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?
void is awesome
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). All the benefits of Linux Mint, powered by Debian.
Major: Debian, Gentoo, NixOS, Arch and also FreeBSD (not GNU/Linux but still).
Other and esoteric: Void, Alpine, Solus, CRUX, Slackware, Mageia/OpenMandriva,
Corporate sponsored: Fedora, openSUSE
If you use a standard package-manager-based taxonomy, there are five base distributions: Slackware, Debian, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS (I’m unclear on which of those is currently the lowest rung), Arch, and Gentoo. There are also a handful of singletons, like Puppy and Void, which evolved independently (or from long-dead predecessors) but have no family to speak of. I think the only one of those that isn’t community-driven is Red Hat.
However, most base distributions are set up because their founder wants to try Something Completely Different, and that “something” is generally not user-friendliness. Even in Debian’s case, the core distro philosophy is about software licenses; its user-friendliness is almost a historical accident. Descendant distributions with a premise of “[distro], but user friendly” are not uncommon, though.
I feel like posting that I was there 3000 years ago meme lol.
I remember when the roots of those family trees where new.
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.
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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.
For all the shit Red Hat has gotten, Fedora Linux is still actually a community base distro.
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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.
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.
Slackware / opensuse
The problem with OpenSuse is it’s based on a corporate product, not an original community base.
Ok but not Slackware (the base of opensuse), gecko, puppy or other versions.
Solus deserves to be mentioned here, it’s a great distro. The project went through some turbulence earlier this year but seems to be back on track as they’ve just released a new .iso.
OpenSUSE
inb4 but thats a corporate distro, it is just sponsored by SUSE but is community maintained
I agree that there are not many distros that are both user friendly and not forks of something else, but I don’t see it as an issue, imo there is nothing wrong with forks.
Fedora is also sponsored, and they just added telemetry
No, this is completely false. There was a proposal to add telemetry. There is nothing planned as of yet. In a community distro, we all get to speak. The discussion is ongoing. Those opposed to doing opt-out telemetry appear to be winning that conversation thus far.
Also, other distros do telemetry already. Debian is one of them.
Did the telemetry vote already happen and succeed? Last I saw there was only an informal “feeling out” vote, but I haven’t been following closely since then.
The issue isn’t if something is a fork or not, the issue is if something is a fork of a corporate distro. For instance, there are forks of Arch that still meet the criteria because Arch is a base community distro, whereas OpenSuse is a fork of a corporate distro.
OpenSUSE is not a fork. It’s the base.
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.
