The Verdict

Beginner distros

An operating system is not just its appearance, package management capabilities, the choice of default applications, etc. All the disparate elements, many of which have been the subject of comparison in this Roundup, must gel together to provide an enjoyable user experience.

To recommend a distribution that only gets some of these elements right to a newbie would be a recipe for disaster. While experienced users can work their way through and around a distribution’s weaknesses, novice users must be provided with a system that’s usable in every sense of the word.

It is with this limited focus that we’re looking at the distributions featured in this Roundup. The outcome is not necessarily an indictment of the distributions. They may still make a good choice for advanced or skilled users but are perhaps illsuited for absolute beginners.

Elementary OS is a lightweight and fast distribution. But it fared poorly in a couple of the tests we conducted here, especially documentation, where it lagged behind all the others, ensuring its position at the bottom.

Zorin OS’S reliance on the Gnome 3 desktop environment makes the distribution ill-suited for machines with less than 4GB of RAM. We experienced some performance issues on our test rig, which is reason enough to deny it a podium finish.

If not for these performance issues, Deepin would never have made it onto the podium, with its limited documentation.

When working with a rolling-release distribution, it’s important to create backups to be able revert to a previous state when something breaks. Solus doesn’t offer one by default, but you can install one from the software repositories. Its installer has long been a bone of contention with us, and we have also criticised its lack of features in past issues, going as far back as LXF178, and more recently in LXF240. A more capable integrated disk partitioner will go a long way towards attracting new users.

It’s no secret that this author has long been a fan of Arch Linux. While many may view the final outcome of this Roundup as nothing more than a result of this bias (where’s my pitchfork?–

Ed), we believe that the results from the different tests the distributions were put to justify Manjaro winning the top spot.