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Most Linux advice targeted at newcomers starts and ends with “just pick Ubuntu or Linux Mint,” but I find that to be an oversimplification. However, at the same time, I do understand that it’s not helpful to overwhelm someone with the hundreds of distros out there. So, we’ve developed a quick cheat sheet that walks you through a dozen beginner-friendly distros and shows how they compare across the four key areas that matter for a Linux newcomer. This should help you decide for yourself instead of simply listening to someone else’s opinions.

Linux has changed dramatically since the early days of the kernel. Desktops have gone from X11 environments with primitive window managers to polished graphical shells. Containers, cloud computing, virtualization, and immutable operating systems have transformed how people deploy Linux. Even the hardware running Linux today would have seemed extraordinary to many of its earliest users.

Linux on desktop systems is in a great place right now. Whatever desktop system you have, you can probably slap a Linux distro of your choice on it right now, and have few if any issues.

I am not a professional red teamer or security researcher, but my background is in systems engineering and DevOps, so I spend a lot of time working with Linux, networking, firewalls, virtualization, and infrastructure security. I already knew the obvious security rules.

One of the perks of Linux is that both the operating system and the vast majority of apps are free. Yet if you try to buy a PC that comes with Linux, you might end up spending more than buying one with Windows. Why spend that extra money when you can install Linux on an existing computer for free?

If you're new to Linux, or you've happily existed in Mint's easygoing ecosystem for years, you might want to hear what its downsides are. That comfortable feeling may cost you dearly.

Most Linux distros you'll find are basically a pile of separate programs—a panel, a compositor, a window manager, and so on—all exchanging information and coordinating their behavior to create a cohesive experience.

If you're new to Linux and switching from Windows to Linux, there are some mistakes you want to avoid. Avoiding common beginner mistakes in Linux will put you ahead of the other Linux newbies.

Like a lot of Windows users, I resisted Linux for years for two main reasons. I expected a steep learning curve, and I assumed I'd have to give up some of the Windows apps I rely on every day. Either one is enough to make switching feel like more trouble than it's worth.

I’ve been using Linux for many, many years now, but I still keep learning new things all the time. It seems like, no matter what task you’re running, there’s a faster way to do it. So I decided to start focusing on these speed gains to see just how fast my terminal life can be.

Buying used enterprise storage is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you look at the price and becomes more complicated once you actually put the hardware into a machine. Enterprise HDDs that originally cost a small fortune can appear on the used market for surprisingly little money. For a homelab, where storage capacity is always useful and budgets are rarely unlimited, it is difficult to ignore those prices.

I've been an Arch user for five years, and it's been a love-hate relationship. I love having access to the AUR (Arch User Repository) and the hundreds of thousands of packages it brings with it, along with access to bleeding-edge updates as soon as they drop. But at the same time, I hate it when a buggy update just wrecks my system, not to mention the current malware mess with the AUR and all the headaches that come with it.

Back in 1998, four of the biggest names in enterprise computing agreed on something wild. IBM, the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Sequent, and Intel would merge their separate UNIX systems into one OS for Intel's upcoming 64-bit chips. They called it Project Monterey.

One reason that Linux has struggled to gain desktop users is the perception that the Linux desktop is a mess. Apps look too different from each other, and command-line elitists rule the system. The way the Linux desktop is the way it is largely stems from Linux's predecessor, Unix, and some design choices made in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

Linux is famously smaller and lighter than Windows, but that understates just how small Linux distros can really be. There are complete, general-purpose operating systems that only take up 200MB of storage—truly tiny by the standards of 2026.

I've been in the Windows camp for decades, and for years I thought Linux was simply harder to use. That was a pretty common view among Windows and Mac users, and for a long time, it was fair.

If you type a lot of commands in Bash, it can be time-consuming to navigate, correct, and add strings to achieve the desired output. I've found my fair share of typing errors, multi-instruction commands, and complex interpreters. There are ways to speed up the typing process without wearing you out or giving you headaches, from short codes and hotkeys to cool shortcuts and hidden features.

Firefox, GIMP, and LibreOffice are the obvious, popular apps that you'll see everyone recommend for your Linux system. But there are many more apps beyond those.

Proxmox is remarkably forgiving when you use it the way it was designed to be used. With it, you can have a functioning homelab in an afternoon, but that ease and simplicity can also encourage a lot of mistakes.