What version of Linux should you install?

From your question it seems you’re new to the world of Linux.

If so, welcome friend, I hope you have a good time.

But more to the point, as an introduction to Linux, my top choices are Ubuntu, Mint and Manjaro.

Ubuntu is probably the most known and used Linux distribution (personal perception here, corrections are welcome!). It is popular because it focuses on simplicity and user-friendliness, and it works on most hardware out of the box.

Mint is also user-friendly, especially if you come from Windows, as it tries to provide a similar user interface, making it feel more familiar from the get-go.

And finally, Manjaro is in the list as the user-friendly version of my current favourite distribution, Arch Linux. Arch can be challenging for a beginner, but Manjaro does an awesome work of providing all its functionalities with much more ease of use.

All of these can be installed using a graphical interface that makes the process as painless as possible, and the Internet is full of guides and tutorials to help along the way.

I don’t think you can go wrong with any of them, but just in case you may decide to try a Live version first, or even an installation on a virtual machine, to try them out.

Ubuntu Mate is Ubuntu but with a great user interface. Mint is also nice, but I had trouble with it. LTS versions of Ubuntu are very stable and offer about 5 years of support, bug fixes, without having to upgrade. Even upgrading to a newer version is a breeze (most of the time).

CentOS is an enterprise distribution. It means it is very stable and comes with about 10 to 15 years of support without having to upgrade. It is the kind of system you can leave running on a server for years without rebooting, or use as a desktop. The drawback of this is that it doesn’t have all the latest applications. Enterprise distribution emphasize on stability, on making sure that a release is really stable, than on getting the latest application.

I think Ubuntu mate is better on home computers, since it has more recent apps, and on laptops, since it has a more recent kernel and better hardware support. CentOS is more conservative and could be a better choice for office and on servers.

>> Also you can read: What should you do after installing Ubuntu