I've found that Distrowatch ranks OS by people's average ratings as well as their page-visit popularity. They give very different results, for example Linux Mint is ranked at number one by page-visits, but at rank one-hundred-and-ten by ratings.

As I'm considering changing or upgrading my OS, I have gone through the whole list of beginner's OS at DistroWatch and noted down their rating score.

In the list below, first is the rating, then the total number of people who rated it, then the name of the OS.

At the end of each line, as a crude measure of how up to date the OS is, is the number of versions behind the current version of Firefox that the distribution is. So with the current version of Firefox being 53, a version on the distribution of 45 would give the number 8. (My Linux Mint OS ships with FF50 and so has a number of 3, but has updated itself to the latest version).

"NA" means not available.

10,1 pinguy os,8
9.68,25 solydxk,8
9.57,7 korora project,3
9.41,29 ubuntu mate,1
9.27,88 pclinuxos,0
9.2,10 chaletos,6
9.09,23 linux lite,1
9.0,1 rebellin linux,3
9.0,1 emmabuntus,8
8.84,126 linux mint,3
8.79,28 elementary os,NA
8.42,59 zorin os,NA
8.0,1 ubuntu desktop pack,6
8.0,1 uberstudent,10
7.42,12 sabayon,NA
7.17,83 ubuntu,3
7.11,9 netrunner,1
7.0,3 robolinux,8
5.25,4 black lab linux,NA
NA,NA toutou linux,NA

Ignoring the OSs with a low number of raters and hence a less reliable rating, it looks as if PCLinuxOS is top of the list, and its version of Firefox is right up to date as well. The large number of raters also suggests it has a big user-base and support.

If you are willing to take a chance with a lesser number of raters, then Solydxk and Ubuntu Mate both have a slightly higher rating, although Solydxk ships with a version of Firefox that is eight versions old. I'd never heard of Solydxk before.

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?re...g&sort=average

Edit: comments indicate that Solydxk is not so good at providing hardware drivers, but that PCLinuxOS is good at providing hardware drivers.

I don't know why Ubuntu Mate is much higher in the list than Ubuntu.

good, i didn't know that.
strangely i'm getting different output:
1 Absolute Linux101
2 blackPanther OS102
3 BLAG Linux And GNU101
4 BlankOn101
5 Calculate Linux106
6 Chapeau101
7 Clonezilla Live101
8 CRUX102
9 Dragora GNU/Linux-Libre101
10 DuZeru101
11 Finnix101
12 Fuduntu101
13 Guix System Distribution102
14 IPFire102
15 Linspire101
16 NAS4Free101
17 OviOS Linux101
18 Pardus Topluluk101
19 Pinguy OS101
20 Proxmox101

calculate linux seems to be the winner here, with 6 votes, all 10/10.

I think that's because OP restricted their results to the beginners' distros, listed at https://distrowatch.com/search.php?o...=Active#simple

Ironically "reviews" just try them all until you wind up here: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/u...y-live-builds/ ...have fun!

This is a rather useless feature. Absolute got 10, but only one person reviewed it. Mint got an average of 8.77 from a total of 131 reviewers. And who are these reviewers, anyway?

If we're talking about beginners, then a vital thing is documentation. Is there a manual with installation and instructions? I liked Black Lab, but I don't remember any documentation, and some of the Ubuntu wiki is seriously dated — including the installation instructions. The Mint Manual is much more use, and the PCLinuxOS Knowledge Base is excellent.

1 members found this post helpful.

yes, one has to look at the number of reviews, and other spects.
rather useless yes, but not completely useless.

Distrowatch is only a single metric based on their data. It is not accurate for any other use.

I have been disappointed with PCLinuxOS, which I had thought I would install as my everyday operating system. I downloaded and used a liveCD, but it did not get itself on the internet, did not get the correct resolution for the display, would not recognise or print anything on my old printer.

I have just tried an old liveCD I have for Ubuntu 16.04.1 and it did all of the above automatically without requiring any intervention by me. However it is shocking that Ubuntu sends your disk searches off to Amazon and others so they can give you personalised adverts, despite promising that it would stop doing this.

My conclusion is that anyone who is not an expert should use the most mainstream Linux distributions, since these have the most support, and hopefully the biggest range of supported hardware, and save yourself hours of frustration trying to get the thing to work. So that means its either Ubuntu or Mint, and from my experience Ubuntu is probably better. Ubuntu has a different screen layout to what I was used to in Windows, but that is a trivial consideration.

The above suggests that the DistroWatch user rankings are unreliable, regrettably.

(All built on non-free what:)
...is this why the term "distro hopping" exists?

Hardware ("we" "buy") can make the difference between needing to DuckDuckGo or not.

Have fun!

Your info is out of date, grumpyskeptic - Ubuntu no longer do this, and online searching is also disabled by default.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/01/u...disabled-16-04

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/0...lts_gnu_linux/

I have now tried a Ubuntu Mate livecd, and I think that is the OS I shall upgrade to when I have time as it seems better than anything else I have tried. Although Mint is mainstream and quite well supported, Ubuntu is even more so both of those things. I prefer the Mate variation of Ubuntu as the screen layout is more classic/like-Windows, and it should not have the spyware problems that the mainstream version used to or maybe still does, plus it should be less demanding of resources and hence be quicker and more stable. It is also near the top of the list above.

I found that all the liveCDs would not automatically connect to the internet if I had turned my modem off when re-starting, but if I kept the modem on then they would. Only the Puppy Linux livecd would carefully guide you and help you to get connected to the internet, none of the others did. PL cannot be installed except with great difficulty, so is only useful as a liveCD.

I tend to agree with this. I think one of the 'buntus or Mints (things like Lubuntu, Xubuntu and the equivalent Mints, for example, would avoid Unity/GNOME[when it comes] and work on lower-powered systems) would be the way I would suggest people go.
On the other hand, there's a reason I started using Debian Sid as my day-to-day OS on all my machines and it's not because it's difficult to install, configure or use. Similarly, Slackware's a very logical system and arguably one of the most stable one can run due to being largely as upstream intended and preferring simplicity over complexity.
I suppose, after typing the above, it reminds me that people learning to install, configure and use Linux themselves (in other words not your dear old aunt who you sysadmin for) should really start with the easy stuff like Ubuntu and Mint, try things like Fedora and CentOS then look into Slackware, Gentoo and others and decide what is easiest for them. As I typed I really am not kidding and not trying to sound smart when I state that I use Debian Sid because I find it's the easiest way to do things -- I'm that lazy.