Ubuntu’s popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I’ve highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.
Ubuntu isn’t your only option
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Pop!_OSwhich is a fork of Ubuntu.For now. They’re switching to Debian.
Edit: I think I was thinking of Linux Mint?
Edit again: I was wrong twice, it was Vanilla.
https://linuxiac.com/vanilla-os-announces-major-shift-moving-from-ubuntu-to-debian/I was looking for some information on this but couldn’t find anything. Do you have a link or any more info on them moving to a Debian base?
Hm. I don’t think I dreamed it, but now all I can find is a Reddit post where mmstick says the next version will be based on Ubuntu 24.04.
Maybe I was conflating it with Linux Mint.
I was thinking of Vanilla. Thanks for the callout, I was lined up to be very confused at the next Pop OS release.
Linux Mint already has an alternative Debian edition maintained.
Ah that makes sense. I didn’t know about Vanilla so thanks for updating that.
I know Pop is updating with their own DE “soon” and thinking they were changing their base as well would have been quite an undertaking
I thought the DE was already out.
They’re making their own from scratch because modifying Gnome became too much of a pain. It’s got the same name, which is confusing.
This is probably why I had it in my head that they were doing the Vanilla thing, in that they are both departing from their long-standing fork.I mean I get that, but I could’ve sworn cosmic was already out.
Cosmic does look really nice.
New article: Debian isn’t your only option
Yeah but it’s the best one
Step 1: install Debian
Step 2: install a bunch of packages essentially making it UbuntuYou are doing it wrong, then.
Step 3: Don’t install Snap & have a better time
Very true. Snaps are the worst. I don’t even get why Canonical hasn’t decided to just drop them already
Sunk cost fallacy?
Because they want control.
This article is actually well written. I might bookmark it to send to people looking to switch.
It’s good but Fedora or at least OpenSUSE should definitely take the place of Manjaro.
I wouldn’t use openSUSE. It is way to obscure.
As a noobie to Linux I have a question: I decided to try ubuntu (haven’t yet) because of what I think is called the Gnome Desktop Environment, which from what I understand is what gives it all of those sleek animations and tab switcher and stuff. Am I correct about this? Or do all distros have this? I care a lot about aesthetics and stuff like that—the main reason I’m interested in Linux, other than learning about something new, is the idea of being able to fully customize the look and feel
Most distros will have it, you could install it on any distro with effort
Example of effort https://itsfoss.com/install-gnome-linux-mint/
https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/ Other distros with it
I use Endeavour and on install I just chose Gnome
You can stick with Ubuntu, it’s not really a big deal. Everyone will say what they use is best because eventually you will find what is best for you
You will be able to get GNOME as the default desktop environment in many distributions and then install what extensions you want to change both appearance and function: https://extensions.gnome.org/
You can use a bunch of extensions to get the taskbar + app menu that Windows and KDE use:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ , https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3628/arcmenu/ and https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/Or make GNOME look more like macOS if thats your thing:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4994/dash2dock-lite/Many users swear by GNOME’s default work flow though, so might wanna give it a shot before changing it.
Thanks a lot
Installation of Debian 12, Desktop Environment choices
Fuck, now I wanna distro hop
Garuda gets a mention, as a gamer I can highly recommend Garuda, a lot of work has gone into it and it looks great too… especially if you like neon. 🥰
Only last year I’ve switched from Windows to Linux and I choose Garuda because I wanted to learn Arch from the beginning. Boy am I happy how well it worked out of the box. The most annoying issue was to get the xbox gamepad dongle to work but aside from the it’s so good.
Well as a psychopath, I always recommend beginners start with Gentoo. Guaranteed they won’t go back to Mac or Windows. /s
Back in early 2000s I ran Gentoo as daily driver for a year, while almost a Linux noob, but eager to learn. Installation instructions were long, but excellent.
It was fun, and worked well, but in the end the long compilation times got the better of me. Now I heard they are including binary packages, so the itch is coming back.
Right now running opensuse tumbleweed, which works fine, sometimes too smoothly.
Right? I’ve been on Tumbleweed a few years - never actually expected it rolling so effortlessly.
By starting the switch to Gentoo, they either learn Linux well enough to never want to go back, or they fubar their system so bad that they can’t go back.
It would of been funnier if you left out the /s
Anyone else notice that the first three are Ubuntu?
Corporate wants you to find the difference…
“They’re the same picture” Pam from The Office
targeted at regular desktop users
While Slackware and Debian are the oldest still-maintained Linux distros, I don’t think either had a desktop-first approach.
