 Whether you're new to Linux or you've been using Linux now for a long time One of the things that everyone has to answer at some point during their Linux journey is what is the best distro for me? and This is a question that has been highly contentious amongst the Linux community forever Literally since there has been distributions there has been questions of which one is better And I'm gonna do a little spoiler alert here for you The answer to the question is that there's no perfect distribution and there's no distribution out there that is best for everyone while we like to Say that Ubuntu is the best new user distro or Linux Mint is the best new user distro If we're all being honest with ourselves It is highly dependent on the user themselves to choose what distro is best for them I can never come out and tell you what distro is best for you based on my personal experiences Because of several different factors one I Like different things than you do. That's just the way nature human nature works You know, we all are special little snowflakes if you will the other reason why I can't do that is because we have different Hardware you may be running something that is older I may have something newer or vice versa and What distro I choose will depend on which distro runs best on the hardware that I have and it's the same for you so When we ask what is the best distro for new users the answers We give have to be a little bit disingenuine because the true answer has to be we don't know like we have no clue Which one's going to be best for you because again, we're all a little bit different all we can do in that scenario is give General advice saying Linux Mint for the most part is probably going to work best for you Because it works the best for most people You can substitute that with Ubuntu you can substitute that probably with fedora things like that Which one you'd say really doesn't matter because again It's just general advice and it may or may not hold true for everyone The question I'm going to try to answer today is how do I find the perfect distro for me? And this is really the whole crux of the matter is that when you switch to Linux The first thing you should do or one of the one of the first things you should do is distro hop I truly honestly believe the best thing you can do as a new Linux user is to try all the distros You possibly can don't get attached to the first one you use even if it works perfectly for you Try other ones because maybe there's another one that works even better for you And you want to try at least the top tier distros. I'm talking about Ubuntu I'm talking about Fedora talking about an art space distro of some kind you want to try those out You won't try Linux Mint. You probably want to try elementary things like that You want to try the ones that are like the very popular ones that almost always get suggested for new users You don't necessarily need to go and try Arch Linux or Gen2 or something like that But it's not gonna hurt you to try them if you Deem yourself technologically advanced enough to do so the reason why you want to hop from distro to distro is to get That experience of not only how to install Linux and how to determine which is better for you But also it gives you an idea of which distro actually works better for you because you're not going to know for sure How to answer any of the questions that I've asked so far Without trying them for yourself. No one can tell you how one distro will work on your hardware over another It just is almost impossible because your hardware configuration is almost guaranteed a little bit different than anyone else's But there are certain things you can kind of keep in mind as You're searching for the perfect distro for you and those things are the things that we're going to talk about today The first thing that you should care about the most or the first thing you should keep in mind the most is speed of updates These this is for the most part very important simply because it's going to determine a lot Over how often you have to update your computer And if you are a Windows user or a former Windows user chances are you are used to having updates kind of forced on you and while There are Linux distributions out there specifically Ubuntu and Linux Mint that definitely do push you towards updating a little bit more fiercely than Something like say Arch would it's never going to say hey you have to update right now or you can't use your computer We're gonna restart your computer. We've done updates for you already It's probably never going to say that but the point is is that the speed of updates kind of matters Especially when it comes to things like stability So for example, if you want something that only updates every few weeks Ubuntu or something based on Ubuntu is probably going to be the best for you If you want something that's a little bit more cutting edge and you're more interested in always having the latest Software something that is based on arch is probably going to be better for you So in this question here, we're more talking about Rolling versus stable releases and it's definitely something to keep in mind It's not the most important thing to keep in mind because in the end at the end of the day What truly matters is does the distribution work on your hardware? But it is something to keep in mind The next thing to keep in mind is going to be software availability because even though Everything that we're talking about is based on Linux The repositories where they draw their software from is going to be different So if you're using Ubuntu, you're going to be using the Ubuntu repositories and snaps if you're using Linux Mint You're going to be using the the mint repositories and the Ubuntu repositories if you're using elementary OS You're going to be using the Ubuntu repositories and flatpacks if you're using Fedora You're going to be using the RPM repositories and flatpacks If you're using Arch, you're going to be using the Arch repositories and the Arch user repository Literally we could go on forever and ever every single distribution is going to be slightly different based on where they're pulling their repositories Some of them share the Ubuntu and Debian repositories Some of them use their own in addition to those some of them use the Arch repositories if they're based on Arch You get the idea So as you're meandering through trying all these distributions Keep a note of which ones have the better software selection for you It doesn't mean that it has to have the biggest software selection It just means that it has the applications that you need in order to do your work on your computer and have fun on your computer the things that you need to do if It has all the stuff that you need It doesn't matter if you has the largest repositories or not as long as it has the stuff that you require As a subset of this the thing that you might want to pay attention to is whether or not out of the box The distribution supports flatpacks or snaps Most distributions support one or the other a few of them will support both right out of the box And when I say support, I mean they come pre-installed Every Linux distribution can have these installed on there. It's just a matter of you explicitly going and installing them So for example Fedora comes with flatpacks installed out of the box And then you can enable flat hub if you want to do so But that doesn't mean you can never use snaps You just have to install snapd and you could use snaps on Fedora just as you could on Ubuntu The opposite of it's true on Ubuntu. It comes with snaps installed. You can use flatpacks You just have to install them. So it's not necessarily about which Disros have support for these because they all distributions basically support all of them It's just more a matter of what comes installed by default and how entrenched that Support is so for example on Ubuntu, you're going to notice the snaps is very Entrenched inside of Ubuntu. You're going to have several snaps installed for you The software center is based on a snap. They're very attached