The new year is here and you have made a resolution to give Linux a try. A noble resolution and one that will be met, initially, with much confusion. Why? Linux isn’t like Windows where your choice is limited to a single release with different features (depending upon how much you want to spend) or OS X where you have no choice but to take what Apple gives you. No. Linux has a multitude of choices. In fact, if you go to Distrowatch you will see at least 100 distributions listed in the page hits ranking section. Think about it, 100 different versions of Linux. And that’s not all of them. There are many more variations out there, and more coming every day. And then, you add into the mix the enterprise level distributions that not only come with a price, but support, and the ever-staggering number continues to grow.

People already today move seamlessly between Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X and Canonical’s more traditional Ubuntu user interface. The “myth” that desktop Linux has a difficult learning curve is just that… a myth.

So how does a new-to-Linux user decide? With so many choices, how is it possible to start off on the right path? Without help, it’s not easy. My first Linux distribution was Redhat 7. It was rough and nearly pushed me back to Windows. It wasn’t until I found Ubuntu (5.10 at the time) that I found the right distribution for the right purpose. That was ten years ago and the choices were much more limited.

Because the new year is here, and I am always one to want to help people make the move to Linux, I thought I would create a flow chart to help Linux users make the right choice. Is it perfect? Probably not. Do I include every possible choice? No way. The distributions I have included are:

  • Ubuntu
  • Ubuntu Server
  • Ubuntu Studio
  • Slackware
  • Fedora
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
  • SuSE Enterprise Linux Server
  • SuSE Enterprise Linux
  • Gentoo
  • Mandriva Power Pack
  • CentOS
  • PCLinuxOS
  • Linux Mint
  • Debian

FOR more than three years, I’ve been using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of Linux, on my home PC for work and play. As a long-time Windows user, I appreciated the freedom from crashes and system slowdowns that plagued my computing life before I made the switch. The notion that I would have to reinstall my operating system, so common in Windows when something went terribly awry, now seems so foreign to me as a Linux user.

I also enjoyed not having to put up with Microsoft’s intrusive and heavy-handed licensing practices, and not worrying that some malicious piece of code would get past my anti-virus software and wreak havoc on my files.