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it would be a distro recommendation discussion with out at least some disagreement
I would be disappointed if there wasn’t, lol
I actually put quite a bit of thought into how I wanted to go over forks/downstream distros, and I may have come to a weird conclusion but I decided discouraging them was the best option because:
Distros like Manjaro/EndeavourOS are being described as “beginner friendly” when beginners should not be starting with anything Arch based. Listing out individual bad examples would just make the entire message more confusing.
People will always google their question in the format of “distro name” + “problem”. Someone with Linux experience using KDE Neon will know to google “ubuntu problem” because it’s just Ubuntu, but a beginner will google “kde neon problem” and will find very few results. Alternatively, if they’re using an upstream distro, that search will (probably) return lots of thorough results with more information on why exactly that problem occurred.
Upstream is (generally) less likely to break than downstream, although this shouldn’t be an issue for well managed downstream distros. But again, listing specific examples will make things more confusing.
Regarding Linux Mint and Wayland, I completely agree. I didn’t know that Cinnamon/Mint still didn’t support Wayland, so that should’ve moved Mint into the tentative recommendation category.
I totally agree with #1, somewhat agree with #2, and somewhat disagree with #3.
For support, I would point to the fact that both Nobara and Pop OS! have very helpful communities and are quite good about directing users to use those channels to troubleshot problems rather than simply googling them.
As for upstream distros being generally less prone to breaking? I can’t say that has aligned with my experience. My laptop had more issues with Fedora than any other distro I tested on it, and while Debian is definitely pretty solid in terms of stability, the age of the packages and the general unfriendliness of the user experience don’t quite make up for it, in my opinion.
This is obviously why the question of “which is the best beginner distro?” remains a point of perpetual debate!
I would be disappointed if there wasn’t, lol
I actually put quite a bit of thought into how I wanted to go over forks/downstream distros, and I may have come to a weird conclusion but I decided discouraging them was the best option because:
Distros like Manjaro/EndeavourOS are being described as “beginner friendly” when beginners should not be starting with anything Arch based. Listing out individual bad examples would just make the entire message more confusing.
People will always google their question in the format of “distro name” + “problem”. Someone with Linux experience using KDE Neon will know to google “ubuntu problem” because it’s just Ubuntu, but a beginner will google “kde neon problem” and will find very few results. Alternatively, if they’re using an upstream distro, that search will (probably) return lots of thorough results with more information on why exactly that problem occurred.
Upstream is (generally) less likely to break than downstream, although this shouldn’t be an issue for well managed downstream distros. But again, listing specific examples will make things more confusing.
Regarding Linux Mint and Wayland, I completely agree. I didn’t know that Cinnamon/Mint still didn’t support Wayland, so that should’ve moved Mint into the tentative recommendation category.
Fair points all round.
I totally agree with #1, somewhat agree with #2, and somewhat disagree with #3.
For support, I would point to the fact that both Nobara and Pop OS! have very helpful communities and are quite good about directing users to use those channels to troubleshot problems rather than simply googling them.
As for upstream distros being generally less prone to breaking? I can’t say that has aligned with my experience. My laptop had more issues with Fedora than any other distro I tested on it, and while Debian is definitely pretty solid in terms of stability, the age of the packages and the general unfriendliness of the user experience don’t quite make up for it, in my opinion.
This is obviously why the question of “which is the best beginner distro?” remains a point of perpetual debate!