Hello James,
I've seen you've popped up on the IRC channel when the few of us that
linger there have been ‘away from keyboard’ so it's nice to finally talk
to you.
At some point in the future I am planning on switching from windows 11
to linux but I am not sure what distro to go for.
I'm most familiar with debian, through raspberry pi os, but also
either mint or ubuntu are also on the table.
I think the answers from Tim, Rhys, and Terry nicely cover some
different things to consider, and having used Raspberry Pi's Debian
spin-off you'll be familiar with some of them, but they were a bit
implicit, so I'll list them.
- Unlike Microsoft Windows, a Linux distro tends to have a lot more
swappable parts. Three interesting layers are:
- The kernel which marshals the hardware and arbitrates requests to
access it from the programs above. Most users don't find
sufficient here to distinguish one distro from another, though
some more unusual bits of hardware may need a particular kernel
module for support.
- The distro's preperation of software for easy install of a new
program as a ‘package’, and the other packages it depends on.
Then keeping installed packages up to date with upgrades.
The two main flavours of package managers are APT, from Debian,
and DNF, from Fedora. I'm not sure there's much to choose between
them as competition worked its magic.
- The graphical desktop interface is the key one in many users'
eyes. Terry uses the Kubuntu distro which is the KDE desktop on
Ubuntu. There are many desktop environments, and they can each be
installed as a package at the same time, at the cost of disk
space. The graphical log-in prompt for username and password
normally provides a menu of the available ones to choose from for
that one session.
So don't think plain Ubuntu with its default of the GNOME desktop
means KDE is out of reach. Or the lightweight XFCE, or a tiling
window manager like i3 plus other parts of your choosing. You can
experiment with different desktops without switching distro as
most provide all the main ones.
- Hardware compatibility used to be a significant hurdle in Linux's
earlier days, and can still cause more minor problems like getting the
audio working, etc., as new chips are continuously arriving on the
market. A ‘live’ version of a distro lets you boot from a USB drive
to check how much of the hardware works before installation.
Searching for your model of PC or motherboard along with ‘Linux
compatibility’ may also show up those who have walked the same path
before you. The program ‘inxi’ run from a live distro can summarise
the hardware.
- The philosophy of the distribution. Not just whether they're zealots
for an aspect of licensing, but what's their approach to releasing
updates. Is it every six months on schedule, or when volunteer effort
means it's ready, or is it a rolling release where they're keen to get
an upstream release of a single program into their users' hands?
- The level of activity in the project. Some have paid staff, others
are volunteer efforts, and some a mixture. Do they have a means of
community you like: mailing list, IRC, web forum, ... Is it active
enough: are others getting a thread of replies going to their
question?
✻ ✻ ✻
Separate from all that, there's what do you want to use the distro for?
Something you can forget about? Or something to play, experiment, and
learn through? You've the mainstream ones, split by Debian or Fedora
ancestry, and then the others like Arch Linux and its spin-offs.
Pure ‘Arch’ has a very manual installation process where you're left at
the shell prompt of a root user and you work your way through setting up
the network configuration, then installing just the packages you want
using their ‘Pacman’ package manager: neither APT or DNF. This may
appeal if you like to learn how things are put together. You can have
a skim of the instructions without thinking of installing Arch.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide
I use Arch Linux at home. On remote servers, especially for clients,
where I want to ‘install and forget’, I go for Debian. I'd be happy to
use Ubuntu or Fedora if it was the client's wish.
Hope that helps. Tell us what you decide and how you get on. Feel free
to ask this list questions.
--
Cheers, Ralph.
