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.
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.
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:
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. :)
For anyone who wants a system that doesn't break, look into immutable distros (unchangeable base OS and libraries) with atomic updates (which don't replace anything until they have been fully installed and confirmed as working).
I don't know where Vanilla OS is officially headquartered but I do know several of its key figures are Italian.
https://vanillaos.org/