Hi, years ago if someone had asked, “Which Linux Distribution has the best Community Support?” I would have answered “Ubuntu”, but mainly because my journey took me from openSuse to Ubuntu, with some detours around DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux, with Ubuntu being the clear winner in terms of having a friendly, welcoming, and active community.
The main avenues of finding support were #ubuntu on freenode (now https://libera.chat/) and https://ubuntuforums.org/ (now retired). Back then both of these were humming with activity. Today, the activity has severely decreased; people don’t seem to be hanging out in these spaces helping each other, with the occasional expert popping in and steering the conversation. They’re mostly quiet. There’s also discourse.ubuntu.com, which I don’t know well, and the Ubuntu Matrix space, which is just an awful buggy experience. Even today, Element took 5 minutes to load, and then hit me with the “this channel is closed, the conversation continues elsewhere” which didn’t work when I clicked it. Not like IRC at all.
All this to say, I don’t think I can recommend the Ubuntu Community any more, unless it truly is the best option and I’m doing it wrong somehow. I am open to that possibility!
The others I’ve heard of, and the preconceived notions I’ve heard are:
- Debian - community geared towards more advanced / knowledgeable users
- Arch - community geared towards more advanced / knowledgeable users
- Linux Mint - less active than Ubuntu
- Fedora - corporate Red Hat?
Could anybody help me out here to find a Linux Distribution where you can talk to actual helpful humans and solve a problem together if you get stuck?
Most of the Linux support community is all handled in forums, though there are some development oriented chat spaces. If you’re looking for a place to just hang out and get live help, youre probably not going to find that.
That being said, the documentation for all distros is massive, and about as complete as you can get. That should be enough for most people, but I understand that not everyone is so technically inclined. I’ll hit some key points:
Most active: Probably Fedora or Arch Best Wiki: Arch first, Fedora second, Debian third, with others usually referring to the above Most active: Arch first, Debian second, Fedora third, with most Fedora comms happening in dev channels and issue tickets
In order to get help though, you need to get familiar with figuring out if your issue is with the actual distribution (it almost never is), the specific software you’re having an issue with, or a combo of both where the software has a configuration issue with the specific distro you’re running.
If you’re having a problem with Audacity on Fedora for instance, don’t go looking to the Fedora community for help, because it likely has nothing to do with Fedora. Go to the Audacity GitHub and search issues first, then start looking for specific information to your issue (error messages, logs…etc) next.