Probably the most important aspect of any distro are its communities. No matter how good a distro is sooner or later you will hit a snag, how will you fix it? Are you the lone wolf that will find it's own solution, fix that bug by rewriting some code or do you need some help? Every distro of course has it's own unique collection of bugs, quirks and problems, but there are also problems one will encounter that are more general of nature. The general problems are usually solved with googling, for example: view connected USB devices. When you can't find a solution to your problem, it is most probably a distro specific thing. Many times Google will actually find your question already posted on your distro's forum, but occasionally you won't find a solution to your problem. If you were in the middle of something you'll want a fix immediately which can become quite frustrating if you can't find one.  Probably one of the most dreaded types of users on any community are noobs, so much so that often a forum will have a noob section to prevent contamination to other forums. Why are noobs such a bad thing anyway and what defines a noob? Anyone new to anything might be considered a noob or newbie, however there are different kind of newcomers to describe.
Obviously these are just stereotypes and often a newcomer can be any combination of the above, however the most desired newcomer by a community is the honest and cautious one. A community is like a good party, but when someone brings along his friends (who don't pay any respect to the existing members) things can get nasty and ruin any good atmosphere. It is important that people can get along and share the same goal or love. My advice to behave like a good newcomer: be friendly, be compliant, be patient. You will get better help and more attention. Which community suits my needs?While choosing a distro solely based on a community would be plain silly, it is advisable to choose one that suits your skills. You can still choose a Linux distro that is above your current skill set but you might have to swallow a steep learning curve. Especially hardcore communities will force you to explore their howto's and wiki's, but that can be a good thing.Here is my index of distro's:
Now in case you're wondering, yes i did try out all these distro's and some more. Thus if a distro is not in this list i have not tried it or it isn't interesting enough to list here. Of course it is very difficult to test all these distro's for extended periods, but i was able to get an adequate experience of these communities. Beginner communities I really have to be honest here, this one definitely belongs to Ubuntu. Lots of friendly people to help you out on the forums, well written guides or HOWTO's and an extensive knowledge base. All the other communities are just as friendly, but the communities are just not as active as Ubuntu's. Still the Mint and PCLinuxOS community come second forums wise, but there isn't any other distro able to offer the quality knowledge base Ubuntu has. I know a well designed beginners distro should be able to guide users trough trail and error, but this is still Linux, you will feel like Alice in Wonderland at some point if you've only used Windows before. That's why i think newcomers should still be prepared and guided with good documentation. Take Zorin OS for example, at the point of writing there is only a very poor explanation how to install or even use the downloaded (ISO) file. Now look at Ubuntu's guide, now that's a proper guide. Fedora has good guides, but no official stuff on their website, it's all scattered across blogs and Google. Intermediate communities Now things will get interesting. Once you've played around with Linux for a while, got used to the terminal and might have solved some problems already, you could get to a point where your needs exceed your current distro. For example you want to use that old computer as a server or perhaps a media center. You'll find that every distro has limits in terms of compatibility, speed, manageability or lacks the support you need. *** OpenSUSE access to rpm packages, easy, suitable for any project I found Slackware to be an excellent community for whatever project you might have. The community is helpful, friendly to newcomers and have extensive knowledge which proves their legacy as one of the oldest distro's. This is an excellent distro if you want to gain more knowledge on the command line. Their primary forum is linuxquestions.org, check it out. Manjaro and Sabayon are the tech and speedy distro's and have good support trough their own community but profit mostly from their parent distro's Arch Linux for Manjaro and Gentoo for Sabayon. I will go into depth on those in the hardcore section. Crunchbang is quite an odd one but it has a great community, friendly, fast and knowledgeable. This is a good distro to start with if you want to get used to Debian based distro's, you can profit from the huge Debian software base while having proper support from the Crunchbang team. Hardcore communities Keep in mind that this list was made with the idea of a newcomers experience to a community. Now already you might have wondered why Debian is listed as hardcore, well this was a matter of findability and lacking of a common place where users meet. Yes there is an official forum but it's all a little vague and incomplete. Then there are other forums competing with the official scattering the community. Looking trough some of the topics and answers posted you can tell right away most users are quite experienced and don't do small talk. Even for an intermediate user it's easy to get lost in all the tech language. As for Arch Linux and Gentoo, well these communities are just my cup of tea. Excellent knowledge, friendly, human and very nerdy. However they are very protective of 'their' community, so RTFM and don't bash anything. What you get in return though is a hi-tech distro with the best knowledge base available to any user, you will learn all the ins and outs of the Linux system this way. Keep in mind that these two communities require a very active attitude. |
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