Step right up - LXF’s greatest showman Jonni Bidwell is here to unveil the finest Linux distros around!

Jonni Bidwell

Cast your mind back 15 years, to that pre-credit crunch optimism of the mid-2000s. Windows users were appalled by Windows Vista, and this new Ubuntu operating system was claiming that it could displace Windows. This, despite being based on Linux (something you needed to have either contributed to yourself or subscribed to an arcane journal such as Linux Format to understand) and thinking that orangey-brown hue was a good desktop colour.

Well, Windows may not have been wiped out by Ubuntu. But Linux has developed in leaps and bounds. It’s more useable than ever and key industry players take it much more seriously now. Thanks to Valve and Vulkan, we can play thousands of Windows-only titles on our Linux boxes. More companies than ever are shipping Linux on consumer hardware. Your wireless hardware probably works with it.

Best of all, there’s a fine range of distros to choose from. Ubuntu has always been a great place to start, but it’s not to everyone’s taste. Here, we present our pick of the next generation of distros, sure to ruffle a few feathers. Since making Linux easy is very difficult, we’ve got a section on useable distros, including our long-time favourite for beginners: Linux Mint.

Next, we’ll explore some of the best-looking distros out there that will give you a truly modern desktop. In particular elementary OS, through its Pantheon desktop, is doing the unthinkable by making Linux simple, powerful, and - dare we say - at least a little bit Mac OS-like.

Finally, we’ll look at distros that are leveraging the latest in open source technologies. You might not want these technologies (or so it seems by the number of complaints we get about Wayland, Systemd et al.). Or you might not be able to use your favourite software with them easily, but these will shape desktop Linux in the years to come.

Linux milestones

Many battles were fought - and coffee urns emptied - to get distros to where they are today. Here’s a quick recap…

Linux distributions have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros (actually in the beginning there was no Linux, and no space-time, then there was a big bang… - Ed). You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realise you’d got your Makefile wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was great fun.

More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian Murdock into creating Debian. Yggdrasil, the first Linux live CD, was launched shortly after SLS, which required a gluttonous 8MB of memory and a gargantuan 100MB of disk space. The first stable version of Debian didn’t appear until 1996, by which time Red Hat Linux was on the scene and all of a sudden people realised there was money to be made with that thar Linux.

The Hardy Heron wallpaper (from 2008) was remastered for Ubuntu 20.04.

It’s easy to overlook the contributions of those pioneer distributions, and other giants such as SUSE and Mandrake. And indeed those of lesser-heard ones such as Conectiva (a distant ancestor of Mageia that popularised Linux in South America). There’s a tendency to just focus on Ubuntu as the great humaniser of Linux.

By the same token, there’s a tendency to dismiss desktop Ubuntu today as a sideshow to Canonical’s commercial success. Ubuntu continues to do great things for Linux, and is an excellent distribution for beginners and professionals alike. But what happened in the mid-2000s was pretty exciting. Suddenly, here was Linux that anyone could use. It did everything that Windows XP did (except maybe talk to your wireless device). There was an office suite that could mostly open Word documents. Finally, something was standing up to the Microsoft juggernaut…

Things are different now. Microsoft’s attitude towards open source has changed and desktop computing isn’t the be-all and end-all it once was. In our LXF262 interview with previous Linux Format editors, they point out there’s no longer the threat to Linux that there used to be. The web is truly OS-agnostic, so there’s no danger of say, your bank not supporting you if you use Linux. We take for granted the ability to watch Netflix or play games, but this would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Today Intel, Oracle and even Microsoft (sort of) now have their own Linux offerings. A few stand-out distros have emerged that have brought genuine innovation, whether technical or ideological, to the Linux world. So let’s have a look at some of them…

CHANGING TIMES Today Intel, Oracle and even Microsoft (sort of) now have their own Linux offerings

SOLVING PROBLEMS

Don’t worry if you think something’s not right with a particular Linux distribution. You’re entitled to a full refund after all. Only kidding. In 2012 even Linus himself raged at OpenSUSE developers when he discovered that adding a printer (on his daughter’s laptop) required the root password. Sometimes there are reasons why things are that way (in 2012 there wasn’t the notion of a privileged local user; it’s handled by systemd these days), sometimes it’s a genuine bug, and sometimes you’re just using it wrong.