A note! the desktop field is completely optional! You can install any other desktop you like, but the listed are the “main” ones, usually recommended by the distro.

Linux Mint

  • Country: Ireland 🇮🇪
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: Cinnamon

Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)

https://www.linuxmint.com/

Ubuntu

  • Country: Britain 🇬🇧
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: GNOME

Good distro, but has some controversies. Though it’s the most popular beginners distro by far.

https://ubuntu.com/

EndeavourOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

My second favorite :) Arch based, easy installer and updater, friendly community and beautiful themes. I recommend this distro if you are into arch based distros without wanting the painful part of it.

https://endeavouros.com/

OpenSUSE

  • Country: Germany 🇩🇪
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE

It’s mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.

https://www.opensuse.org/

Manjaro

  • Country: Germany 🇩🇪 / Austria 🇦🇹 / France🇫🇷
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

Added because of popular recommendation. I recommend EndeavourOS more, since manjaro has a… history.

https://manjaro.org/

NixOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME

My personal favorite <3 Great for servers. It’s not for the faint of heart, though hah. It’s an immutable distro, where there is no package manager, or manually modifying config files; your entire system is created with .nix files, not commands. Reproducable.

https://nixos.org/

Arch

  • Country: Canada 🇨🇦 (Yes yes, it’s not european but how can you not mention arch???)
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: None

Most popular distro for dedicated users, and for good reason; bleeding edge, full power over your system. Though you have to manually set up everything, from internet to your deskop environment.

Void

  • Country: Spain 🇪🇸
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: XFCE

Great distro if you want something like arch, but without systemd or slightly more stable (Also, musl support). Obscure but amazing.

https://voidlinux.org/

Debian [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global 🌍
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

An honorary mention. Isn’t suited for everyone, but is the golden standard for servers, and the grandfather of a huge family tree of distros.

https://www.debian.org/

VanillaOS [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global 🌍️
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: GNOME

VanillaOS is a debian-based immutable operating system, which can install packages from any other distro and is very hard to brick.

https://vanillaos.org/

That should cover a lot. Please heed the desktop warning, and please correct me/comment suggestions. This is not perfect, so please do criticize where possible c:

  • @Polderviking@feddit.nl
    3•9 hours ago

    Maybe I’ll get down-voted so hard I end up below earth’s tectonic plates but I’m against this, in the context of open source software.

    The whole point is that it’s worked on by everybody from everywhere and we really need to not tarnish that ideology. Very little money changes hands in this desktop OS landscape and there’s thusly more to lose than to gain here.

    You’d literally only be caring about the location of the entity behind any distribution because all the packages that make up the vast majority of Linux distro’s are still going to be coming from the same places as, again, that’s the whole point.