Distrochooser: Tool to choose a good Linux distribution for your needs

That was fun taking the survey & was even reminded that Cubes OS exists. Gonna give it a try.

Thanks for sharing ❤️

Ran through the questions with both realistic and idealistic answers and was recommended Debian in both cases. Am indeed a Debian user.

What people often overlook is that Debian has an incredible broad range of use cases it is well suited for: It has a beginner-friendly graphical installer, it works for desktops and servers as well as embedded systems, and it also has a rolling release version which is attractive to software developers.
And if you have questions you can always look into the Arch Wiki ;-)

Just use arch

Lol I ended up with Debian > Rocky > Arch.

Idk how to feel. I was a longtime Debian user but actually prefer Fedora + Arch.

Same. But it was Fedora > Void > Arch for me.
Well, guess i'm installing arch linux soon:tm:.

Some more criteria which I think are meaningful:

How often are you willing to upgrade or re-install your system ?
How reliable does your system need to be ? Would it inconvenience you or even be a risk for your livelihood if it stops working tomorrow morning for a few days until you find time to fix it?
If some software package has a breaking change, do you want to see the consequences of that change (a) invariably together with the next minor software update, or (b) only with the next mayor system upgrade of which you can chose the timing?
How quick and experienced do you want to have security updates applied? For how long do you need security updates ? (btw this point is an important difference between Debian and Ubuntu, as in older Ubuntu LTS releases security updates are reduced!)
is security of your system and privacy of the user data a top concern for you?
are you an open source software developer or do you have otherwise a strong need to run the latest software version - and how old would be the oldest version you want to tolerate?
do you want to be, in an easy way, to be involved with the open source development community?

Wow, I can’t believe it narrowed the list down to 30.

I am thinking this could be neat for people new to Linux to help them select a first distribution.

A few more points:

There are a lot of choices
There are also a lot of different valuable qualities.
Consequently, there are no distributions that are "good" or "bad".
It is nice to try out things! And trying out things will change what appeals to you.
That said, perhaps you don't want to try out too many things now, instead right now you'd prefer something that just works....
Also, your needs and your capabilities will change over time. If you are a young student who wants to learn programming, a pc gamer, or somebody who likes to learn and understand Linux in detail, they might be different from when you are a busy parent or a young professional which just needs to write job applications!
So, what matches your needs best will likely also change over time.

Finally, the choice of distributions is not an either-either or black-and-white thing. You can run Linux, and on top Windows in a Virtual Machine (basically an entire simulated computer). You also can run another Linux distribution in a virtual machine, which matches a specific use case.

There are a lot of choices
There are too many choices. I’ve tried the chooser and at the end it gave me 9 distributions to choose from (i.e. nine distributions with no marked negatives). I’ve tried again and it gave me 13 distributions to choose from. This is absolutely useless for someone who knows nothing about Linux.
If someone selects ‘I have little or no knowledge about Linux’ it should go straight to recommending Linux Mint or with no other questions. Or maybe Bazzite if they selected gaming as main use case.
And if I select Windows experience, why doesn’t it mark Ubuntu with a negative as it has more of a MacOS feel?
- last time it got posted here people dismissed it. I don't get why it got a positive reaction this time. It's a kinda cool app but also completely impractical. If you already know if you want systemd on your system or not, you aren't a noob and you already know what you want, or at least know what to search for.
  This thing is more like one of the "What Power Ranger are you?" type of surveys.
- You can narrow it down further by looking at the reviews for each suggestion at distrowatch.com - I think these reviews are often spot-on!
  Also, a lot of smaller distributions are derived from a few larger ones. Therefore, they are usually not very different.
  In the end, it is more important to try, after gathering a reasonsble amount of information!

I got OpenSuse. I currently use bazzite and I've tried popOS and mint. I guess I could try it.

I don't generally recommend opensuse. The package management always made me go back to arch or debian. I would recommend trying it if you have a spare pc or space for a vm though.
- The package management always made me go back to arch or debian.
  Well, why? Do you have concrete reasons?
- That's a poor statement to make without giving any evidence. I use both Debian and Opensuse for decades in production environments. Both have very mature package management tools. Can't remember that they have failed me ever. Back in the days Opensuse's early zypp had problems, but that was solved in 2008.

~~RHEL~~, OpenSUSE, ~~Devuan~~, Rocky Linux, ZorinOS, ~~Knoppix~~, Debian, Mint, ~~MX Linux~~, ElementaryOS, Kubuntu, etc.

When I'm looking for a distro (which I'm currently doing) my core concerns are:

Comes with KDE Plasma pre-installed (or Xfce failing that, I may be better off with Xfce but I want to try KDE).
That any money I'd give to the project would not end up in America.
That any money I'd give to the project would go towards organization doing most of the dev work.
Minimal software set to limit the chance of a malware-infected update.
Gets critical security patches quickly, ideally as close to straight from the horses mouth as possible.
Strong security by default, and a strong security culture.
Monetizes the home user in some way.

EDIT: I went with OpenSUSE Leap (to replace OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which wasn't working for me). Video encoding works properly now. Doesn't meet all my conditions but probably nothing would.

reminded me i wanted to test artix

To me, it gives Devuan, OpenSUSE, Rocky, Debian, Artix and Arch.

What I have used in the past 27 years is S.U.S.E., Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE Leap and Arch (the latter for some years dual-booting with Debian until NVidia shit broke both after a Debian dist upgrade, but that was only once in 13 years). I never had a stability issue with Arch.

What I currently use is Debian as daily driver, with both Guix package manager on top of it for programming, and Arch in a VM (with Guix for programming with dependencies). And importantly, I only use fully supported hardware.

I could imagine using Arch as a daily base system, or using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as a base or in a VM. But I don't have strong incentives to switch the base, Debian works incredibly well for me and I know how to configure it.

Fairly accurate

It would be way more useful if it limited the results to three or five.

It never proposed GNU Guix to me. Quite unfortunate, that's my daily driver and I love it.