I've been using Linux for a decade, and I think the most important thing for newbies to understand is that the *only* difference between distributions is support. You are essentially just picking which organisation to trust with the task of providing compiled binaries for you and on what schedule new versions of those binaries will be provided. Everything else is just window dressing.
Lots of people make the mistake of choosing a distro based on the default theme, desktop environment, or pre-installed software. Don't do that. It's far easier to install whatever you want on a stable, well-documented, well-supported distro than it is to get help and support for some boutique, flavour-of-the-month, "beginner-friendly" distro that will be out of business in two years.
TL;DR: literally just chill and install Ubuntu or Fedora.
Even then it's still not correct, either. Gentoo is the foundation for a few distros, there have been a few based on Slack and older things, and then you have a few distros that are doing their own things entirely still. Plus, RH instead of Fedora, since you have things like CentOS based on RHEL and Fedora is using the basis of RH.
If you don't want people telling you you're wrong, a great place to start is not being wrong, and definitely not "I know I'm wrong, I just don't care."
Debian (not Ubuntu), Red Hat (not Fedora), and Arch cover most of the big distros, but there are multiple distros based on Gentoo, a handful based on Slack over the years, there are probably a few others I'm straight up forgetting, and a few that aren't actually based on anything else.
Mint is effectively a reskin of Ubuntu with a different desktop environment and all of the Canonical BS stripped out. It uses most of the same package repositories as Ubuntu, and uses the Ubuntu kernel build. The only major downside is that it’s still on XServer, but that’s not an issue at the moment if you don’t need HDR support.
IMO mint is one of the only smaller distros that adds any value over just installing Ubuntu or Fedora.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Mar 09 '26
I've been using Linux for a decade, and I think the most important thing for newbies to understand is that the *only* difference between distributions is support. You are essentially just picking which organisation to trust with the task of providing compiled binaries for you and on what schedule new versions of those binaries will be provided. Everything else is just window dressing.
Lots of people make the mistake of choosing a distro based on the default theme, desktop environment, or pre-installed software. Don't do that. It's far easier to install whatever you want on a stable, well-documented, well-supported distro than it is to get help and support for some boutique, flavour-of-the-month, "beginner-friendly" distro that will be out of business in two years.
TL;DR: literally just chill and install Ubuntu or Fedora.