this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It's maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
Edit: Opting for Mint.
According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching
Canonical/Ubuntu is uk
Suddenly Ubuntu doesn't seem so terrible now, does it??
Ubuntu gang represent.
Well, their "customisation" of Gnome with that ugly bar on the left side is still ugly as hell.
And GCHQ isn't also really trustworthy, with them being part of 5 Eyes
That's part of why I use Xubuntu/Kubuntu mainly and Lubuntu for real low end stuff. Straight vanilla Ubuntu is... not super appealing. Ubuntu server that's just CLI/headless though, that's pretty tits, imho.
Ubuntu server is okay, but I've come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.
I think I will go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. But Kubuntu is also nice to keep in mind
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
I don't want it at all.
But thanks for the Head Up that you can make this ugly thing go away
Snaps still suck
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it's doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like... competing standards happens. It's part of life and always will be.
Mandrake/Mandriva is from France
SUSE is now garbage. Not sure about open suse
What's garbage about it?
When SLES 12 came out they made everything harder and forced everyone to migrate to 64 bit, even if you were doing legacy development
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Gee, it's common even for 'experienced' folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn't play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it's perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don't give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don't want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how "experienced" I get, that's always going to be the case. Maybe I'm just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
I think it's overblown for the most part. Yes, the OS should just work... but it does, for 99% of users, on windows, and linux, and probably macos, which I haven't used so can't speak on.
The ones who blow up their systems are either techies who like futzing with stuff, or are using a 'bad' distro for their needs. If you're switching over granny, you set her up with a long term stable kernel, a vanilla distro, and a browser. The few other stories are when people switch from windows and want something specialized to be the same. Those will need a customized solution, but it's not much different than windows when something breaks. Whoever is playing IT gets to poke at a stupid amount of settings, registry edits, or esoteric drivers/dependencies.
It really isn't, though
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn't notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
Not gonna bother with the rest of your comment if the start is that weak, tbh
Really? Being sure that your system is essentially unbreakable isn't valuable to beginners? I can't see how. It has massively helped the beginners I have given it to feel safe in tinkering with their system.
It was important to me, one day my arch just decided to not boot anymore, so, i switched to nixos.
I explained in my comment why cinnamon is a terrible choice for beginners, if you had read it you'd know, why even bother replying to a comment you won't read with such a lazy response?
"Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway."
There's so many reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here's some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:
and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon... cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don't believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you'll note kde isn't developed on github and that's just a mirror. It's not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, https://github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn't even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you're SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.
I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don't think it's a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv... it's much more common than you think.
In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they're mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.
As an XFCE user, I dislike the reputation that xfce is only useful for low end old hardware. It's a fully complete desktop just like cinnamon, kde, or gnome. lxqt however, I would not wish on my worst enemy.
We're talking about specifically for beginners, it's not nearly as good for beginners as KDE is. You like xfce because you're used to it and it works for you, but KDE supports a vastly wider variety of usecases, for example, try having two-screen setup with one screen having a 4k display at 144hz, and the other a 1080p screen at 60hz
This will be impossible to get working properly on xfce. There's not even a warning, it'll just act very strangely without explaining itself.
there's also the same issues with security that cinnamon has. XFCE does work, but there's no reason to recommend it to someone who doesn't already use/like it over KDE.
I 100% agree. Immutable is the way to go for beginners. Source: started on Mint and actually had a few problems. Now I'm on Bluefin (previously Aurora) and I have none.
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It's a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop's components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the "USA bad, so product bad" rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
It's not “USA bad, so product bad”, it's the concern that the US government can do a lot more to US based projects and you probably wont know untill it's too late.
The code is open though, I don't check it since I am an idiot but I assume pros would spot irregularities.
Do you have a specific vector of attack here in mind?
I guess most methods of attack on a FOSS projects are independent of the country of origin. But, I could still see them being forced to do things they don't want in the US, without being able to tell anyone. Hopefully if that ever happened it wouldn't be too hard to detect, but you never know.
People find vulnerabilities and malware even in closed source projects. Us regime is as malicious as it is incompetent. They trust anyone who can throw a sig heil and prompt a LLM to completely dismantle and rebuild major infrastructure.
That's really not the case, there's no proprietary parts to inject this into, and pop is one of the most heavily watched distros for a reason.
The minimal things they add to their particular distro are essentially just theming, and it'd be really obvious if they injected something malicious into it.
It would also NOT be too late because they're a stable distro and have regular releases, it'd have to be a completely last minute unexpected change for that to be the case.
They can still sanction your country and then you can't get updates anymore over official ways, like Fedora and Iran.
It's just peace of mind to not deal with anything US Based right now
FOSS has no country lines.
Try out CachyOS