Linux is nice and fun, and Linus himself is European. However there are lots of distributions based in various countries. All of them are international in some way or other, however there are distinctly European ones. If it’s commercial, where is the company located. If it’s community based, where do the leaders come from and what languages are supported. What languages does the community support or is active in.
This is an incomplete list. Could you help with your own recommendations?
You can use Distrowatch search to filter by country of origin, base distro, package manager, desktop environment, and many more.
The distros I recommend the most from the ones below are:
- Gecko Linux for stable bleeding edge
- Omarchy for (web) developers and lovers of efficient aesthetic UX
- Garuda for gamers, power users, and lovers of loud neon looks
- KaOS for systemd haters and Niri/KDE lovers
- OpenSuSE leap for something boring, mainstream, and stable
NixOS
NixOS is highly configurable and portable across operating systems. Super powerful, advanced , innovative, but not beginner friendly. Based in the Netherlands.
SuSE
Originally a German distribution. (Open)SuSE is a distro that has been around sind the 1990s and is strongly connected with KDE. The Qt framework not being FOSS back in the day, is the reason for GNOME to exist today. The parent company was originally based in Nürnberg, now based in Luxembourg with offices in Düsseldorf and Nürnberg in Germany. They sell Suse Linux Enterprise Server.
OpenSuSe
OpenSuSE is a great allround distro for beginners and pros alike. The rolling release Tumbleweed gets you bleeding edge packages, but with more stability than Arch. Leap has a six month release cycle, offering more stability.
Gecko Linux
Gecko Linux is a derivative that includes often used nonfree packages like codecs, drivers, firmware.
OpenMandriva
OpenMandriva is French and historically comes from Mandrake Linux.
Mageia
Fork of Mandriva for complicated reasons. French
KaOS
KaOS is a Dutch based distro with a focus on KDE, Niri/Noctalia, and being free from systemd.
MocaccinoOS
MocaccinoOS an Italian distro with an Italian name, their own package manger, and great taste. Based on LFS, Gentoo, Sabayon.
Arch Linux based
Omarchy
Omarchy is a very opinionated fully configured desktop OS featuring Hyprland compositor. Optimized for easy fast installation and keyboard focused interaction. Targets developers. Looks very nice, has great documentation and support. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Manjaro
Manjaro developed from Mandrake Linux. Based in France, Germany Austria. Nowadays Arch based with a little slower releases to improve stability. Strong local communities and also commercial support available.
Elégance
Elégance is obviously French and based on Manjaro with some niceties on top. Good Gaming Support.
Garuda Linux
Garuda Linux comes fully configured, and pre-riced with lots of eye candy, gamer support, lots of ease of life tools. Everything you need or want is included and configured. Makes installing and running Arch a lot easier. KDE Focus, but other DEs are supported as well. Leader is German. Strong German and Italian communities. Have their own precompiled repositories, speeding up installs.
EndeavourOS
EndeavourOS is Arch with some helpers on top. Still close to Arch with lots of steps during installation and configuration. Strong language specific communities for several languages. Based in the Netherlands.
CachyOS
CachyOS is Arch based with a friendly installer and a few helpers. The install is still barebones. Optimized for speed with aggressive compiler optimizations set.
Debian based
Sparky
Sparky comes from Poland and comes with LXDE as desktop.
Vailux
Vailux is based in Germany and targets users coming from Windows.
TUXEDO
TUXEDO tailored for the computers made by German computer maker TUXEDO.
Fedora
Fedora is RedHat, which is American. I know Linus Torvalds uses it. On technical merits Fedora might be the best and most advanced at the moment. Especially the atomic distros.
EU OS
EU OS is an initiative for digital sovereignty. Sadly they are using Fedora as a base.
Ubuntu
Is based in South Africa, which is in Africa.
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IMO this completely misses the point of “buy European”.
Volunteers maintaining the distros and mirrors are spread around the globe.
Boycotting a distro because it was founded by Americans doesn’t help anyone.
You’re not buying anything. You don’t pay any money.
In fact, if you just use the distro without contributing, you’re a net drain on their resources.
(This is why the often stated “Linux should do X to get more market share” also misses the point. There is no market.)Unless you’re actually paying for an enterprise distro, then SUSE is your best option.
