Since Red Hat made their recent decision, there has been a lot more talk about people wanting to focus on communiy-based distros instead of corporate-backed distros.
I was trying to think of how many active, stable, user friendly base community distros I know about. When I say a “base” distro, I mean a distro that’s basically the base for its ecosystem. For instance, Debian would be a base distro because it’s the base of its ecosystem. A community distro based on Ubuntu wouldn’t fit what I’m talking about here because Ubuntu is a corporate distro.
So, there’s Debian.
Arch is a base community distro but it’s not user friendly to install, but there are more user friendly varieties of Arch available like Manjaro and a few others.
All of the other base distros I can think of are either corporate, or aren’t particularly user friendly to install. Care to add your thoughts to the list?
From what I remember, AOSC OS is fairly easy to install, though it’s more niche, so I don’t know if I’d recommend it to a new user. There’s also Solus, I suppose, but while there is a new release out, I wouldn’t count on it remaining actively supported, given its track record. Not a lot else I can think of.
I used to use Mandrake back in the day. Those Mandrake descendants, as long as they’re actively being maintained, could be interesting.