Excellent work.

I had already had an idea of what distro I will be shifting to but this reenforced that choice. A good sanity check.

Nice chart!

If I could offer an addendum, CachyOS and PikaOS should be included in the gaming distros for non-new users. I love Bazzite, but CachyOS gives people a very good Arch option, and PikaOS gives people a nice Debian (not Ubuntu) option that's about up to feature parity with CachyOS.

Good idea. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with touch screen devices on Linux. I should do research into it, as it would be a nice addition.

I heard somewhere that Fedora Workstation includes the Surface kernel-module needed for Surface devices, though I'm not sure.

Fedora is a very nice OS. Nothing wrong with that

Desktop Linux

Is there one for laptop Linux?

macOS

What about mac hardware?

Things I do want to point out if you intend to make this as new user friendly as possible:

1. The bottom section doesn't quite makes sense to include as it contradicts the purpose of this diagram. Similar reasoning for color coding and immutability tag; it makes sense to the experienced Linux users, not much for others.
2. I can understand that the diamonds connected with a simple line are of equal standing, but it looks like steps. Users would also question which they should choose amongst them (or question why they exist if they seemingly serve the same purpose).

Nice chart.

I'm new to Linux (April or May of this year) and most of my experience is Android. I picked Fedora Workstation because of Privacy Guides recommending it for noobs. Using a T470s ThinkPad.

This is really great. I agree with pretty much everything on there and I figured I might want to try a artist distro at some point.

I think your legend is supposed to say "with immutability"

On a more philosophical level... This is great for a certain type of person but I worry about it also being scary for a Linux noob. I know out of my friend group, maybe 25% would appreciate seeing things in this format and thats because those are the engineers in the group.

Joke’s on you, I have a Surface! Is it a laptop? Is it a tablet? It’s the Dr. Pepper of computing devices!

But seriously, is there a small bit that can be made for tablets and those slightly-more-than-a-tablets?

I have used Alpine Linux at work and I don't like the fact that they only have one version of each package in their repo. First of all, that creates a risk that a given version is bad and I cannot go back to a known good version. Also, some times I explicitly want to use an old version of a package. New versions change and remove features.

I use the NumPad.
Without NumLock

No answer on Bazzite source I could find - just says check bios. That's why I'm here too, and tried something from Arch.

Then refer to the source for other ways to go about it.

Yeah, those settings were on. I'll read up on the article linked above and see if I can make it work.

Tnx, I'll give it a read.

These are strange times for the NumLock club. Strange times...

I've been wondering about this. I've only had this issue with Fedora based distros, but not Ubuntu or Debian based ones. It's extremely annoying, and the system settings having it on and same with bios don't do anything. Num Lock is on by default for Mint for example - same system. Even freaking windows.

Doesn't work for Bazzite

Because for some reason Linux developers do not use the number pad. This is the worst default.

As a long time Slackware user, I second this opinion. The Arch wiki is gold for all Linux users.

I don't know the answer (I don't care about numlock myself), but the arch wiki has an article on this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Activating_numlock_on_bootup

Perhaps that will be useful to you. In general checking the arch wiki is a good idea for any Linux issues, even if you don't run arch, many things still apply to other distros and the articles are of very high quality.

In this case, "Early bootup (mkinitcpio)" would likely not apply to most other distros that aren't based on Arch, but the rest looks to apply widly.

It is worth noting that in the KDE section it mentions the need to apply two settings, perhaps that could be it?

Go to System Settings > Input & Output > Keyboard, in the Hardware tab, in the NumLock on Plasma Startup section, choose the desired NumLock behavior.

For this to work, make sure that System Settings > System > Session > Background Services > Keyboard Daemon is enabled.

Source

Alpine Linux has been my go to OS for things like servers and NAS's. Its small, rock stable, and can run on basically anything thay has a floppydrive ;-)

All my servers run AlmaLinux. Install docker, openzfs etc. as needed. AlmaLinux offers a very solid starting point.

You can game and record on Ubuntu studio and everyone who says you need a different distro is wrong. Install steam and OBS and you're good to go. If youve got an nvidia card check youve got the latest proprietary driver and thats really it.

If you really do want a different distro you can try nobara fedora based, bazzite fedora based but immutable, pika Debian based, popOS Ubuntu based.