“This is america, why are there more than two choices”
The big advantage of Linux it’s fully customizable The big disadvantage of Linux, it’s fully customizable
You think choosing your Linux distro is bad, imagine having to choose your electricity, water, internet, phone, banking, and insurance provider as well as your local councillor, workplace, school, career, entertainment, childcare, car, house, food, etc.
This “love choice, hate choosing” is a really valuable thing to understand.
OP is posting AI slop and plagiarizing other people’s work. Lead image seems a cyanide and happiness cartoon, but it’s a blatent ripoff, and they watermarked it with their own username to boot. And no communication out transparency around any of that as well
All you need to know is that, whatever you pick, you made the wrong choice and you will be roasted if you ever attempt to explain your decision.
Unless you use Arch, then you have chosen correctly.
I use Fedora, but I frequent the Arch wiki often enough that I feel like an honorary Arch user.
The Gentoo wiki is pretty good too
You’re obviously not using NixOS. I clearly don’t even need to try to use such a subpar stateful system such as Arch, you absolute pleb.
Am I out-jerking you already?
I use NixOS, obviously.
I use NixOS btw
Urgh! Why did you choose Arch? It is just the worst!
Actual reenactment:

Screams in Debian…
You mispelt gentoo
Not true, you just become immune to the opposition.
Arch is utterly inferior because of its use of the Systemd “init” system, which is a bloated mess that completely disregards the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and shouldn’t be forgotten for its sins and heresy. “Arch Linux” (Really Arch Gnu/Linux, or more preferably Arch Gnu+Linux (Unless you consider that Gnu runs on top of Linux, in which case it’s Linux+Gnu)) cannot be taken seriously as a minimal do it yourself distro when it hinges on an software that has ties with RedHat, which has had a history of forcing their woke Wayland Display Server (Even though Xorg worked just fine, suspicious much?), as well as their DEI onto the entire Linux space - where politics shouldn’t play any role. A WOKE company like RedHat has no place in the open source community. If you want to be a true and righteous Linux user, I recommend Either Void Linux+Gnu (What manly men like myself use) or Gentoo.
Edit: this is satire, I clearly interact with these people far too often to have done this good of a job.
Edit: this is satire, I clearly interact with these people far too often to have done this good of a job.
Imagine if The Onion had to say this.
Your target audience understood, the people downvoting probably are Ubuntu users anway.
It says something about how sad of a state the world is in when I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
I mean, it’s both good and bad. The amount of downvotes mean there is a large subset of folks who no longer recognize the twisting of stallman’s rant. They are new to linux, and not super-serious-no-casuals-allowed penguin lovers. It’s bad because I would love if everyone coming to linux could be as into it as I am. People who are invested into a thing take a much deeper look at things, and can appreciate it’s soft and jagged parts and then properly make recommendations on how to change things.
There has beenI have noticed a marked increase in argumentum populum, argumentum ad lapidem and argumentum ad novitatem, with the influx of new users (in recent years), who seem to be coming to “Linux” like it’s another platform; another groupthink team to switch to [“PC vs Mac”], rather than Linux just being a kernel that has a license that qualifies it as having a Free Software philosophy, and the free software (free as in freedom) being the reason to use it.Like they’re still caught in, not just the fallacies and identity-attachment mass-formation malady, but also a consumerism and a dependence paradigm, rather than embracing the freedom to learn, to empower themselves and each other.
It’s daunting to think, many may not know they can look deeper into it, not merely just use the software, but also study it, and change it, and share their changes… like they don’t know how we got here.
Freedom forgotten is freedom lost.
The age of the account makes it even more nebulous
Lmao, I just made this account, yeah. It’s not my first Lemmy account. I made an account on lemmy.world back in 2023 I think (lost the account), and a PieFed account earlier this year, which I hardly used. I thought I could use a fresh start. (And sorry for the ambiguous satire)
I don’t think that’s on you. Like the person above said it’s more to do with how the world is rn
I had to read until “manly man” to confirm it was satire
Void Linux+Gnu
Uhh, it’s GNU SLASH Linux actually
Arch is utterly inferior because of its use of the Systemd “init” system, which is a bloated mess that completely disregards the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and shouldn’t be forgotten for its sins and heresy.
So… do arch without systemd. (And not listed there, because its live-installer iso comes with systemd, is parabola linux, which does let you install with any of many init systems).
Or as you say, any of many other distros that offer init-freedom.
Though I’m not entirely sure if I’m replying to an instance of poe’s law, intended to mock those of us who see things largely like you depicted. n_n Which is fun.
PS,
history of forcing their woke Wayland Display Server (Even though Xorg worked just fine, suspicious much?),
Yes. Actively inhibiting development of Xorg. The tighter they squeeze the more of us slip through their fingers. Now there’s XLibre (a Xorg fork, to continue (otherwise actively inhibited) patching and developing), and even Pheonix (a from-scratch implementation of the X11 protocol written in zig! ~ give it a couple years). Exciting times.
Frankly I’m not even keen on the idea of pulse audio either. Funny how all this “Lennartware”'s so contemptable… from Lennart Poettering, who then went to work for Microsoft. Funny eh? Funny how it’s almost like it’s following the same ruthless dastardly insidious method of unscrupulously building a monopoly, via “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Not a fan of pulseaudio, systemd, and wayland. Much prefer free software stays closer to being in human reach, so more of us can make use of the 4 freedoms of free software. So it’s not just “free software” in name only, but in practice too.
Sorry, my comment was satire, though I do daily drive Void Linux (and very much enjoy runit, and I’m looking to try openrc). Also I’m not really anti wayland, but I do dislike the squeezing of xorg development, as you mentioned. I’m pretty excited for the Phoenix project, as I’m a big fan of Zig myself, and I’m thinking of contributing. XLibre, I worry may be a lost cause with how many bridges I feel it’s maintainer has burned with so many people, but he’s also very committed so we’ll see.
I love Lemmy. I hate AI posters.
Holy sneaky AI image, Batman!
Proceeds to use it exclusively for browsing the web.