I considered putting logos of some of the many more user-friendly pre-ubuntu distros in the meme but was lazy.
Debian was intended to be for regular desktop users back then too, though.
…Except Debian wasn’t even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu’s release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I’m aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.
Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don’t exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn’t used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.
SUSE?
I forgot about Corel Linux and Lindows as well now that I think on it.
one of the first
there were dozens of others in the 11 years between the first and ubuntu
“Targeted at regular desktop users”
I really feel like you’re missing the idea of that sentence deliberately.
What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?
What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?
There were a bunch of distros advertising ease of use; several were even sold in physical boxes (which was the style at the time) and marketed to consumers at retail stores like BestBuy years before Ubuntu started.
Here are four pictures of the physical packaging for three of those pre-ubuntu desktop distros designed to be user friendly and marketed to the general public:
Ubuntu was better than what came before it in many ways, and it deserves credit for advancing desktop Linux adoption both then and now, but it was not “one of the first” by any stretch.
Yeah, no.
It was one of the first that didn’t make you to want to tear your hair out, I’ll give them that.
That’s what I interpreted from the “targeted at regular desktop users” part.
Certainly not one of the first distros. But one of the first that almost any normal person would actually be able to install and use? Absolutely.
There were multiple before it that claimed to be easy for anybody to use, but most of them still weren’t by a long stretch.
I don’t think that’s particularly wrong, tbh.
The key words being targeted at regular desktop users.
Obviously far from being one of the first distros, or distros with a GUI. But targeted at regular desktop users - i.e. “normies”? Absolutely.
People need to remember how crappy and janky the desktop was before Canonical spearheaded a lot of usability improvements.
If only they had continued along that path :/
There were lots of distros that tried to target regular users before it. Mandrake/Conectiva/Mandriva, Corel, Mepis, Lindows, Linspire etc. just off the top of my head.
Hell, Lindows came preinstalled on Walmart PCs at some point.
Mandrake/Conectiva/Mandriva
That’s two.
(And hey, thank suse for killing Conectiva)
Slackware is a garbage distro purely because it doesn’t have a functional package manager supporting dependency resolution
Ubuntu is not even good in my opinion. At least not as a normie Distro.
Yes they have lots of docs online but “it is good because people think it is good” is not a good argument.
If you dont like GNOME I guess you will have a harder life anyways, as Distros with KDE are just a really hard task. Like anything stable is not a good idea, I at least reported 30 bugs that will never get backported fixes.
The fact that appimages are broken on Ubuntu is like the only thing that I completely understand and dont care about. Appimages needs to get their stuff together.
I hope many projects will convert from Appimage to Flatpak
I hope many projects will convert from Appimage to Flatpak
They seem like different projects with different goals. Appimages are portable executables.
Flatpak, to me, is something you install on a system and run with a flatpak runtime that is installed on your PC. I think its a fantastic way to sandbox programs with differing dependencies, but you still install programs and run them on your PC.
Appimage, on the other hand, is a wholly-contained executable. It is less efficient than flatpak in every way if you are installing apps on a system, but it is more portable. I can throw a handful of appimages on a USB stick and carry them from machine to machine (or mount an ISO in the case of VMs). I can plug in my “troubleshooting and development” stick to an otherwise barebones server at my datacenter, fix an issue with a comfortable set of useful apps, then unplug and leave the machine untouched.
Appimage is not a replacement for flatpak, but it has its own purpose. Snap is more similar to flatpak, but inferior in every single way. If we must get rid of one, can we phase that one out?
Weird as my AppImages work fine on Ubuntu 22.04LTS
why are distros with KDE a really hard task? users who want customizations will have a horrible time with gnome
That are two unrelated or even contradictory scentences.
Gnome is waaay more reduced, so it has less bugs. It will work way better on stable Distros.
Also because of some things (KDE 4.0?) GNOME became the default Desktop, and Distros orient at its release cycles.
KDE has so many bugs and fixes that I think calling 5.27 “stable” is misleading.
KDE is default on some distros and is supported directly as a variant on most major distros so I wouldn’t say GNOME is the default.
But my point is that at least some of the appeal of desktop linux is customization, and GNOME will be a disappointment for the users looking for that.
Otherwise I agree vanilla GNOME is rock solid and great for new users!
I meant “shipping a KDE Distro is a hard task”, that should be more clear. For sure, KDE forever. GNOME is either CLI-only (even for basic settings) or install tons of apps that only do one thing (ThE UnIx pHiLoSoPhY) or dont change anything.
