this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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210
List of European Linux Distributions (inspired by blaze's post) (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
89 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ช
  • 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 ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง
  • 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 ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ
  • 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 ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช
  • 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 ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช / Austria ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡น / France๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท
  • 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 ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ
  • 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 ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ (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 ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ธ
  • 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 ๐ŸŒ
  • 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 ๐ŸŒ๏ธ
  • 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:

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

NixOS supports more than just KDE Plasma and GNOME, the installer is in one of those (It has the options KDE Plasma, GNOME and minimal (No GUI)), but in it you get the choice to install any* DE (It has like 5 or 6 choices, otherwise you can still install any other directly from your config) :3

EDIT: Nevermind, i didnt read the note at the top of the post, although i'd consider NixOS as having no main DE :p

[โ€“] [email protected] 48 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

I'm currently wondering whether this is going in the right direction. I understand that we are boycotting commercial products from the US, which makes perfect sense to me. But as someone who works on FOSS software myself, I wonder if we are hurting the right people by not using FOSS software that comes from the US. I think these are largely people who don't support Trump.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Also i find "Europeaness" a bit sketchy, if things are developed globally. We should embrace global cooperation rather than mimicking US nationalism with a new "European" nationalism.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If you look at a lot of the other posts they're more along the lines of "these companies are based in the EU".... and that's it. Not why they're better than the US based equivalents or why the US based ones are worth boycotting.

And to a certain extent I understand that. But the signal to noise ratio has lowered considerably in the past few weeks.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

I completely agree. I think FOSS software is way harder to control by a corporation (especially licensed copyleft) Personally i don't think it's harmful to use OSS software from any country at all. Whether by chinese, belgian or american as long as it is open source, it's fair game i think.

I shared this post since i thought this community might enjoy it, but all distros are fine.

[โ€“] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

Linux Mint is honestly amazing. I always read about it being labeled as "for beginners" or being "boring" almost as if that's a bad thing. I just wanted something that works out of the box and not take on a new hobby.. And I got just that with Linux Mint. Highly recommended

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Good to know! Being a Canadian, I'm pretty determined to transfer over to linux before Microsoft stops supporting windows 10 but have been pretty intimidated by various horror stories etc.

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Canadian person! If you break it, ask me and I will do my best to non-snarkily assist. I am working on becoming less snarky, so it's practice!

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Also, I like Mint. Back in the day, I had an obscure wifi issue, asked Twitter, and Clem himself replied with a one-liner that fixed me right up.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If it breaks more is because you are free to do more with it. Just try dual booting or even just via a live "install". There's nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I broke my system several times and probably will continue to do so. Linux really shoehorned it into my thick skull to make backups xD

Apart from that I can recommend saving any important data on a seperate drive or partition from the OS and keeping a thumbdrive with the live OS around. If the system is truly borked, you can boot the liveOS and do some damage control, like getting important data out, before reinstalling the system.

Best of Luck on you Linux journey. :)

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

I've been distro.hopping for years. I am now setting up my new home server and because I plan to also use it as a daily driver, Linux Mint is my choice. It just works. I like KDE, but it gives me too much choice, so Cinnamon it is.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Iโ€™m pleasantly surprised by the country origins of Arch and Mint.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Yep. Honestly i'm just happy i got to recommend them here lol

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I chose Mint basically because it is European distro. Secondly because it uses Cinnamon and apt. Itโ€™s just a great way to replace Windows. Works like a charm, very easy to use and maintain.

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago

Whaaat linux mint my beloved is Irish! Awesome!

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Wait Arch is Canadian?

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Graphene OS Is also canadian.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

I've been using Mint for ages and never realized it's Irish

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Manjaro was originally German/French. It is more international now, but still:

The Manjaro project is backed by Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, an open source driven company.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Thanks for this post. Here's my contribution:

Search results for Lemmy communities for these distros:

Others mentioned in the comments (I can't vouch for their "Europeanness"):

Others (I can't vouch for their "Europeanness"):

At this point I remembered Distrowatch and realized you can search by country of origin. E.g. Distrowatch search for active distros from Austria. And Italy.

Too many European countries and too many distros for me to do them all. If anyone else wants to chip in, e.g. pick a country, feel free.

And if one neighbouring country (Canada) being threatened by that f$#king guy can get an honorary mention here, let's include another, too: Mexico.

Mexicans also started the GNOME desktop environment, but I don't think the upcoming GNOME OS is based in Mexico.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

What about Ubuntu? Canonical is based in London (registered in the Isle of Man iirc).

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

True. I know a lot of Linux people hate Ubuntu but I think it's a decent distro especially for beginners, and like you say, Canonical is based in London.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I'm guessing because Ubuntu is not as "hip" as it once was. Don't see Fedora there either and those two would be the largest, right? I know it's main sponsor used to be red hat and that's what it is based on, but it too could be in the honourable mentions section.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

You should probably classify a lot of these as global. Like Arch: sure it was founded by a canadian, but nobody in the current dev team is from Canada.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Seems remiss not to mention Ubuntu, which is British.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

In my opinion, it is unfair to judge a distribution by it's origin country. Because it's an international effort regardless.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Can Debian not be added here? Linux Mint is based on Debian, and no company owns Debian.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

one word about SuSE - one of the oldest still active distros. Is one of the few "real" enterprise distros with features like SAP certification. 10+ years support for SLES releases (Suse Linux Enterprise Server). Has Tumbleweed as rolling release like Arch and Leap for non-rolling. Also Micro OS (which is IMHO the future), and desktop is of course not only KDE but also GNOME and every other major and minor DE available. Don't get discouraged by the Installer, it's very powerful but also not simplest point and click. Also zypper and YaST take getting used to if you come from apt or pacman lands. Disclaimer I use Tw ;)

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

What about Zorin? I think it is one of the best to Show Windows users a Linux experience.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

There's Mageia and openMandriva from France !

PikaOS is from UK I guess.

It's hard to enumerate all of arch based distro but CachyOS is German (not sure ), and archolinux is from belgium.

Europe work on open source in general is strong, I love it !

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Mint has a few desktops, including KDE

https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint-22/

I have Cinnamon Mint on my laptop, was thinking of checking this out as I do like the KDE desktop.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Is LMDE also the one that would be recommended for beginners or, as one, should I stick to the Ubuntu-based?

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Because its been Mint-ified, there's not a huge amount of difference apart from the positive step of not shipping with Snap. I use LMDE and if you stick with Cinnamon you're not going to notice much difference at all. You can trial it on a live usb if you want.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Snap and Cinnamon being UIs, right?

Sorry, but I am THAT much of a beginner.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Snap is a packaging format for applications that was created by Canonical, the company that makes Ubuntu. Works similarly to Flatpak in that you just download one file and the application still then just run as it includes any necessary libraries, etc. I don't know how well supported it is outside of Ubuntu, but Flatpak seems to be more prevalent.

Cinnamon is a UI, one that should be easy to pick up for new users if they've had some experience with Windows.

And FWIW, everyone starts as a beginner!

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Thank you so much for the explanation and the understanding.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

Snap is a way of installing applications (like Flatpaks) but is seen by many as problematic as its closed source and Ubuntu seem to want to make it the default way to install apps.

Cinnamon is a desktop environment like gnome or KDE - so things like (to use a Windows example) File Manager - things like icons, folders, toolbars, windows etc - all the graphical bits that make up your desktop.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Arch based Manjaro - German: https://manjaro.org/

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Isn't Canonical (Ubuntu) a UK-based company?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

ultimate neckbeard momentI'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Desktop: None

lmao

Also I never knew NixOS was European! Good post

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