Best Operating Software

Linux Mint is a free operating system for desktop and laptop computers, designed to work out of the box and shipping fully equipped with the applications most people need.

That design goal is the distinction, and it addresses the reason most people who try desktop Linux abandon it. A minimal distribution installs an operating system and expects the user to assemble a working environment: find a photo editor, find an office suite, work out which media codecs are needed and why the video will not play. Someone switching from a commercial operating system does not experience that as flexibility, they experience it as the machine not working.

Mint's position is that the applications should already be there. The published examples are concrete rather than abstract: Blender for 3D work, GIMP for image editing, Inkscape for vector graphics, alongside the office and media applications a general user expects.

The current release is version 22.3, named Zena, with published installation instructions and a documented installation guide.

The project's funding and governance are published openly, covering donors, sponsors and partners, alongside a store. For a free operating system with no commercial owner, publishing how it sustains itself is the equivalent of a business model disclosure, and it answers the reasonable question of what happens if the funding stops.

Community infrastructure is substantial: forums, chat rooms, a community website, Reddit and Discord presence, IRC, a podcast and local community groups in several languages. For a desktop operating system aimed at people leaving commercial platforms, accessible community support matters more than documentation quality, because the questions are frequently basic and the asker has nobody else to ask.

The distribution is free.

Fedora Linux is a free community Linux distribution published as several distinct editions rather than one operating system with options, and the edition structure is what distinguishes it.

Workstation ships the latest GNOME desktop, KDE Plasma ships the KDE desktop, Server runs applications on bare metal or in the cloud, Cloud provides images optimised for cloud infrastructure, CoreOS is a minimal automatically-updating system for running containerised workloads securely at scale, and IoT provides a foundation for device edge deployments.

CoreOS deserves particular attention because it represents a different philosophy about how servers should work. Conventional systems are installed once and patched continuously by an administrator, which means the running state drifts from any documented baseline and no two machines are quite identical after a year. CoreOS updates automatically and is deliberately minimal, treating the operating system as a replaceable substrate for containers rather than as a thing to be maintained. For an organisation running containerised workloads, that removes an entire category of configuration drift.

The Atomic Desktops line applies the same idea to the desktop, with Silverblue for GNOME, Kinoite for KDE, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic. Atomic desktops update as a whole image that can be rolled back, so a bad update is reversible rather than requiring repair.

Fedora is where technology destined for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is proven first, which explains the emphasis on recent open source components and the shorter support lifetime.

The distribution is free with no licence cost, sustained by community contribution.

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution published by Canonical, free to download and use, with commercial security, support and managed services available separately through Ubuntu Pro.

The commercial structure is the thing to understand, because it explains why a free operating system has a price page. The distribution itself costs nothing and always has. Ubuntu Pro adds extended security maintenance, broader package coverage and support commitments, which is what an organisation running Ubuntu in production actually needs and what a hobbyist does not.

The distinction matters most around support lifetimes. Long term support releases receive standard maintenance for a defined period, and the vendor notes the standard support period for 20.04 LTS has ended. An organisation with hundreds of machines on an unsupported release is accumulating unpatched vulnerabilities with no upgrade window scheduled, and Pro exists largely to solve that: it extends security coverage without forcing a distribution upgrade that the organisation cannot resource.

Coverage extends from cloud to edge, and the vendor cites Ubuntu as the operating system chosen by 66 percent of experienced developers in a 2020 HackerEarth developer survey.

Ubuntu Pro pricing is published at $25 per machine per year for a personal workstation, with figures of $300 and $500 published across the range, and weekday support priced at 50 percent of the 24/7 enterprise rate. A 30 day free trial is available.

Per-machine pricing with a published personal rate is unusually accessible, since it means an individual developer can obtain the same security maintenance an enterprise gets without an enterprise negotiation.