I’m not saying its not possible, I am disagreeing that his is a valid point as an argument for “the distro does not matter” statement.

But when the question is between Ubuntu and Kubuntu you can “convert” between them very easily. Not to mention that the fundamental difference between all Debian based distros is the version of the packages they offer, so you can very easily jump between them expecting most things to be the same.

These are not the only reasons, but good reasons WHY the distribution matters. BTW I also think that some distributions are technically superior for certain use cases. In example CachyOS is more up to date, has optimizations even on Kernel level, compared to an old Debian distribution that is focused on stability. These are technical differences that matter, for whatever you want to achieve. It’s not just a personal taste.

Yes, that matters for you, it doesn’t matter for someone who just wants something to use. That contributes to the decision paralysis of switching to Linux, when we say distro doesn’t matter we’re trying to remove that hurdle, because for the average guy that will just use his computer the difference between Debian and CachyOS is the name. Someone without experience in Linux doesn’t understand what stability means, they think it means the system won’t crash so they always try to use stable distros and get frustrated because they’re out of date, or alternatively they think they want bleeding edge until it cuts them. And that’s the crux of the issue, when we make a distro choice, it matters because we understand the differences, when a new user is trying to pick their first distro they’re essentially throwing a dice, it doesn’t matter where it lands, it matters how they feel about it.

It’s hard for us to put ourselves back in the shoes of someone just getting started,

They are thetorical questions

But they’re not, they might be to you or me, but for someone without Linux knowledge they’re very real questions. I have answered some form of some of those from people in the past.

If they don’t understand the differences, then they SHOULD research and debate until they do.

Oh really? Would you mind telling me what’s the difference between Pop, Ubuntu and Mint in a way that would matter for someone who doesn’t understand anything about Linux?

Choosing a random distribution and hopping until they understand is not only waste of time and resources, it will teach them wrong lessons this way.

Having to research what to use before understanding the difference will teach them nothing and make them give up before starting.

I for myself researched for months before I landed on Ubuntu in 2008 as the default, to replace Windows XP. Then I kept using it for… I think 15 years straight or so (forgot the exact numbers).

Yeah, but 2008 was a very different playing field than it is today. 2008 we were almost unanimously recommending Ubuntu or Mint, every forum you asked, every thread you found online it would have been essentially the same recommendation. It’s easy to make the decision then. Today if you open 4 different articles from 4 different sites you will likely get at least 4 different answers to which distro you should choose. And theyake it seem like it’s this big important decision that you have to get right the first time around, that’s the mentality we’re trying to fight.

I don’t like the analogy of “clothes” or someone else with “colors”. Distributions are extremely complex and there is way more work and knowledge involved, they have way more impact and dependencies.

An expert in clothes might tell you the same about them, and that’s what you’re missing, you are an expert, to you the difference between Mint and Pop is concrete and mensurable, to someone who doesn’t understand what I package manager is it’s just vague words without any meaning.

And to your point if someone asks me “do clothes matter?” i will say “off course”. Not just to contradict you, but because I think clothes do matter depending on how they fit to me, to the situation I am and how nice it feels, how it looks and so on. Even on practical side, if it rains or if I want to swim. While I don’t like this clothes analogy, I still wanted answer that question you assumed I would say “no”.

Cool, now explain to an alien who walks around naked why this jean and t-shirt is different from that jeans and t-shirt.

Just because it does not matter for most, does not mean that it does not matter at all.

And if the alien above asked you what clothes to wear to go to the supermarket, you would just say “any jeans and t-shirt would do”, only to have dozen of other people telling him “use this shirt and this pants”, “No, that’s a bad color combination for your eye color, use this one instead”, “No, that show is hard to lace, use this outfit instead”, “You’re not really dressed unless you wear a custom tailor suit”, etc, etc…

They don’t know it does not matter.

Precisely why we tell them it doesn’t.

I think there are choices better suited to them, even if they don’t know and say it does not matter - it does, they just don’t know it yet.

Yes, exactly, but they won’t know until they understand, and you won’t know until they understand, and they won’t understand until they do, and no amount of reading will make them understand. The initial choice between 5 different “noob” friendly distros doesn’t matter, the understanding you get from that will guide your next step, trying to take the next step before knowing where you’re standing is a recipe for disaster

I see often people say that the distro you are using doesn’t matter.

For certain things it doesn’t. Usually this is brought up in the context of someone wanting to choose between 5 possible valid alternatives to start using Linux, and the advice is “it doesn’t matter, just pick whichever and when something annoys you you might understand the difference”

One can turn any distro into another. And I do not agree with that.

You can disagree all you want, it’s 100% possible, stupid, but possible.

If that was true, why do we even have so many distributions?

Because philosophy matters. You don’t pick a distro because it’s technically superior or because it has features others don’t have (with some exceptions like NixOS). You pick a distro because it’s philosophy speaks to you, be it “I aim to be user friendly” or “I aim to follow KISS”. This is why for the most part distro doesn’t matter for newcomers, because they’re looking at 5 examples of “I aim to be user friendly and…” distros.

• … why distro hop?

Because I want to try something different and see how I feel about it.

• … why don’t you use Ubuntu then?

I did, for a long time, then I decided that building my system up was easier than tearing it down. If I was using Plasma or Gnome I wouldn’t have switched probably.

• … why don’t you recommend Archlinux to a newcomer?

