List of European Linux Distributions (inspired by blaze's post)

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 🇮🇪
• 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 🇬🇧
• 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 🇳🇱
• 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 🇩🇪
• 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 🇩🇪 / Austria 🇦🇹 / France🇫🇷
• 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 🇳🇱
• 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 🇨🇦 (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 🇪🇸
• 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 🌍
• 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 🌍️
• 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: