from Hacker News

Distro Chooser

by franzpeterstein on 9/17/16, 5:30 PM with 50 comments

• by Paul_S on 9/17/16, 10:32 PM

  1/25 suitable after only 3 questions. I think the selection might be flawed.

  Anyway, any reasoning that divides distros between easy to use and hard to use is nonsense. Just because I'm used to Linux doesn't mean Ubuntu isn't the right distro for me. The questionnaire logic goes: well, you're capable of running this distro so you should run this distro.

  Reality is if you're a developer you either use RHEL because that's what corporate chose or you use Ubuntu because that is the platform chosen by library devs and unless you use it as well you will waste time sorting out issues.

  If you're a user then it doesn't matter what distro you use, they're all fine. If you want to play games then your best bet is Ubuntu.

• by bunderbunder on 9/17/16, 8:27 PM

  I like all of the questions it's asking, and appreciate the guidance. One thing that would really polish this off, though, is to put some extra time into the results page.

  The explanations of what distinguishes each distribution are, to me, a wall of Linux jargon that is all familiar (Slackware was my primary OS for a while in the late '90s and early '00s), but also largely meaningless. From a user perspective, I'm interested in a tool like this precisely because I've got no idea whether I should prefer GNOME or Unity or KDE nowadays, and I don't really care to take the time to sift through the flamewars to find out. So when I'm dropped into the results and the top results are five different flavors of Ubuntu distinguished by what desktop environment they use, and the explanatory text for each largely boils down to, "Portmanteau-of-Ubuntu-and-$DesktopEnvironment is Ubuntu with $DesktopEnvironment", I'm left feeling like the tool has taken me on a short ride around the neighborhood and then dropped me off exactly where I started.

• by blueside on 9/17/16, 8:13 PM

  asking for the preferred package manager is a bit too much of a giveaway

• by k-mcgrady on 9/17/16, 9:03 PM

  Pretty cool. I've dipped my toes in Linux over the years with Ubuntu being the distro I used longest. I tried it recently and wasn't too impressed with the UI. This was suggesting Mint to me and after a quick look on the site I may give it a try. I always liked KDE too and it suggested Kubuntu which might be worth looking into as well.

  As for the site you could make the questions shorter/more easily readable. A radio button instead of a hyperlink would be much more intuitive for selection (and possibly auto-advancing to the next question once an option is selected).

• by nmstoker on 9/17/16, 10:39 PM

  I thought the recommendations are excellent for me.

  Plenty of useful feedback from other users here. The one idea I'd develop from what one other said was improving the results page descriptions. You could actually use a couple of question responses to mildly tailor the descriptions - eg, a less experienced user could have text with a lower level of assumptions made and a more experienced user would get responses more relevant to where they were.

  Finally, I'd have preferred to know it was a probabilistic recommendation up-front (as was initially concerned that I'd rule out choices with some responses)

• by cuillevel3 on 9/17/16, 8:01 PM

  Why is everyone suggesting NixOS to me?

• by veddox on 9/17/16, 9:34 PM

  Neat tool! Still needs some polish though:

  1) The English translation feels a little bumpy (as compared to the German).

  2) The presentation of the various distros should be a little more considerate of newbies (see bunderbunder's earlier comment).

  3) A few questions need rethinking, especially the one on the target manager (see blueside's comment) and the one about the community.

  Otherwise: great idea, concisely executed.

• by fdomig on 9/17/16, 7:52 PM

  I bit odd not to ask for WHAT I care a lot. E.g. security, updates, age of packages, support, etc.

• by sebisebi on 9/17/16, 8:39 PM

  Are there any Distros that can be installed persistent to a USB on Windows, that boot UEFI? I formerly used Puppy Linux, but the UEFI installation didn't work with Rufus.

• by edcastro on 9/17/16, 6:41 PM

  That directed me to the exact distro I'm using. Nice. :D

• by seanwilson on 9/17/16, 8:52 PM

  Looks useful but I found it was too much effort to fill out. I think you could easily reduce the amount of text per question e.g. the first one could be rewritten to something like this:

  I'm good at fixing computer issues myself 1) Agree 2) Disagree

  Also, if you move on to the next question automatically after an answer is given instead of having to press "next" the process would be a lot quicker.

• by ramblenode on 9/17/16, 9:34 PM

  I was a bit skeptical while answering the questions, but the recommendations were spot-on and I gave them 5 stars. Top result was my current distro, NixOS, which I wasn't expecting because this is a fairly uncommon distro. I appreciate how thorough the list of distros seems to be.

• by busterarm on 9/17/16, 8:24 PM

  It's about right. It picked Slackware, which I used for years. I'm surprised how far down on the list Arch was, as I'd used that too...

  I just wish BSDs were an option here (I know, I know, not the goal here). I'm bullish on OpenBSD.

• by mablap on 9/17/16, 11:10 PM

  The proposed distro (Debian) was spot on for me. You could probably split the questionnaire between people who want to try linux for the first time, and people who want to try a new distro.

• by olp2 on 9/18/16, 2:59 AM

  It just pinpointed Debian, however I think asking about the package manager creates too big of a bias for a "chooser".

  pick: next button messes with the browser history.

• by smkellat on 9/17/16, 8:33 PM

  It guessed Xubuntu. I'm using Xubuntu at the moment. How it then jumped from that to Slackware...damfino.

• by steanne on 9/17/16, 7:54 PM

  rolling versus non?

• by ashitlerferad on 9/18/16, 2:45 AM

  Seems to be broken without JavaScript turned on?