Not the first time trying Linux, but the first time in the last 10 years since I tried it and I’m digging Mint. Still has problems with my Logitech steering wheel and Logitech mouse, but overall not bad.
I just had a flashback to 1999 and compiling a custom kernel to get my damn Logitech mouse to work.
Manjaro? nah, don’t
Manjaro: Reliable and Cutting-Edge Features
Rarly laughed that hard. Reliably is by defenition wrong. Manjaro delays packages a few days in their main compared to Arch this can cause issues and makes them not compatible with the AUR which one of the most advertised and enabled by default feature.
You can read more about other problems here, https://github.com/kruug/manjarno
Yeah, that one made me chuckle as well. But I guess the article ‘had to be written’ for reasons & it does actually have some overview value & nice pics … which I guess is what new users have to go on before they actually dive in.
AUR is unsupported on Manjaro. Go back to Arch if you want that without issues
I tried out Arch for a while. The AUR is a bit of a wild west and at least I found it important to vet packages before installing them. It was a hassle. The same reason I only use one package from the OBS on Tumbleweed now.
I like that they hold the updates back. Manjaro is as reliable as any other desktop Linux I’ve used.
Recommending Pop_OS! to newbies
That might just be the quickest way to make someone hate Linux forever. The glitchiest, most troublesome install I’ve ever tried to do. In the end, after two days of work just to get the damn live image to boot, the only reason I kept going was probably sunken cost falacy.
Funny. The one time I installed it, I just stuck it on a usb, booted from it, started the installer, next, next, done.
I really didn’t have much of a different experience between installing pop os Vs Ubuntu.
I guess some weird hardware thing that Pop OS doesn’t provide for?
Yeah, maybe. My experience has been a multitude of hangs and flash drive rewrites. At first, I thought my flash drive might be bad, so I tried another and quickly determined that the other one was actually bad before going back to the first. Eventually, I ended up just unplugging everything out of desperation and for some reason that worked.
I’m actually still working on this as I type this, currently waiting on partition changes because, while I read that 500MiB is recommended for Pop’s boot partition, the installer has told me that it’s too small…
Since I’m still dealing with this, and given the issues I had booting the live disk, there’s a good chance this won’t even be useable in the end. I’ve used Ubuntu before, and it boots fine, but fuck if I want to deal with snap.
Edit: Went up to 750MB (yeah, MB not MiB here, easier to think about later). Still says it’s too small. Sure wish I had some detailed documentation to work with here, instead of just “use Clean Install” in the official docs and a single Reddit comment saying “500MiB is good.” That would the bee’s damned knees.
Edit 2: Works fine once installed. The live disk just would not boot with anything else plugged in for some reason.
Well glad you got it sorted.
I think it requires 1GB and it’s an incredibly recent requirement that that does not show up well in most search results. I had the same issue on a recent install and I had to go searching around the internet to figure out the actual size like you did lol.
Y’all seriously overestimate thr average user:
Debian. It’s simple, stable, minimal upkeep, rarely if ever has breaking changes, and all this out of the box.
Someone new doesn’t need to be thrown in the deep end for their first foray into linux, they want an experience like windows or mac: simple interface, stable system, some potential for getting their hands dirty but not too much to worry about breaking
Debian is good until you need to install a PPA :\
“PPA” is Ubuntu’s branding for third party repositories. So, of course you will have a hard time adding a Ubuntu-specific third-party repository to anything that isn’t the Ubuntu version it’s made for…
Debian of course supports third party repos, just like Ubuntu. On Debian they just aren’t called “PPA”.
For more information on how to add third party repos to Debian (or Ubuntu, if you don’t use Canonical’s weird tooling), check out the Debian Wiki page on UseThirdParty or SourcesList. There’s also an (incomplete) list of third party repositories on the wiki: Unofficial. And just like with PPAs, anyone can host a Debian repo.
out of the loop since I’ve moved to debian and been using flatpak for the last few years, what software are you installing via PPA that isn’t generally available via flatpak?
Debian is in many ways the “deep end”. A big part of its development philosophy is prioritizing their weirdly rigid definition of Free Software and making it hard to install anything that doesn’t fit that. I’m not saying it’s not a good distro, but IDK if it’s beginner friendly.
Debian is in many ways the “deep end”.
The first time I tried Debian was when I was new to Linux, on a laptop with both the Ethernet and Wi-Fi unsupported. On top of which, it had an nVidia GPU. It was hard.
Now I know much more about Linux and checked the Motherboard for Linux support before buying it. Debian works pretty well.
