Since Red Hat made their recent decision, there has been a lot more talk about people wanting to focus on communiy-based distros instead of corporate-backed distros.

I was trying to think of how many active, stable, user friendly base community distros I know about. When I say a “base” distro, I mean a distro that’s basically the base for its ecosystem. For instance, Debian would be a base distro because it’s the base of its ecosystem. A community distro based on Ubuntu wouldn’t fit what I’m talking about here because Ubuntu is a corporate distro.

So, there’s Debian.

Arch is a base community distro but it’s not user friendly to install, but there are more user friendly varieties of Arch available like Manjaro and a few others.

All of the other base distros I can think of are either corporate, or aren’t particularly user friendly to install. Care to add your thoughts to the list?

  • mudamuda@geddit.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Major: Debian, Gentoo, NixOS, Arch and also FreeBSD (not GNU/Linux but still).

    Other and esoteric: Void, Alpine, Solus, CRUX, Slackware, Mageia/OpenMandriva,

    Corporate sponsored: Fedora, openSUSE

  • afb@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Debian and Void (and Void is iffy. The TTY installer is easy enough though, and it’s basically good to go out of the box if you get the glibc iso with Xfce). None of the other base distros are super user-friendly in terms of installation, though I’d add Endeavour OS as an honorary member of the group since it’s essentially Arch with a good installer, a friendly community, and nice defaults.

  • ash@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    OpenSUSE

    inb4 but thats a corporate distro, it is just sponsored by SUSE but is community maintained

    I agree that there are not many distros that are both user friendly and not forks of something else, but I don’t see it as an issue, imo there is nothing wrong with forks.

    • FloppySlapper@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      The issue isn’t if something is a fork or not, the issue is if something is a fork of a corporate distro. For instance, there are forks of Arch that still meet the criteria because Arch is a base community distro, whereas OpenSuse is a fork of a corporate distro.

      • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
        01·
        1 year ago

        Did the telemetry vote already happen and succeed? Last I saw there was only an informal “feeling out” vote, but I haven’t been following closely since then.