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?

  • S41p@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 year ago

    Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). All the benefits of Linux Mint, powered by Debian.

  • Matt@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • eu@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • FloppySlapper@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • afb@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.