throwawayish, 1 year ago (edited 6 months ago)

While I get why distrochooser.de is romanticized, in its current iteration it’s simply not very good and anyone that is somewhat well-versed in how different distros operate and how Distrochooser works, will tell you the same. At best, it provides some orientation into what some of the more common distros are. But it fails to answer some fundamental questions in the process; like:

• What is the relation between a distro and its derivative and (more importantly) how does that matter to a user?
• How exactly does a distribution’s chosen release model affect software and updates? And while we’re into that, what’s even the difference between the “stable” used when talking about point release distros that opt to freeze packages over longer periods of time vs the “stable” that’s brought up in conversations regarding update concerns and how they might break software (I’m honestly not even sure if the one(s) responsible for writing the parts of Distrochooser even know(s) themselves)^[1]^.

There are a lot of other fundamental questions that are involved in the decision for picking a distro that would have made a lot more sense than the ones found on Distrochooser. E.g. Do you use an Nvidia GPU and want this to cause no issues in the process of installation and is this your biggest concern? If yes: then just use Pop!_OS. Otherwise, move on to the other questions etc. I think the fact that a flowchart isn’t used for some uses and that ultimately priorities aren’t brought up to finalize the decision are the two biggest issues that Distrochooser has in its current iteration.

And we haven’t even gone over the many distros that despite having little to no user base are still included in the results, while (more recent) are clearly left out for reasons most likely related to the maintainers not being able to keep up with the Linux landscape. Which, to be fair, is quite hard; so I don’t blame them. I, in fact, applaud them for their continued contributions and hope that some day it will become something that we can proudly present to others for their first orientation.

Allow me to end this with a question to OP:

• Do you feel the same way about excellent websites like DistroWatch.com and DistroSea?^[2]^
  • If yes; Why didn’t you make a similar post for either of the two instead?
  • If no; Why not?

---

1. Sure, there is some overlap in what they mean and how they’re used, but it’s a very important distinction; otherwise openSUSE’s stable rolling release designation for their Tumbleweed wouldn’t make any sense.
2. If anything, I think these two actually make more sense to be included.