A lot of distro recommendation threads focus on the questions that novices think are important, but leave out the questions people would have after experiencing the differences (things that distro-hoppers might ask). As such, answers vary between “use _____, I found it very user friendly” and “use whatever, you can turn any distro into any other, and tweak it to your needs.”
What are some questions that newbies should ask when deciding on which distro to use as the basis for their system. Things like “what package manager suits my needs and how do I try out different ones without changing distros?” Or “what is a desktop environment/window manager, and how do I figure out which suits me?” Or “how does an init system affect my user experience as a newbie?” Or “how what are the choices made by such-and-such distro during install?”
Bonus points for also answering the questions you propose (I don’t have answers, picked a distro and stuck with it)
my hot take is that a distro at the end of the day is just a package manager and an install script.
the question i would ask is: what do you want out of your package manager?
this would be an odd question for your given non-Linux user because their package manager before was called “fuck it YOLO”.
i’ll go through some that i use or have used.
apt/rpm/etc: stable. designed for the Linux of the 90s. uptime is king. i end up using these usually out of network effects. some popular package uses it in their Docker file or my VPS only supports these. they’re boring, but that’s on purpose. updates are purposeful and vetted (relatively). these are your Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc flavors.pacman: seriously just a great design philosophy imo next to the others. rolling release. no versions. fix forward. also with the AUR, you get your “fuck it YOLO” packages back in a way that they can actually be maintained, updated, or nuked as appropriate. if you ever caught yourself waiting for a CUDA release onapt, this is for you. Arch, Manjaro,… i think there’s a ton of vibe coded configs that all pretty much amount to Arch.nix(/maybeguix?): a software engineer’s package manager. everything is declarative, reproducible, and version controllable. what was that thing i installed last weekend? it’s in the commit log. need 3 different C compilers/graphic drivers/toolchain dependencies installed? handled by the OS, and cleaned up when those versions change. this is my current rig cuz it helps me keep a bunch of machines in sync for my home projects.Gentoo and LFS and anything else would be a bit much.
I’ve been using Chimera linux recently (coming from Arch), and APK v3 is so good. It is so fucking fast and it’s dependency management is next level. Also the world file is really cool. Pacman felt more powerful in some ways, but a bit slower and more cumbersome. I also have had it just remove dependencies that another package still needs, and optional dependencies aren’t handled as cleanly.