I got asked a question… this gives me a chance to write an opinion. I have lots of them!
What Linux distribution should I use?
Oh boy, this is a biggie and could almost be a religious one!
In the past we had the Unix wars and then the Linux distro wars. But with Microsoft making Windows worse and people trying out (and liking!) Linux is becoming a viable desktop operating system. Heck, even gamers have started to use Linux, with the March 2026 steam survey showing that 5% of steam users are using Linux. 5% sounds low, but this is just for gaming; even I (a Linux user for 30+ years) have a Windows machine to play games.
So if this is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop then what’s the right choice?
And it depends.
Are you learning Linux because you want it for job?
If you’re in North America then RedHat Linux is probably the number one OS you’ll find in the commercial space. Definitely in finance, which is where I’ve been. So if your goal is to learn skills that will help you find a job (or get promoted) then a RedHat or derivative is a good starting point. It’s not the best desktop, but it makes a really good server OS. You can also run KVM based virtualization and have virtual machines and networking which will let you experiment; want to try something out? Build a VM, play in it, destroy it when you’re finished.
The three main options, here, are Rocky Linux, Alma Linux or even a free RedHat developer trial. The RedHat solution is something you have to renew every year but it gives you real licenses for real RedHat and gives you access to their knowledge base.
These are Long Term Support (LTS) operating systems; if you install a 10.x release today it will still be supported until end May 2035. Upgrades between major versions has historically been a bit of pain, but once every 10 years? Not too bad!
The one big downside to RedHat is that they’ve become a little more hostile to the free derivatives in recent years; they can’t stop them from existing but they can make it harder. It’s for this reason that I have been migrating my own servers away from Rocky and onto Debian.
For home lab
If you don’t need to learn the RedHat way then you might want to look at Debian Linux instead. This is what I’m mostly using, these days.
Debian has many of the same advantages of RedHat except it’s not what large corporate entities tend to be using. It’s also a really good server OS, and can do the same KVM virtualization as RedHat. You could have both worlds, potentially; have a primary Debian OS and run some RedHat VMs to learn the corporate tools.
Debian’s lifecycle is a new release every 2 years, with each release supported for 3 years, and LTS support up to 5 years. That seems short compared to RedHat, but Debian has a smoother upgrade path between major versions; I have a machine that was originally installed with Debian 11, then upgraded to 12, and is now running 13. It was mostly smooth with only minor issues.
There are forks and derivatives of Debian, most notably Ubuntu, but I don’t see any reason to run these for a home server setup. There are some corporates using Ubuntu, but it’s not something I’d recommend.
And containers?
This kinda almost doesn’t matter. Generally you shouldn’t treat the container base as an OS to be used, but merely as a base layer.
The idea behind a container is that you layer your software on top of a base image and you don’t admin the OS layer. If you need to make a change (e.g. there’s patches needed) then you rebuild and redeploy. So you typically don’t need to understand the underlying OS beyond knowing dnf or apt.
Commonly you’ll find Debian or Alpine being used; historically I also saw a fair bit of Ubuntu but that seems to have dropped (at least from what I’ve seen). RedHat tried to get into the game but I’ve not seen anyone use it!
For desktops or gaming?
Now we’re getting into a large messy area. I, personally, use Debian with LXDE as my desktop environment. This is stable and means all the tools I use on my server can also be used on my desktop. However Debian, being a stable release, doesn’t always have the latest and greatest libraries and so some software may not work or some new hardware will have issues (back in 2022 I bought a “stick computer” which had an Intel Celeron J4125 CPU in it; Debian just didn’t work with the sound chip; Ubuntu did; might be interesting to see how things work today!)
Outside of that there’s really the two main families; those in the RedHat side of things and those from the Debian side of things.
Fedora and its remixes are probably the main RedHat based desktops. It has a very fast release cycle (roughly every 6 months) which means you might spend a fair bit of time upgrading. Fedora can be upgraded between major versions and even allows you to skip a version, but you’ll still be forced to upgrade once a year. The plus side is you’ll always have more recent libraries and newer versions of software compared to Debian.
The biggest Debian descendent used to be Ubuntu. It’s still popular. Note that it sometimes does stuff differently and pushing agendas (e.g. Wayland instead of X11; heavy use of snap; LXD containers) and it sometimes feels bloated. I haven’t used this for a few years because I really didn’t like how it felt. But that’s a personal preference.
In the past I’ve also used Linux Mint (Debian Edition), especially on low under-powered laptops. As I understand it, Mint is generally built on Ubuntu but LMDE is built on Debian. You’re meant to get the same experience on both; I just picked LMDE because it was closer to Debian.
And then we get into the weeds. If we look at DistroWatch then we’ll also find distros that have been optimized for gaming, such as CachyOS or Pop!OS. And more. I really can’t talk to this because I don’t really use Linux for gaming. I can only suggest testing them out and seeing what you like the most, or what works best on your hardware (different kernels, different libraries; you may get different performance).
Steam for Linux appears to be mostly focused on Ubuntu, but a many of these distros have it packaged in their app store (e.g. CachyOS).
What about Arch or Gentoo?
I consider these distros as doing Linux on “hard mode”.
I started with PCs in 1987 and learned how the machine booted all the way
from power on through the BIOS to the hard disk boot loaders (primary,
secondary) and so on. This meant that when Linux had its own bootloader
(LILO) I understood what it was doing. Similarly I’ve spent more than
enough time doing things like ./configure && make && make test && make install
in the past (and even built my own distro in 1993 for
deployment at sea). I don’t
need to have my OS installer do this for me.
So, yes, it can be instructive to use these distros. You can get a lot closer to the guts of the OS and it may be worth testing them out in a VM to see what you can learn. But I wouldn’t use them daily.
On the plus side, the Arch wiki has some of the best documentation around!
What about other Unix systems?
Mostly, these days, this means a BSD variant. Yes Solaris 11 is still out there…
But if you’re asking me a question about what distro to use then you’re probably not the right audience for these alternatives. They’re good operating systems and have some real use cases that they’re possibly the best for. But for a general purpose server or desktop with the most support and compatibility? I’d stick with a Linux distro.
Summary
Yeah, this is a messy area. And it’s got messier. Everyone has their own opinion and can argue it with religious fervor. Every distro has pros and cons, and there’s no one size fits all.
For a conservative desktop or server, I’d recommend Debian. For learning marketable skills then Rocky Linux. For more cutting edge desktops or gaming… I dunno.
And then there’s SteamOS…