How do you choose the best Linux distro for your needs?

Choosing the best Linux distro involves considering factors like your technical proficiency, hardware compatibility, intended use, and personal preferences. For beginners, user-friendly distros like Ubuntu or Linux Mint are recommended, offering robust community support and extensive software repositories. Advanced users may prefer more customizable options like Arch Linux or Fedora. Consider hardware requirements and compatibility, ensuring the distro supports your system components. Evaluate the available software packages and desktop environments to align with your workflow and preferences. Lastly, explore community forums, user reviews, and compatibility lists to gather insights and make an informed decision.

Your Linux distribution choice for your hardware will come down to what your deployed systems are meant to do and that will dictate which system architectures are required and what distributions support it; if you are deploying edge systems, for example, like low-power IoT devices, you might need a lightweight OS that supports ARM chips, if you're an enterprise, you may need to find an OS that offers this arch with enterprise-tier hardware testing and support for the product, etc. If you are attached to specific kinds of network hardware, or storage, this can also impact which Linux distributions may best serve your workloads deployed onto it (i.e. if using as Kubernetes or virtualizations hosts).

Community size and activity is important context, even if you do purchase professional services or utilize enterprise support for your distribution; not every unexpected behavior is a bug or regression, and seeing how other users handle various issues, patterns of use, or even discuss operations and sharing tooling and open-sourced runbooks for the ecosystem can improve the user experience, and increase the quality of your experience at work as operators. This is far better than being left to find these things out yourself, or worse, having to burn paid support hours on them and being left without recourse when/if paid enterprise support from your vendor may truly be needed.

Many distribution maintaining organizations are active in many domains of interest to consumers of Linux beyond the maintenance system package repositories, if you are looking to tightly couple your OS with those domains, such as virtualization and container orchestration, one might recommend considering the features your organization needs from that level of software as well in determining the underlying operating system interoperability as well, as well as from the perspective of community support.