Ubuntu’s popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I’ve highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.

    • nooneshere@discuss.tchncs.de
      10·
      10 months ago

      Slackware is a garbage distro purely because it doesn’t have a functional package manager supporting dependency resolution

    • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
      6·
      10 months ago

      targeted at regular desktop users

      While Slackware and Debian are the oldest still-maintained Linux distros, I don’t think either had a desktop-first approach.

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlM
        3·
        10 months ago

        I considered putting logos of some of the many more user-friendly pre-ubuntu distros in the meme but was lazy.

        Debian was intended to be for regular desktop users back then too, though.

        • Soleil (she/her ♀)@beehaw.org
          2·
          10 months ago

          …Except Debian wasn’t even user-friendly when I used it two years after Ubuntu’s release. Red Hat Linux (not RHEL, which came later) was the only distro I’m aware of before Ubuntu that was more UX-focused.

          Edit: I forgot about a few others — SUSE, Corel Linux, Lindows/Linspire, and others. Buuuuuuut most of those distros don’t exist anymore. I still stand by that Debian didn’t used to be as noob-friendly as it is these days.

      • vzq
        8·
        2 months ago

        deleted by creator

            • prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
              8·
              10 months ago

              I really feel like you’re missing the idea of that sentence deliberately.

              What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?

              • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlM
                12·
                10 months ago

                What Linux distribution came before Ubuntu that was specifically designed to be user friendly for a non-technical user?

                There were a bunch of distros advertising ease of use; several were even sold in physical boxes (which was the style at the time) and marketed to consumers at retail stores like BestBuy years before Ubuntu started.

                Here are four pictures of the physical packaging for three of those pre-ubuntu desktop distros designed to be user friendly and marketed to the general public:

                Photo of the cardboard packaging for Caldera OpenLinux Another Caldera box Packaging of SuSE 8.1 Mandrake 7.2 packaging

                Ubuntu was better than what came before it in many ways, and it deserves credit for advancing desktop Linux adoption both then and now, but it was not “one of the first” by any stretch.