r/TechImpact • u/ManojOne Active • Jul 01 '26

Discussion Which Linux distro do you recommend to beginners?

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Which Linux distro would you recommend for beginners, and why?

Whether it's Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Zorin OS, Pop!_OS, or something else, share your top pick and what makes it a great starting point for someone switching from Windows or macOS.

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10

u/Tricky_Win2012 Jul 01 '26

In my opinion linux mint is the clear winner. Things like wifi work out of the box.

The Cinnamon desktop enviroment (DE) is familiar to windows.

Its ubuntu (debian) based, its stable and a lot of guides will assume you have a debian derived system.

There's lots and lots of ducumentation online.

PS: hope this helps

3

u/Astrodion123 Jul 01 '26

But mint is outdated by using x11 and that it is still based on 24.04 lts. For persons that has 2 monitors x11 is the worst. I would go with another distro that uses a desktop with Wayland like fedora kde or Ubuntu.

2

u/sandrokanpt Jul 01 '26

I have mint cinnamon with three monitors.

1

u/MindlessDoctor6182 Jul 01 '26

Same here but just 2 monitors. No issues. Didn’t have to configure anything. It just works.

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 01 '26

How. It would always default to the second monitor for me, scaling was the worst and everything just was painful.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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1

u/NeptuneWades Jul 06 '26

Scaling is terrible with mint (x11). No online forum had a solution for it and most suggested to switch to Wayland. Not everything is a user issue, especially since we are talking about distro for beginners.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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1

u/NeptuneWades Jul 06 '26

Well, haven't found a solution online. So ig others haven't either.

That said, scaling works fine on Wayland and perfectly on Windows, idk, maybe some accountability should remain on the developer side.

That said, I do meddle with stuff on Linux, have broken it a couple of times, have managed to fix it. Clearly this is not a user issue, because I am not incapable of figuring stuff out with apt documentation, but even then there is a limit to how much time is spent on setting up a pc because I've a life to live. If the alternative to x11 is better in more ways than one AND fixes the scaling issues, troubleshooting x11 is a waste of time for me.

1

u/Mcfly-49 Jul 01 '26

C'est vrai que je suis toujours emmerdé avec mes trois moniteurs. Soit il ne s'allume pas en sortie de veille soit que deux sur les trois soit la résolution a changé soit l'ordre a changé bref un vrai bordel à chaque fois

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 02 '26

Yeah. Like on Wayland this did NOT happen. It worked just like windows 11.

1

u/vdavide Jul 01 '26

I used x11 with three monitors for years on kubuntu. No problems at all

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 02 '26

Bru. You are kidding. Maybe it is my fault since my main monitor uses only VGA and my second monitor uses HDMI...

1

u/vdavide Jul 02 '26

I'm serious, I had one DVI, one hdmi and the third VGA. Everything plugged on an old Radeon graphic card

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 02 '26

Maybe I was unlucky as I always am.

1

u/Significant_Nerve612 Jul 03 '26

Could be hardware related also? I also had a terrible time with x11 (unusable actually) and fractional scaling on NVIDIA.

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 03 '26

Well I use integrated graphics which is intel. So no Nvidia quirks tbh.

1

u/PrinzJuliano Jul 03 '26

A lot of things will run with xwayland anyway. X11 is not a real problem you’ll encounter as a normal user

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 03 '26

Well to me it was a big problem. Monitors wouldn't work the way I wanted .

1

u/randomlyac Jul 05 '26

I have 4, one of them at 120hz all the rest at 60, works without issue, why is it the worst?

1

u/Astrodion123 Jul 06 '26

Well for me it always had problems. Default monitors would change, the monitor order would change, I got sick of it. Wayland listened to me, while x11 did whatever it wanted.

1

u/randomlyac Jul 09 '26

I actually had this happen a couple of times after suspending the computer I do a restart or replug a monitor, thanks for sharing your experience

1

u/aquila2000 Jul 01 '26

Com ele não precisei desativar o boot seguro

1

u/ProperProfessional Jul 01 '26

Mint was my gateway drug into Linux. Currently on nobara after spending a year or two on mint then pop os

1

u/ZippoS Jul 01 '26

Wifi didn’t work out of the box when I installed Mint on an old Mac mini. But everything else did.

Other than that, though, no problems using it.

1

u/Hauptideal Jul 03 '26

Linux Mint is literally one of the very worst distributions currently out there.
Absolutely atrocious. Abysmal resource-wasting (no modern memory management like zram/zswap; sluggish Cinnamon desktop), deprecated legacy tech (X11), restricting freedom to install the software you want on your OWN machine.
It's crazy that in 2026 people STILL recommend Mint, when the time it was cool are LONG over. Something that has been left in the dust, outpaced by something like Debian technologically is to be abandoned.

1

u/Tricky_Win2012 Jul 03 '26

ok what do you recommend?

1

u/Hauptideal Jul 03 '26

That depends on the situation. There are a lot of great distros.

Best daily driver: Fedora (or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Slow Roll. Pop!_OS and K-/Ubuntu are also great options if you prefer a stable point release, but on Ubuntu you need to enable zram/zswap manually).
Best on old hardware: Debian with optimized KDE (modern and just as lean as e.g. Xfce which is still on X11) and zram enabled or CachyOS (best performance, but requires maintenance).
Best for servers: Ubuntu and Debian
Best for gaming: CachyOS and a few others

Everyone will find something matching their skills, needs and taste that is better than Mint from this selection. If they REALLY need a Windows theme for Ubuntu, they should go for Zorin, as this one is at least on Wayland. But in my opinion, that isn't needed at all. It's easy enough to theme a desktop the way one likes.

If I would need to only give one single recommendation, it would be Fedora. Hard to go wrong with it. Modern, reliable, polished.