Because Arch philosophy is KISS, meaning you have to build everything from the ground up and you’re expected to understand the steps and read the manual. This is why I believe distros like Manjaro or CachyOS cause issues, they remove the initial hurdle of Arch but don’t change the core philosophy, making them ticking time bombs for people who don’t know their way around Linux.

• … why don’t you use Kali Linux as a server?

You do you, my servers don’t usually need all of the extra tools a distro with the philosophy of “I’m a pen tester tool” has.

• … why don’t you use Batocera or SteamOS as your daily driver?

Because usually I want my daily driver to do computer stuff, and those distros philosophy is “I’m a gaming console”

• … why do you trust a community distro more than a corporate distro? (or vice versa)

I don’t trust either more inherently than the other, I trust distros that have a track history of good behavior.

I don’t think that distros only matter to newcomers. Maybe it matters for experienced users even more.

Distros matter, they tell a lot about what you’re trying to accomplish. But most newcomers are debating for days whether they should use Ubuntu, Pop, Mint, Fedora or CachyOS, and realistically they’re unlikely to even understand the difference between those. Think on distros like clothes, if you’re just going to the market it doesn’t matter what clothes you wear, if you’re going to a job interview it matters, and if you’re going to do something very specific like swimming some clothes are simply better than others. But if someone asks you “do clothes matter?” You will probably reply no, because for most stuff you do as long as you’re not wearing clothes with holes in them you’re fine, but you can tell a lot about people by the clothes they decide to wear. It’s a similar thing for distros, for most stuff it doesn’t matter, for certain things it’s important for others it gives some information and for some specific cases it makes a huge difference, but for the most part it’s a personal choice.

When I first started using Linux I used Kate, I know, I know, not command line, but I didn’t needed a command line editor for my own computer. Eventually I started using nano for quick edits and that became my default CLI editor for a while. I don’t remember what I used as an IDE back then, but maybe it was Eclipse, although I think it was mostly just Kate.

Eventually I decided to learn either VI or Emacs, and a friend who used Emacs pushed me to that side. I ended up switching everything to emacs, CLI, IDE, I even learnt org-mode and had tables and presentations in it.

Eventually my pinky started to hurt too much, so I switched to Pycharm for python, and kept emacs for C++, text edits and org-mode. I ended up slowly switching emacs everywhere and reverted to nano.

Some years back I decided to properly learn vim. I have been using nvim for a few years, and while it’s not the everything tool that emacs was for me, it’s still pretty darn useful. I also haven’t become a movement ninja and oftentimes I go wwwwww to get where I want to be. But still, there are some very nice shortcuts that I use a lot like Change Inside/Around or Delete X lines. Macros are cool, and sometimes feel magical, but other times they don’t work like I expected and I can’t figure out why. I don’t see myself changing to something else, the ubiquity of vim shortcuts in other programs makes it very convenient when I have to use something else.

Everyone who said proxmox didn’t read your post to the end. Proxmox is great for people who want a machine to just self-host things and don’t care about how things work. You don’t seem like that sort of person, and you also mentioned Moonlight which will be annoying to do on proxmox as it’s not intended for that use case.

Every system capable of being used as a Moonlight client can run self-hosted services, but the other way around is not true. So it’s better to start with the Moonlight part.

So, with that in mind I imagine you want this machine to be plugged to a TV in the living room or something similar, so it needs to have a GUI, and the GUI probably needs to be something you can navigate with a controller (although the new Steam controller probably increases that definition dramatically).

You will already have one system with a GUI, so it’s easier to use the same thing. Really, don’t overthink this, if it’s good for general use it’s good for self-hosting, and you don’t want to have to learn how to solve the same problem in multiple ways because of different distros. In the future considering different distros makes sense, but when you’re just getting started nailing the basics is easier with consistency across systems. Think about it this way, if you were learning how to write mixing cursive and print at the same time would be harder than choosing one and then learning the other.

But why proxmox is great? It’s because it makes it easy and gives you a GUI to add services. How hard is it to do the same on Linux using docker? Ssh into the server, edit a small text file and run a single command, all of which should be easy for you since you’ve probably done this in the past, but for most people that is very hard and that is where proxmox shines.

Don’t believe me? You said Jellyfin, this is the whole Jellyfin file with comments:

# Services that this file creates
services:
  # Name of the service, it can be whatever you want
  jellyfin:
    # Image this server runs, this is what tells what the service is
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:latest
    # Volumes to mount. In the format <local>:<inside the image>
    # So this will mount the ./jellyfin folder inside /config for the image
    # some services require specific folders inside of them, e.g. /config to store jellyfin's configs, otherwise the folder would get lost with every restart of the service 
    volumes:
      - ./jellyfin:/config
    # Rarely needed, but this gives hardware access to the image. Specifically access to the /dev/dri device
    # Jellyfin specifically benefits from this for transcoding 
    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
    # This shows what ports you want to expose, again in the format <local>:<inside the image>
    # So if you want Jellyfin on port 8080 on your machine you don't need to change settings, just do 8080:8096
    ports:
      - 8096:8096
      - 8920:8920
      - 7359:7359/udp
    # This tells docker to restart the service if it crashes, unless you've stopped it
    restart: unless-stopped

That’s it, and this is one of the most complicated ones out there, here’s a simple one:

services:
  radarr:
      image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
      volumes:
        - ./radarr:/config

Of course there’s more to those files, and lots of extra configurations to be used, but the core is very simple and the rest is just needed for special cases.