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When I first began researching Linux, for my needs, I found the number of different Distros to be overwhelming. So I made this flow chart, with the intent to help new users find a starting point for choosing a distribution.
I'm open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.
EDIT: Chart updated based on suggestions in the comments.
Joke’s on you, I have a Surface! Is it a laptop? Is it a tablet? It’s the Dr. Pepper of computing devices!
But seriously, is there a small bit that can be made for tablets and those slightly-more-than-a-tablets?
Good idea. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with touch screen devices on Linux. I should do research into it, as it would be a nice addition.
I heard somewhere that Fedora Workstation includes the Surface kernel-module needed for Surface devices, though I'm not sure.
This is really great. I agree with pretty much everything on there and I figured I might want to try a artist distro at some point.
I think your legend is supposed to say "with immutability"
On a more philosophical level... This is great for a certain type of person but I worry about it also being scary for a Linux noob. I know out of my friend group, maybe 25% would appreciate seeing things in this format and thats because those are the engineers in the group.
Nice chart.
I'm new to Linux (April or May of this year) and most of my experience is Android. I picked Fedora Workstation because of Privacy Guides recommending it for noobs. Using a T470s ThinkPad.
Fedora is a very nice OS. Nothing wrong with that
I'm very happy with it.
Nice chart!
If I could offer an addendum, CachyOS and PikaOS should be included in the gaming distros for non-new users. I love Bazzite, but CachyOS gives people a very good Arch option, and PikaOS gives people a nice Debian (not Ubuntu) option that's about up to feature parity with CachyOS.
Things I do want to point out if you intend to make this as new user friendly as possible:
Godsend, swapping my main laptop now.
Question: If I say, go with PopOS, does this mean it isn't optimal for development? Or can you get pretty much get anything to work provided there's kernel support, this chart is just a matter of working out of the box?
The latter. Imo distros essentially are the choice of different package managers, software repositories and pre-installed software. PopOS will work perfectly for development, provided you install the tools you need. Debian/Ubuntu based distros like PopOs, have a fantastic software repository, out of the box.
Thanks!
Desktop Linux
Is there one for laptop Linux?
macOS
What about mac hardware?
Minimalist NixOS
That is NOT a reason to pick NixOS. You pick NixOS when you want to configure your entire OS via a configuration that you've saved in one or more files, potentially in a git repo. No more manual scripting that'll break a major version down the line.
Copy the repo to another (or new) machine, let the OS setup your configuration and you're done. You're back to where you were.
Now, not everything is tracked in that repo, like a stateful browser containing your browser history, etc, but if you can get back 90% to where you were in a single installation - that's a massive time-saver :D
I use CachyOS myself, and I'm a gamer who doesn't even do development, though I do music production, and do pretty well there. However, I see a lot of Wayland-default distros, which tells me it's a Wayland bias. Mint is an exception, since Cinnamon is working on Wayland support, and it was X11 the entire time, though Cinnamon and i3 (my window manager of choice) works on XLibre.
Edit: After reading the chart, it actually works extremely well, despite me using Linux for about a 4 years (between myself and my producer, Neigsendoig, about 9 years combined experience).