this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Buy European

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A note! the desktop field is completely optional! You can install any other desktop you like, but the listed are the "main" ones, usually recommended by the distro.

Linux Mint

  • Country: Ireland ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ช
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: Cinnamon

Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)

https://www.linuxmint.com/

Ubuntu

  • Country: Britain ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: GNOME

Good distro, but has some controversies. Though it's the most popular beginners distro by far.

https://ubuntu.com/

EndeavourOS

  • Country: Netherlands ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

My second favorite :) Arch based, easy installer and updater, friendly community and beautiful themes. I recommend this distro if you are into arch based distros without wanting the painful part of it.

https://endeavouros.com/

OpenSUSE

  • Country: Germany ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE

It's mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.

https://www.opensuse.org/

Manjaro

  • Country: Germany ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช / Austria ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡น / France๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

Added because of popular recommendation. I recommend EndeavourOS more, since manjaro has a... history.

https://manjaro.org/

NixOS

  • Country: Netherlands ๐Ÿ‡ณ๐Ÿ‡ฑ
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME

My personal favorite <3 Great for servers. It's not for the faint of heart, though hah. It's an immutable distro, where there is no package manager, or manually modifying config files; your entire system is created with .nix files, not commands. Reproducable.

https://nixos.org/

Arch

  • Country: Canada ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฆ (Yes yes, it's not european but how can you not mention arch???)
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: None

Most popular distro for dedicated users, and for good reason; bleeding edge, full power over your system. Though you have to manually set up everything, from internet to your deskop environment.

Void

  • Country: Spain ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡ธ
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: XFCE

Great distro if you want something like arch, but without systemd or slightly more stable (Also, musl support). Obscure but amazing.

https://voidlinux.org/

Debian [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global ๐ŸŒ
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

An honorary mention. Isn't suited for everyone, but is the golden standard for servers, and the grandfather of a huge family tree of distros.

https://www.debian.org/

VanillaOS [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global ๐ŸŒ๏ธ
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: GNOME

VanillaOS is a debian-based immutable operating system, which can install packages from any other distro and is very hard to brick.

https://vanillaos.org/

That should cover a lot. Please heed the desktop warning, and please correct me/comment suggestions. This is not perfect, so please do criticize where possible c:

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

In my opinion, it is unfair to judge a distribution by it's origin country. Because it's an international effort regardless.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

one word about SuSE - one of the oldest still active distros. Is one of the few "real" enterprise distros with features like SAP certification. 10+ years support for SLES releases (Suse Linux Enterprise Server). Has Tumbleweed as rolling release like Arch and Leap for non-rolling. Also Micro OS (which is IMHO the future), and desktop is of course not only KDE but also GNOME and every other major and minor DE available. Don't get discouraged by the Installer, it's very powerful but also not simplest point and click. Also zypper and YaST take getting used to if you come from apt or pacman lands. Disclaimer I use Tw ;)

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Thanks for this post. Here's my contribution:

Search results for Lemmy communities for these distros:

Others mentioned in the comments (I can't vouch for their "Europeanness"):

Others (I can't vouch for their "Europeanness"):

At this point I remembered Distrowatch and realized you can search by country of origin. E.g. Distrowatch search for active distros from Austria. And Italy.

Too many European countries and too many distros for me to do them all. If anyone else wants to chip in, e.g. pick a country, feel free.

And if one neighbouring country (Canada) being threatened by that f$#king guy can get an honorary mention here, let's include another, too: Mexico.

Mexicans also started the GNOME desktop environment, but I don't think the upcoming GNOME OS is based in Mexico.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thank you! Sorry for ignoring my inbox for some time, i've been slow these couple of days. I tried to avoid more obscure distros/forks since they're harder for users. I've gotten multiple manjaro recommendations, and i wanted to add vanillaOS but it's small (though why not lol) I'll add them, thank you :^)

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

You're welcome :)

Obscure distros vary in difficulty, some are quite easy, but generally the more obscure they are, the less chance of support through forums, chat rooms etc. That's the main reason why I personally moved from more obscure to more popular (Mint).

Vanilla OS is still pretty obscure (it has Wikipedia pages in only 2 languages, Spanish and German), but I think it's designed to be pretty unbreakable by noobs. (I haven't tried it yet, so can't vouch for that.)

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Manjaro is German, French and Austrian.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Add cachyOS too. Arch based from Germany and one of the hottest risers.

[โ€“] [email protected] -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Arch is not based from Germany.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

But cachyOS is. It is an Arch based distro.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Desktop: None

lmao

Also I never knew NixOS was European! Good post

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Isn't Canonical (Ubuntu) a UK-based company?

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I don't really know anything about them, but I've always thought "Canonical" was a cool name for a company.-

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

As with Oracle.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

There's Mageia and openMandriva from France !

PikaOS is from UK I guess.

It's hard to enumerate all of arch based distro but CachyOS is German (not sure ), and archolinux is from belgium.

Europe work on open source in general is strong, I love it !

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Arch based Manjaro - German: https://manjaro.org/

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Seems remiss not to mention Ubuntu, which is British.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I've added it, thanks

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I really appreciate these lists.

I would like to point out, however, that some of these distros are not that user friendly. Arch is notoriously not beginner friendly, endeavouros is slightly better but I would still not recommend if you are just fresh off the boat from Mac or Windows. Opensuse is great but its very professional based.

Pick a distro that works for you. If they are open sourced thats already most of the way there! Even devs based outside of the EU will likely share our gripes against the US's authoritarian shift and anti-big tech vibes.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Would also mention (have not ...yet... tested it myself) PearOS, an Arch Linux flavor from Romania.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You should probably classify a lot of these as global. Like Arch: sure it was founded by a canadian, but nobody in the current dev team is from Canada.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

Whaaat linux mint my beloved is Irish! Awesome!

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

I've been using Mint for ages and never realized it's Irish

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