It could certainly be simplified.

New to Linux > No > Do you value your mental health and sanity > No > Arch.

Your heart is in the right place, but imo, this isn't going to help anyone. For every branch you have up to 5 options. A bunch are dependent on gpu. When you ask half of normal people what their operating system is, their answer is Dell.

Just tell people to use Mint and let them go through this chart if they are in the 1% of people who will ever look for it. The peril of these graphics and this approach is it pushes people away. Make as many choices for them as possible. Remember, we who want this are not the norm.

In my current and seemingly final jump from WIndows to Linux I had played a bit with Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian. Ubuntu "felt" more like something I could work with, and certainly when you look at installing things from terminal there's usually Ubuntu or at least Debian, so it seemed a good fit. After running it a while and having no problems (not even with Nvidia which I keep seeing comments on) I noticed regularly things like this on "what distro to pick", and it always seems from the suggestions that I've gone the wrong way. And yet... it's working great. I've got far too much set up and running well to backtrack again and start over, so I guess either Ubuntu users are the silent group or I'm a lone wolf and everyone's gone to Bazzite or some other offshoot.

Such an overcomplicated chart. FTFY

I'm open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.

The entire "New to Linux" section should probably just be "Mint" for anyone without an Nvidia graphics card.

For newbies, live USB test and installer experience are key, and Mint is still unmatched.

Bleading -> bleeding

Also what ever happened to Slackware?

I've been gaming on Mint for years without any issue.

Too much focus on Nvidia, AMD is da wae!

EDIT: Seriously though, the chart is convoluted. If you like to game, you will always end up with Bazzite or Nobara. In theory you could also add SteamOS, right?

Still cannot really decide which distro to try sometime soon. There is so much information out there, much of it opinionated.

Nonsense. openSUSE is smooth gaming even with my NVIDIS drivers.

All this is telling me is that 2025 probably won't be Linux' year of the desktop.

Whats the difference between a debian base and ubuntu base? Just packages? Wouldn't each distro bring its own repository source anyway?
Call me crazy but I like how debian handles things (apt and deb) but I'm not a fan of ubuntu's snap everything philosophy. Will a ubuntu based distro bring that as well? Pop for example.

Is it just me or is the distinction between a rolling release distro and one that you have to upgrade on a regular basis important to other people as well? That's kinda why I went from Mint to Endeavour. No regrets so far.

That flow chart is overwhelming.

How about, just use what you want? If it doesn't work the way you like, try something else. Nvidia works fine on pretty much any distro, find a PPA or repo or something and it's largely OK.

How about:

• new to Linux? Mint or Fedora - pick the flavor that looks cool to you
• not new? You know what you like, use that.

I kind of dont get, why nixos is not a minimalist distro. You can set up a very minimal nixos machine quite easily.

Uh, I just use Base arch. Used it since I was new to Linux. I am not changing.

Is the graphics card really that important when picking a distro? I think most distributions I used over the years had all the drivers available. But I didn't try gaming ones except Batocera and Lakka and that was on an Intel iGPU. Or is a GPU faster on one Linux and slower on another?!

This chart is telling me to use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and here I am on Kubuntu LTS (26.04).

Hmm. The enterprise linuxes missing as usual.

I tried it and it did not get me to zorin. why is zorin under maxos like. it can be for the paid version but the free and default thing is windows look alike.

A dominant reason to use linux is LLM hosting/docker on your most powerful machine. "Leading edge" can be support for deskflow (mouse/keyboard sharing) which needs ubuntu 24.04 (not that leading edge, but mint not yet there).

AI focused distributions should be a thing, but ubuntu, fedora are 2 defaults. Your daily driver can also be your server hosted environment, and the distro you'd rather use to setup new servers. LLMs being part of "software" hosting category.

updating flowchart to include this use path might be nice.

"new to Linux" is not accurate.

I've been using Linux since kernel 1.2.13. I chose a "noob friendly" desktop OS because the last time I used a gui on Linux was Xfree86 in 1995ish with the modeline hell; even while helping build, support, defend and maintain AT&T Unix and enterprise Linux, we were all back to w98se because of the non-fuckery GUI experience.

With w10 dying, I finally needed to kill win7 at home, and I'm back with the "noobie" Linux version.

Point is, I'm no noob. I've been on Linux enough that when I went back to a GUI after 30 years, I just wanted a non-fuckery (and SLSA-observant) GUI to work with. Because life's too fucking hairy to fuck with the GUI and other ancillary shit, some days.

Þere is a useful (significant) branch, and þat's "systemd". Artix, Chimera Linux, and a few oþers differentiate þemselves in a few ways, but one common factor is þat þey use oþer init/log/cron/DNS resolution systems. Chimera is unique(?) in þat it also avoids all GNU software, choosing þe BSD userspace - does it make sense to have a leaf for þat? Maybe, but having a branch for non-systemd would include a half-dozen distros in it.