Just be aware they heavily cooperate with Red Hat and Microsoft, and fully embrace AI.I’d like one for gaming that doesn’t have that weird bright lights RBG gaming laptop aesthetic
Btw what’s wrong with Europe using Fedora? It’s not like Fedora is able to Killswitch EU OS or anything, just like Google can’t just Killswitch brave browser
I’d want to be as far away from US for-profit companies as possible, and Fedora is (afaik) the upstream for Red Hat’s commercial offerings. Though if Red Hat is turning full evil, Linux has a big problem anyway, considering that (afaik) they employ most of the people who (are paid to) develop the linux kernel, systemd and gnome.
Either way, replacing Microsoft with Red Hat (if the EU ends up using Red Hat’s support in some way) seems kind of unnecessary, considering that SUSE and Ubuntu are both European.
Linux Mint is Debian/Ubuntu based and the main developer is French. I think it’s based in… Ireland?
Also, the desktop environment KDE is based in Germany. So Opensuse with KDE should be the absolutely most european distro.
Linux mint?
Re Ubuntu:
Canonical Ltd. is a privately held company supporting computer software, based in London, England. It was founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth […]. Canonical employs staff in more than 70 countries and maintains offices in London, Austin, Boston, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo and the Isle of Man.
Portugal used to have a distro called Caixa Mágica (Magic Box), that was mainly used for kids in school, usually in dual boot with Windows. This used to be the way kids would have access to the Linux ecosystem for the first time.
Also some government branches also used it as alternative to Windows, I believe.
But since Caixa Mágica was a government venture, they made it proprietary, so it’s not widely available to download.
Also, I have no idea if this distribution still receives any updates and improvements.
Some bit of history, certainly.
Tuxedo deserves more praise than just being a tailored distro for Tuxedo Hardware. It is a better Ubuntu really. Flatpak instead of Snap and KDE Plasma / Wayland by default.
As someone who previously used Mint and Ubuntu it is absolutely my ideal distro at this time, it runs on every hardware that runs Ubuntu.
True, I’m currently using Elementary OS, but due to my laptop being a white label Clevo, I can use their Tuxedo panel thingamabob with RGB suport for my keyboard. It’s pretty sweet to have a GUI for that.
Tomte :)
Hadn’t heard of Omarchy, sounds interesting …
Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated Linux by DHH*
Oh No
(Let’s be real, I’d never actually use an Arch derivative. Maybe worth checking out to steal the config.)
*the Ruby on Rails guy
Really nice list, though. e.g. I didn’t know that KaOS is completely its own thing and also doesn’t use systemd.
It’s possible to separate the artwork from the artist. There are plenty of people I don’t like, but still use their software. People have different boundaries of course
Omarchy is one the most interesting Linux distros, I have tried over the last decade. It does a lot of things contrary to the popular and conventional wisdom and is successful with it. The install takes over a whole drive, asks you for keyboard layout, username, and password. Less than ten minutes later after selecting the installer at boot, it was fully installed and updated. I have never seen anything like that.
Instead of trying to be accommodating to new Linux users by imitating Windows or macOS, it leans into the strengths of Linux and tries to actually teach you something.
The keyboard focused UX is very polished and accessible. The integrated themes are very well done as well.
Neovim is the only installed editor. To make it friendlier it includes lazyvim. No other distro does that.
I hope we get more opinionated distros in this vein.
Omarchy isn’t really “art” though. It’s a set of dot files on top of Arch basically. And not very good ones either, there’s plenty to critique there. It also installs a bunch of US-based software like Spotify, Zoom, ChatGPT and Chromium, which seems to run counter to what you’re trying to achieve with this post.
Well, have fun with your far right distro. I’m not going to trust such a central part of my life like my PC’s operating system with someone who is aligned with people who commit racist violence. Might as well send Trump my email password.
Could you explain how Omarchy or the developer is far right?
In 2025, Hansson published a blog post[30] expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests. In response, members of the Ruby on Rails community called for his removal from project governance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Right-wing_politics_and_controversy
This is apparently also a big part of why the Ruby Gems controversy happened, one of its sponsors pulled out because they didn’t want to be associated with far righters, and then Shopify made its move to fill the gap and do a takeover.
I can’t quite imagine that the people on Omarchy’s team are unaware of this.
ew, I gleemed a bit through the blog post, naah, Omarchy is out for me.
If you’re a developer, you really should try NixOS or at least Nix with
direnv. Reproducible environments are just so much better !OpenSUSE
Same, but did op called OpenSUSE boring? But i’m on tumbleweed and not leap
Boring is good. It means it works and isn’t chasing trends.
For example it doesn’t insist you install flat packs.
I had many problems with the NVidia drivers on Open side tumbleweed. But if it wasn’t for that, I’d probably be rocking it, because everything else was to my liking.
Zorin is an ubuntu spin out of ireland.
