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 🇮🇪
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: Cinnamon

Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)

https://www.linuxmint.com/

Ubuntu

  • Country: Britain 🇬🇧
  • Experience: Simple
  • Desktop: GNOME

Good distro, but has some controversies. Though it’s the most popular beginners distro by far.

https://ubuntu.com/

EndeavourOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

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.

https://endeavouros.com/

OpenSUSE

  • Country: Germany 🇩🇪
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE

It’s mainly built around using the GUI, with tools like yast. Uses KDE.

https://www.opensuse.org/

NixOS

  • Country: Netherlands 🇳🇱
  • Experience: Advanced
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME

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.

https://nixos.org/

Arch

  • Country: Canada 🇨🇦 (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 🇪🇸
  • 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.

https://voidlinux.org/

Debian [Honorary mention]

  • Country: Global 🌍
  • Experience: Intermediate
  • Desktop: KDE/GNOME/XFCE

An honorary mention. Isn’t suited for everyone, but is the golden standard for servers, and the grandfather of a huge family tree of distros.

https://www.debian.org/

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:

  • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    10 hours ago

    Thanks for this post. Here’s my contribution:

    Search results for Lemmy communities for these distros:

    Others mentioned in the comments (I can’t vouch for their “Europeanness”):

    Others (I can’t vouch for their “Europeanness”):

    At this point I remembered Distrowatch and realized you can search by country of origin. E.g. Distrowatch search for active distros from Austria. And Italy.

    Too many European countries and too many distros for me to do them all. If anyone else wants to chip in, e.g. pick a country, feel free.

    And if one neighbouring country (Canada) being threatened by that f$#king guy can get an honorary mention here, let’s include another, too: Mexico.

    Mexicans also started the GNOME desktop environment, but I don’t think the upcoming GNOME OS is based in Mexico.