Choosing a Distro

Page status: outline

To-do: Flesh out descriptions and shit

Before researching and choosing the right distrobution for you, you must have in mind what you want to use it for. Facebook machine? Programming? Gaming (lel)? A secondary consideration is hardware. Linux generally tends to play well with underpowered or aging computers, but you may want to try lighter distros.

There are three things you want to compare when distro shopping.

1. Distro quirks

2. Desktop environment

3. Application library

Distro families

For more information, consult each distros' home and wikipedia pages.

Debian

A community-developed distro focused on stability. Has the biggest user base if you include distros based on it. Comes in various releases with different tradeoffs of stability/up -to-datedness. More or less the most important distro.

Ubuntu

Takes Debian Testing, makes sure its packages are usable, adds drivers, adds handholding, and adds spyware. Not to fear, it's easily removable ([fixubuntu.com]). Comes with Unity by default. Repo is supplemented with user-maintained PPAs, so if it's available for Linux you can probably find it here. The most popular desktop distro with the most guides and solutions on various forums.

Developed by Canonical, the evil empire of the free software world.

Mint

Takes Ubuntu, removes spyware, adds proprietary shit like Flash right in the iso. Developed the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. Uses Ubuntu repos.

Elementary

Takes Ubuntu and makes it look like OS X by developing the Pantheon desktop environment. Uses Ubuntu repos.

Crunchbang

Takes Debian Stable and rices it for you. Openbox, Tint2, the works. Comes with drivers. Uses stable and backport Debian repos.

How new r u

babby's first loonix

Ubuntu with fixubuntu.com

Mint

Elementary

Fedora

OpenSUSE

DEs:Any

Reasonably experienced

Debian

Crunchbang

Arch

Now you can do WMs

Neckbeard tier

Gentoo

Slackware

LFS

Desktop Environments

Gnome 3

Cinnamon - Mint

Unity - Ubuntu

Pantheon - Elementary

MATE (Gnome 2) - Mint

KDE

XFCE

LXDE

Window Managers

Explanation of stacking/tiling shit

Stacking

Openbox

the rest/who cares

Tiling

AwesomeWM

dwm

xmonad

the rest/who cares