A note! the desktop field is completely optional! You can install any other desktop you like, but the listed are the “main” ones, usually recommended by the distro.

Linux Mint

  • Country: Ireland 🇮🇪
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: Cinnamon

Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)

https://www.linuxmint.com/

Ubuntu

  • Country: Britain 🇬🇧
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: GNOME

Good distro, but has some controversies. Though it’s the most popular beginners distro by far.

https://ubuntu.com/

EndeavourOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

My second favorite :) Arch based, easy installer and updater, friendly community and beautiful themes. I recommend this distro if you are into arch based distros without wanting the painful part of it.

https://endeavouros.com/

OpenSUSE

  • Country: Germany 🇩🇪
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE

It’s mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.

https://www.opensuse.org/

Manjaro

  • Country: Germany 🇩🇪 / Austria 🇦🇹 / France🇫🇷
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

Added because of popular recommendation. I recommend EndeavourOS more, since manjaro has a… history.

https://manjaro.org/

NixOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME

My personal favorite <3 Great for servers. It’s not for the faint of heart, though hah. It’s an immutable distro, where there is no package manager, or manually modifying config files; your entire system is created with .nix files, not commands. Reproducable.

https://nixos.org/

Arch

  • Country: Canada 🇨🇦 (Yes yes, it’s not european but how can you not mention arch???)
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: None

Most popular distro for dedicated users, and for good reason; bleeding edge, full power over your system. Though you have to manually set up everything, from internet to your deskop environment.

Void

  • Country: Spain 🇪🇸
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: XFCE

Great distro if you want something like arch, but without systemd or slightly more stable (Also, musl support). Obscure but amazing.

https://voidlinux.org/

Debian [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global 🌍
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

An honorary mention. Isn’t suited for everyone, but is the golden standard for servers, and the grandfather of a huge family tree of distros.

https://www.debian.org/

VanillaOS [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global 🌍️
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: GNOME

VanillaOS is a debian-based immutable operating system, which can install packages from any other distro and is very hard to brick.

https://vanillaos.org/

That should cover a lot. Please heed the desktop warning, and please correct me/comment suggestions. This is not perfect, so please do criticize where possible c:

  • kaidezee@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 day ago

    In my opinion, it is unfair to judge a distribution by it’s origin country. Because it’s an international effort regardless.

  • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Thanks for this post. Here’s my contribution:

    Search results for Lemmy communities for these distros:

    Others mentioned in the comments (I can’t vouch for their “Europeanness”):

    Others (I can’t vouch for their “Europeanness”):

    At this point I remembered Distrowatch and realized you can search by country of origin. E.g. Distrowatch search for active distros from Austria. And Italy.

    Too many European countries and too many distros for me to do them all. If anyone else wants to chip in, e.g. pick a country, feel free.

    And if one neighbouring country (Canada) being threatened by that f$#king guy can get an honorary mention here, let’s include another, too: Mexico.

    Mexicans also started the GNOME desktop environment, but I don’t think the upcoming GNOME OS is based in Mexico.

  • turtl@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Linux Mint is honestly amazing. I always read about it being labeled as “for beginners” or being “boring” almost as if that’s a bad thing. I just wanted something that works out of the box and not take on a new hobby… And I got just that with Linux Mint. Highly recommended

    • Lauchs@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 days ago

      Good to know! Being a Canadian, I’m pretty determined to transfer over to linux before Microsoft stops supporting windows 10 but have been pretty intimidated by various horror stories etc.

      • phanto@lemmy.ca
        1·
        4 days ago

        Canadian person! If you break it, ask me and I will do my best to non-snarkily assist. I am working on becoming less snarky, so it’s practice!

  • RambaZamba@feddit.orgDeutsch
    0·
    4 days ago

    I’m currently wondering whether this is going in the right direction. I understand that we are boycotting commercial products from the US, which makes perfect sense to me. But as someone who works on FOSS software myself, I wonder if we are hurting the right people by not using FOSS software that comes from the US. I think these are largely people who don’t support Trump.

    • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      0·
      4 days ago

      I completely agree. I think FOSS software is way harder to control by a corporation (especially licensed copyleft) Personally i don’t think it’s harmful to use OSS software from any country at all. Whether by chinese, belgian or american as long as it is open source, it’s fair game i think.

      I shared this post since i thought this community might enjoy it, but all distros are fine.