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 ๐ฎ๐ช
Experience: Simple
Desktop: Cinnamon
Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)
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.
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.
Country: Canada ๐จ๐ฆ (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 ๐ช๐ธ
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.
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:
I'm currently wondering whether this is going in the right direction. I understand that we are boycotting commercial products from the US, which makes perfect sense to me. But as someone who works on FOSS software myself, I wonder if we are hurting the right people by not using FOSS software that comes from the US. I think these are largely people who don't support Trump.
If you look at a lot of the other posts they're more along the lines of "these companies are based in the EU".... and that's it. Not why they're better than the US based equivalents or why the US based ones are worth boycotting.
And to a certain extent I understand that. But the signal to noise ratio has lowered considerably in the past few weeks.
I completely agree. I think FOSS software is way harder to control by a corporation (especially licensed copyleft) Personally i don't think it's harmful to use OSS software from any country at all. Whether by chinese, belgian or american as long as it is open source, it's fair game i think.
I shared this post since i thought this community might enjoy it, but all distros are fine.
Also i find "Europeaness" a bit sketchy, if things are developed globally. We should embrace global cooperation rather than mimicking US nationalism with a new "European" nationalism.