How to choose your Linux distro

In my case people just recommended various distributions for me to try out. In my case, whatever most of them used ended up as the one I’d use during the time I’d be searching. It made it easier for me because I could easily ask them about using it. My use of Ubuntu started out as a convenience more than anything. These days, I work in an office where the Linux machines are on Ubuntu so that also makes it easier for me when other users ask me about it too.

There are so many Linux distributions so it’s not easy at all to pick one distro. A bad experience with a particular distro would be able to affect your perspective about Linux. For one, you could try the disro and end up hating it. That or you wonder if there are other distros that are better. On one hand, you could try this distro chooser. Or you could keep trying one on live CD until you find something that you like enough.

The difficulty about trusting the distro chooser is that you might not like the distro at all when you try it for yourself. The problem about the latter is that you could be spending a lot of testing them one after the other. Then again, if you are the type of person that would like the hands on approach, it’s probably worth it. The difficulty is how much time should you give it. Even you knew what applications you want there by default, the hardware compatibilities, etc. sometimes things could be subjective and you would see that there are other personal reasons you might need to factor in, after everything.

I guess these are the main things I see which are necessary for choosing a distro:

• The applications you need.
• Hardware compatibility issues.
• Package manager.
• User interface
• Users

If the distro checks out against all these things and you think you’ve found your distro, maybe you could stick with it for a while and see if it’s all you expect and more.