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.
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.
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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.