So, it’s beginner friendly as long as someone helps you out with the installation after checking up on all the stuff you will need to run.
🤣
the first distro i used is debian when i was getting on linux and im still using it
So, it’s beginner friendly as long as someone helps you out with the installation after checking up on all the stuff you will need to run.
In other words, it’s not beginner-friendly
I’m just gonna copy from my other reply to ulterno
Once again overestimating beginners. Any OS installation is inherently not beginner friendly, and requires helping them, regardless of Debian/Arch/Nix/windows/Big Sierra Lion Yosemite III, Esq. Jr. MD or whatever Apple’s calling it nowadays.
I find Debians defaults during installation very beginner friendly, set and forget type stuff. It won’t use the hardware to full potential, but that’s up to advanced users to decided after they’re comfortable with the training wheels.
I’ve only recently switched to Debian after a couple decades with Ubuntu (because snaps) and I had a few issues during installation.
The net install failed to configure my wifi so I had to download the DVD/CD install. That worked but then I had to manually nano several config files to fix about 5 broken things for some reason.
I installed it recently on a different system, and went with the Live option (gnome) and it installed 10x easier and smoother than Ubuntu. It installed in about 4 minutes (on a new/fast computer).
So I would say Debian Live is VERY beginner friendly, but the other install methods are all messed up for some reason. Ubuntu’s default option is the Live option so I think that if Debian just kinda hid the other options on their website it would be 100% beginner friendly…
I would reckon your original hardware also played a big part if it worked swimmingly this time around. I’ve installed half a dozen Debian- and Arch-based OSes on 3 different PCs and four different hypervisors at different times, and run a few more live CDs to boot, and my experience is that there is simply some hardware/emulated hardware that Linux in general refuses to play nicely with.
Debian does make it harder if there are no free drivers, but my non-free wifi cards (an intel and a broadcom) don’t play nicely with any of the OSes’ defaults
The easiest hack I have encountered is to install netinstall Debian, and then on top of it, again install same Debian, without configuring or touching anything. When Debian is installed for the first time, it writes those cdrom folder files, which Debian detects upon a reinstallation. As weird as this sounds, it works reliably, both on my SSD/HDD laptop and ancient desktop with single HDD.
Last month I dualbooted my old Windows 7 desktop with Debian 12 GNOME, works smoothly until I open 10+ Firefox tabs, a Spotify stream and a video in MPV, as it has 4 GB RAM.
To add to that, there’s so much “support” out there for Debian and by proxy Ubuntu. You can Google any error and you’ll find the fix. That’s what draws new people to them. Even my self even though I’m not new to the Linux ecosystem. Ubuntu makes a perfectly good and stable server operating system.
Debian? First time i installed it wanted to use CD for packages instead of online. Don’t know why. Second time it didn’t have wireless drivers as these were non free.
It’s a great distro but not for newbies.
Fedora all the way!
Non-free-firmware is now handled automatically during installation as of the most recent Debian release, just FYI. For reference, see the note at the top of this wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware
I had this problem a week or two ago when I tried to install Debian 12 on my old MacBook pro. Ended up installing something else.
Interesting, that’s kind of surprising. Do you mind sharing which model of MacBook Pro it was? I had been considering getting one for cheap for testing purposes. Also, it may not be useful to you at this point, but I figured I’d drop a link to the Debian Wiki which has a page for MBP-specific info, in case anyone reading might benefit: https://wiki.debian.org/MacBookPro
I have a late 2011 MacBook pro with a broadcom wireless card.
I’ve used this laptop to distrohop a bit and the wireless driver is always an issue. You have to install the broadcom DKMS driver or wi-fi will randomly disconnect after a random amount of time.
That’s a recent development. I also though you had to get a specific build, not the normal one.
Normal users want that potential for getting their hands dirty to be zero at best
Exactly this. To normal people the computer in their house is merely a tool; just another appliance that needs to work every time without any fuss.
One time the installer got stuck on my hardware. Never again. Debian deserves a lot of credit but personally I will not go near an OS unless I am certain in advance that the initial installation will go without a hitch.
Fedora is also apparently newbie friendly. IME, RHEL is not, but their free developer license is good if you want to learn working with it. Some employers use RHEL exclusively, so it’s not a complete waste.
I might give Fedora a try then, finally see what’s so yummy to all the users. Originally stayed away because I heard it was based of RHEL and didn’t want an office-grade OS to do tinkering on.
Also, how about that “freedom,” Red Hat?? what happened to FOSS???
