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 ๐ฎ๐ช
- Experience: Simple
- Desktop: Cinnamon
Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)
Ubuntu
- Country: Britain ๐ฌ๐ง
- Experience: Simple
- Desktop: GNOME
Good distro, but has some controversies. Though it's the most popular beginners distro by far.
EndeavourOS
- Country: Netherlands ๐ณ๐ฑ
- 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.
OpenSUSE
- Country: Germany ๐ฉ๐ช
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE
It's mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.
Manjaro
- Country: Germany ๐ฉ๐ช / Austria ๐ฆ๐น / France๐ซ๐ท
- Experience: Intermediate
- Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE
Added because of popular recommendation. I recommend EndeavourOS more, since manjaro has a... history.
NixOS
- Country: Netherlands ๐ณ๐ฑ
- 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.
Arch
- Country: Canada ๐จ๐ฆ (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 ๐ช๐ธ
- 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.
Debian [Honorary mention]
- Country: Global ๐
- 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.
VanillaOS [Honorary mention]
- Country: Global ๐๏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.
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:
You're welcome :)
Obscure distros vary in difficulty, some are quite easy, but generally the more obscure they are, the less chance of support through forums, chat rooms etc. That's the main reason why I personally moved from more obscure to more popular (Mint).
Vanilla OS is still pretty obscure (it has Wikipedia pages in only 2 languages, Spanish and German), but I think it's designed to be pretty unbreakable by noobs. (I haven't tried it yet, so can't vouch for that.)