Exactly 69 upvotes - as it should be.:-P
How many are there?
It depends.
See, that’s not helpful. The right answer is to direct someone to this GitHub project:
https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline
The releases page contains a 3420x12488 PNG to provide a simple and concise answer.
I can see my OS from here!
“Simple and concise”
Doesn’t even have CachyOS. Smh
There are a few gaps. Seems it’s not being as diligently updated as once was.
There are even some old distros I failed to find on it.
… Didn’t there used to be a text-searchable svg version of it?
Idk. I was making a joke though. A history of Linux chart is functionally useless for actually choosing a distro.
A history of Linux chart is functionally useless for actually choosing a distro.
I’ve used that many times to help me go distro surfing. Very handy for discovery.
For a new person it’s useless. For anyone distro surfing why wouldn’t you just use distro Watch?
For a new person it’s useless. For anyone distro surfing why wouldn’t you just use distro Watch?
I disagree. Not useless. Shows the lineage of distros. Facilitates broader awareness. Handy education. Very well accompanies the likes of distrowatch, at a long glance showing the forest past being lost in the trees and slowly trying to work it out. Expedites the new (or soon to be) user to better know their way around, and perhaps help them go towards whichever branch they prefer or away from any they garner a dislike for, saving time. See past the whataboutism false-dichotomy? Why not both?
Huh? A new user is going to have trouble understanding the base difference between gnome and kde. Flooding them with information about the history of all these operating systems will do nothing except to scare them off even more.
If you know how to edit a comma-separated-value text file and how to submit a PR on GitHub, you could make the image larger.
I just have to assume you’re a troll at this point. That graphic is not helpful at all to anyone except those that care about the history of Linux. For everyone else it’s useless. I was making a joke about how one of the distros I use isn’t on there. I don’t know the history of my distro and honestly do not care. Any noob also would not care.
i am not religious, but oh god…
That picture is also hosted on Wikimedia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
Edit: just pasting the link now, making it into an embedded picture lagged and crashed voyager??
Either 2025 was a horrible year for linux or the image needs an update.
I see the one I like! :-)

EndeavourOS should be a continuation of Antergos, right?
I always assumed webOS was Linux but I expected it to be a fork of Debian
WebOS was made by Palm Inc., one of the earliest and quite successful manufacturer of ‘personal digital assistant’ devices, aka smartphones without the phone part (and later with that too). They originally developed and licensed their own OS, PalmOS, but needed an upgrade for multitasking and such. webOS was thus intended for those PDA devices, and Debian would of course be a ridiculous choice for the task.
I have warm memories of PalmOS: i was snappy as heck with the 16 MHz CPU, but that’s largely because of the ‘single-tasking’ and quite limited app functionality.
The wrong assumption is that you have to pick the best of all possible everything the first time. People agonize less about choosing a type of car to spend $30,000 on knowing that if you sell it used its instantly worth 5000 less.
Meanwhile you can switch everything about your computer in 2 hours for free.
make it without AI and try again
Just ask your favourite slop generator to shit a suggestion for you, it already replaced your ability to draw stick figures, something every person knows hownto do by the age of 7.
Ventoy and go, try a bunch.
But the correct answer is Mint with XFCE
Choice is good when you can make an informed choice. Choice is bad if you are forced to make a decisions where you have no idea of the consequences.
Worst when the newcomers chose Arch because they’ve heard is very configurable.
Then complain that Linux is hard.












