If someone has to ask the question, just recommend Ubuntu or Mint.

I kinda feel like this is better for folks who’ve been at it for a little bit. There are way too many distros claiming to be beginner friendly for a tool like this to be helpful.

I think it’s better to just send them to an easy to install, up to date distro that will suit their needs that has a DE that’s easy to understand but different enough from where they’re coming from to keep them from expecting it to work like windows. Stable updates from a GUI, software availability, and easy to use backup tools are all a plus.

Which OS am I talking about? Hell, I have no idea. Fedora? Maybe Vanilla 2 when it comes out? Certainly nothing Arch based (sorry, guys, I love arch too but it’s not for beginners…).

I’m not pointing a Linux noob to any site that puts a big ol star nex to “suitable for daily use” under Gentoo.

There are way too many answers after you finish this quiz. You should recommend, at most, three options after the quiz. This doesn’t help narrow down your options much at all.

I’m using Windows as my daily driver due to prioritising gaming over everything else. But I also have a 8-year old laptop which is stuck with Win 7, and I’ve been wondering if I should just install Linux on it to try things out. In the past, I’ve only ever tried Linux for short times, never used Linux as my main OS or longer than a week.

With this context, I’ve had the “which distro should I choose?” on my mind a few times. There’s some obvious and some non-obvious issues with this questionnaire. I’ll just go over my thoughts step by step:

• “I want anonymous web browsing” and “distro which is supported by game publishers” can’t be selected at the same time. Is this really true? I’m doubting my understanding of what “anonymous web browsing” actually means.

• “I often need help from others” and “I have already used Linux for some purposes” can’t both be selected. Why? The logic behind this is “You have used Linux at some point, so you can clearly solve some problems without asking anyone”. Makes no sense, and/or the questionnaire’s creator thinks that Linux is impossible for newcomers. I have used Linux in the past and I’m generally good in troubleshooting, but anyway.

• “I want to use the default preset values in the installation assistant” is impossible to answer if I don’t know which values are given as the default. My general answer would be “give me a default value for everything, but also let me change the things which I have an opinion about”. An answer equal to this doesn’t exist.

• Pre-installed programs: this does feel like it lacks the answer of “let me choose what to install during installation of OS”, but I guess I can just skip this question without answering since I don’t care.

• “There are many way to administrate a linux distribution” -> “I want to avoid systemd”. I’ve never heard about systemd, and the explanation give on the page doesn’t really help. For what reasons would I want to avoid it? My actual answer for this is “I really don’t care”, so I just skipped it.

About the result of the questionnaire: I did answer that “I’m fine with paying something”, but it’s not really something I aim for. The suggestions seem to tag “There is a non-free version available” as a plus for the distros, which really isn’t what I answered - there’s a difference between “I’m fine with something” and “I want something”.

I also marked “supported by game publishers” with a star, because gaming is what I’m aiming to do on it. I have no idea if this even matters in practice, but it made sense as an answer when asked about. The smoothness of gaming experience will always be the primary reason for any choice of OS I’ll make.

The first EIGHT answers on the list have either “Programs versions may not be up-to-date enough for gaming” or “May require additional configuration for gaming” as a downside/warning. The game publisher question is the only answer which I marked as important.

The first distro from the suggestions that included “supported by game publishers” is Linux Mint - which does match what I already had in mind, but I really feel like the ordering of the suggested distros feel off.

Short “review” about this: it really didn’t help much. The list of suggestions is practically full of equally good distros, and I’m still stuck with the question “which one of these should I choose?”. I only learned about more distros that I had never heard about before.

As for actually choosing the distro at some point later: I think that I’ll just find out the top 5 most popular distros, and select from those. My reasoning for this is that it’s much easier to find answers if/when I run into issues. Using a niche distro wouldn’t really work for me - Linux isn’t my hobby, I think OS is just a tool to run whatever programs/games I want to.

But this questionnaire doesn’t have any data about popularity, so for my usecase, it lacks some information. I feel like it could use an additional question about “Are you fine with using a niche distro, or do you want to use a popular one?” - this question does have the issue of not being objective though, as there’s no clear answer of what can be counted as “popular”.

TL;DR good idea, but execution could be better.

At the end I got a list of 29 distros, this is terrible. A user who is willing to go through all pros and cons and is able to compare them doesn’t need this website to choose a distro.

If people ask me what distro to choose I say Mint.

Unless you already know what you want and need it is simply the best distro out there to get your feet wet. It is very competent in what it is doing and can be used by anyone no matter the experience.

Even though I believe there are better distros out there this is the only one I would recommend to people new to Linux and it is still a solid choice for experienced users alike. You can use it forever or branch out from there, both are very valid choices.

This put a minus on Debian because updates are slow but didn’t have one on Devuan or RHEL. I would not take these results too seriously. There is also no reason to rank Devuan and Artix as high as it did when I said I don’t care about systemd. The only reason to pick those over the upstream distros is for the init system.

It did recommend Arch as my top choice though which is what I’ve been daily driving for years.

This one is better. Much more accurate and robust.

Well shit, better stop using the distro I’ve been happy with for over a year and a half.

Not enough curation. People can use whatever they want but you should never “recommend” many of these distros.

For example, with apologies to fans, nobody should be pushed to ElementaryOS anymore—especially not new users. I say this as somebody that loves the “idea” of it and find it beautiful.

I think they should have gone through the candidate distros, disqualified many of them for various reasons, and then mapped to the remaining ones with their questions.

While I appreciate this, there were far too many questions, which were pretty technical for a layperson. And even after picking the most basic options, I was still presented with like six variants of Ubuntu, including Mint and Elementary.

How about something like:

• Do you use your computer more for games, or for work?
• How much do you care about open source?
• Do you know what a makefile is?

I took the test and it told me I should use Zorin. I’ve never even heard of that distro

Well at least at the end of the questions the distro I use (Void) was somewhere near the top of the list (4th).

I always point users to howtopicklinuxdistro.com - they’re always satisfied.