to snaps in Ubuntu LAN Similar thing with Fedora a lot of stuff that you're going to see there is going to be a flat pack So as you install distributions and try them try to keep in mind. What is a flat pack? What is a snap and which you like better because the experiences are different Not necessarily in terms of how you install them or even in terms of package availability but more how they react in terms of startup time and Theming and all this stuff all this stuff will eventually play into your decision of which distribution is for you If you find that flatpacks work better for you, which is something that I think more and more people are kind of realizing Then you'll want to always make sure that you have access to flat pack and flat up if you find that snaps are better for you Maybe Ubuntu is the distribution that you've chosen because it's more tightly integrated The next thing you'll want to pay attention to and this is something that you will notice right up front is that the installation process For each distribution is going to be slightly different now This is not as true as it used to be it used to be that pretty much every distribution had a slightly different Installer or an install process, but we've kind of standardized for the most part on three or four different installers So we have the ubiquity installer, which is what Ubuntu and several Ubuntu based distros use We have the elementary OS installer, which is used by elementary OS and pop o s We have the calamari's installer, which is very very popular and that isn't that is used by many different distros things that kaboom to Many different arch based distros Things like that they use the calamari's installer and then the fourth one it is not so popular But it's still used by fedora, which is the anaconda installer every once in a while You'll find a different installer, but for the most part those are the four that you're going to experience and while Once you've started to use Linux the installer really no longer matters as you are Still distro hopping the installer and the installation process does actually matter So you'll want to kind of pay attention to maybe which one you prefer Again, it's not something that's going to play a big role in your final decision But that installer is going to be your first impression of the distro if that install process is bad Who knows how good the distro itself is going to be because it really is true that if they can't get the installation process right Chances are the distribution itself may not be any good either. Also when you're in the process of installing your Distro that you've chosen you're using the system on your hardware if you're having problems during the installation because of a hardware conflict of some kind that may be a Indication that once you have it installed you might have similar problems So during installation pay attention to how the system runs And if the distribution comes with and the ability to try it out like an in a live environment Give that opportunity a try so that you can kind of give get an idea a brief idea of how that Distribution is going to work on your hardware if it runs Absolutely horribly Maybe you don't even have to waste your time installing it because you just know that it's going to be bad now It doesn't necessarily always translate that a poor live environment experience is going to Indicate a poor installation and or installed experience It still is something that might indicate that once you've installed that you'll have problems So I highly recommend during the installation process use the distribution for a little while in that live environment It gives you an idea of how things will work So the final one is the most important one and yeah I'm saving the most important one for last and it kind of ties into everything. We've talked about so far And that is hardware support if you're using the Absolute latest hardware if you have the latest processor from Intel and you have the best GPU from Nvidia you're not going to be able to use something like Debian because Their kernel support is very very old like they use always use an LTS version of the kernel and While you can get newer hardware working on Debian it's usually a pain in the butt if You have that type of hardware You're going to want to use a distribution that has the latest version of the kernel Something perhaps based on Arch which has the latest kernel or something like the most recent version of Ubuntu Which you probably has a very recent kernel as well You'll always want to make sure you keep that in mind because the hardware that you have is going to very much Determine what distribution you can use now the reason why I say that is because if you have new Hardware like very very new hardware you're going to need that new kernel experience if you have older hardware It's going to matter a lot less for you in terms of what distribution you have because the older your hardware is The more widespread support for it will be So if you're using something like the RX 580, which is a graphics card from AMD from many years ago The support for that on Linux is very very good because it's older and has been baked into the kernel for a very long time Whereas if you have something like the 6600 XT or something like that the support for that isn't nearly as good because it hasn't been around for as long So the hardware you have should dictate what Linux distribution you're actually going to try So again, I highly recommend if you have brand new hardware find something with the most recent kernel If you're using something older, you'll have a lot more Selection and it won't matter nearly as much As I said at the beginning the distribution that you choose is going to be very much a Process because it's very unlikely that the distribution you choose first is going to be the distribution You always use now. They're going to be exceptions. Some people are going to try, you know MX Linux right at the beginning because they found it at the top of district watch It's going to be amazing on their hardware and it's just going to work flawlessly and they'll never have to distro hop If that's your experience, you are rare like you're pretty much Very special because for the majority of people they have to Distro hop for a little while in order to find the one that works the best for them Whether that is for hardware support or because they prefer a different package manager, whatever now the last thing I should say about this whole process is that you should not decide your distribution based on what desktop environment ships by default on the distro Disop environments don't matter because you can install any desktop environment on any distribution So if you really really like fedora, but you can't stand GNOME And you've never heard of the fedora spins before you can very easily install Plasma kiddie plasma on fedora and not even have to reinstall fedora You can just install plasma same thing with any other desktop environment or window manager for that matter So don't get attached to the idea that desktop environments Determine which distributions you can use because they absolutely do not You can use whatever distribution you want and then choose the desktop environment or window manager That is appropriate for you because they'll work on any distribution So that is it for this video If you have comments you can leave those in the comment section below if you haven't subscribed yet Make sure you hit the subscribe button You can follow me on Twitter at the Linux cast if you'd like to follow me on mastodon You can find that link in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast I'd like to thank my current patrons Robert said Devon Patrick Fred Kramer Megalyn just back until Steve Acerberg Linux Derek Samuel KB TGB Keith Andy Unclebone had try devil Gary Antoine Mitchell J Doug Karmadage Jamie shone Odin Martin E Ross Eduardo art center Elliott Merritt Cam Dr. Lee Peter a crucial dark benefit time as a PM Thanks everybody for watching. 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