Since Red Hat made their recent decision, there has been a lot more talk about people wanting to focus on communiy-based distros instead of corporate-backed distros.
I was trying to think of how many active, stable, user friendly base community distros I know about. When I say a “base” distro, I mean a distro that’s basically the base for its ecosystem. For instance, Debian would be a base distro because it’s the base of its ecosystem. A community distro based on Ubuntu wouldn’t fit what I’m talking about here because Ubuntu is a corporate distro.
So, there’s Debian.
Arch is a base community distro but it’s not user friendly to install, but there are more user friendly varieties of Arch available like Manjaro and a few others.
All of the other base distros I can think of are either corporate, or aren’t particularly user friendly to install. Care to add your thoughts to the list?
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). All the benefits of Linux Mint, powered by Debian.
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I used to use Mandrake back in the day. Those Mandrake descendants, as long as they’re actively being maintained, could be interesting.
In my opinion, the only “root distro” which ticks all your boxes is Debian, especially with the advent of Debian 12.
All the other distros are too opinionated to be “user friendly”, except maybe Solus which I’ve never tried.
Debian and Void (and Void is iffy. The TTY installer is easy enough though, and it’s basically good to go out of the box if you get the glibc iso with Xfce). None of the other base distros are super user-friendly in terms of installation, though I’d add Endeavour OS as an honorary member of the group since it’s essentially Arch with a good installer, a friendly community, and nice defaults.
Most community distros are small and based on something else; and that’s kinda the point. They’re not trying to be next big thing, it’s just a bunch of people with a common vision that come together to achieve what they need.
Debian and Arch are the exception, and, other than them, the only community distro that isn’t based on anything else that I can think of is Mageia.
Edit: OK, I forgot about Solus and Gentoo, but Solus is a zombie at the moment, and op asked for something easy.
I don’t mind adding forks to the list, or distros based on other distros, as long as the distro they’re based on is a community distro and not a corporate distro. Like you point out though, there aren’t a lot of those.
Debian, Arch, Slackware, Gentoo, LFS, NixOS, many others…,probably a 5 sec search….common let’s research a bit before posting
But how many of those meet the criteria of not being based on corporate distros and are also user friendly? For instance, I wouldn’t exactly classify Gentoo as user friendly.
