Ubuntu: User friendly and easy to setup
Ubuntu
ubuntu.com
Our take
Ubuntu is the friendly on-ramp to Linux, the distribution with the most tutorials, driver support, and forum answers when something breaks, which matters more than ideology for a first switch. Be aware Canonical has made past privacy missteps and pushes Snap packages some users dislike, so it is a step up from Windows rather than a privacy-maximalist choice. Pick it to get comfortable on Linux easily; tune the defaults or move to something stricter once you know your way around.
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Ubuntu alternatives
Qubes OS Qubes OS: A reasonably secure operating system
Tails Tails: Portable, encrypted and secure through the Tor network
Whonix A free, open-source desktop operating system that forces all traffic through Tor, run as two isolated virtual machines.
secureblue secureblue is a security-hardened immutable Linux OS built on Fedora Atomic Desktops. It ships as OCI bootable container images and applies kernel hardening, a hardened memory allocator from GrapheneOS, and a hardened Chromium browser called Trivalent.
Kicksecure Kicksecure is a security-hardened Debian-based Linux distribution that applies a broad set of kernel and userspace hardening settings out of the box, reducing the attack surface without requiring manual configuration. It also serves as the foundation for the Whonix anonymity OS.
Fedora Atomic Desktops Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, and others) are immutable Fedora variants where the base OS is read-only and updated atomically via rpm-ostree. Applications run as Flatpaks, and rollback to a prior OS image is built in.