap
29:54 - OpenSUSE Leap Pros and Cons
30:53 - Ubuntu Desktop
31:30 - Pros and Cons of Ubuntu Desktop
33:13 - Ubuntu kbuntu
34:28 - Kbuntu Pros and Cons
35:25 - Zorin
36:28 - Zorin Pros and Cons
36:52 - One Last thing
38:20 - Wrapup

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#Linux #Beginners #Opensource

[timothybilotta]

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.

[jdebultra]

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.

[andrewpalm]

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.

[mikehosken]

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

[tonywise]

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.

[gylkag]

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. :)

[onlyeyeno]

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

[leothegeek]

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

[theplaymakerno]

This is the only video that a newbie should watch. All the other YouTubers 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.

[grahamlauder]

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.

[AaronHuffmanPerson]

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!

[Khader]

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

[act..]

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.

[CyborgZeta]

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.

[michaelwright]

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.

[entelin]

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.

[technodruid]

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.

[helenbowie]

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.

[pyrielrising]

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

[richh]

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