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00:00 Intro
00:37 Sponsor: Monitor and secure your internet access with Safing
01:19 Desktop Environments
02:57 Distros are NOT their desktop
05:01 The DE creates the first impression
06:40 The distro still matters
09:33 Sponsor: 150€ off your Slimbook Executive Ultrabook
10:00 Support the channel



Let's begin with a quick refresher: a desktop environment is the compilation of all programs that are going to make your graphical desktop.

Linux has plenty of these desktops environments, and the choice of that desktop environment is what is going to make or break your first experience with Linux.

Ok, so desktop environments are important. But why are they more important than the distribution?

Well, the first thing is most people conflate a distribution and its default desktop environment. This only works for one distro, and that's elementary OS, because their desktop environment and the experience they provide isn't really available in other distros.

In some cases, I'd say the changes that have been added are enough to turn these customizations into another desktop entirely. Other changes are really not that important, like what Ubuntu adds on top of GNOME, or the Manjaro GNOME version. So, virtually any desktop implementation from a distro, can be replicated onto any other distro. Which means that the distro itself doesn't really matter for the graphical experience.

What makes the experience good, or bad, is the desktop environment. We could argue that the implementation of it, or the stability of the distro's base could play a role, but it's really minor compared to the experience with the desktop, and its default programs.

On top of that, you can install almost all desktops on almost all distributions, whatever the default desktop you picked.

For someone who's already familiar with Linux, distros DO matter, quite a lot, just as the philosophy of the distro itself, the personal preferences, the experience we had with various other distros... It's all important.

For a beginner, these elements do not matter at all. Someone starting with Linux won't care about BTRFS or ext4, about systemd or not systemd, about using flatpaks, snaps, or legacy packaging formats, like RPMs and DEBS.

Beginners will rarely, or at least SHOULDN't HAVE TO interact with these elements of their system. They should use graphical solutions that abstract all of these differences for them, and make them basically irrelevant.

What we should recommend to beginners is a desktop environment first: do they prefer the look and feel of KDE? GNOME, Pantheon, Cinnamon, or something else? Once they've decided on that, then they can be guided towards a distribution, even though they could pick any that uses that desktop, and they would probably be fine.