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?
Based on experience I’ve always found the Fedora community very helpful and knowledgeable, I wouldn’t exactly say humming with with activity on the discussion forums but maybe the best quality to quantity ratio and not much drama.