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LinuxKompass

A bilingual decision aid for people who want to switch to Linux and do not know where to start. It asks about your hardware, your habits and your patience — and then explains every recommendation instead of just printing a number.

→ technikweber.github.io/LinuxKompass

What it does

• Three depths. Three short questions estimate whether you want the beginner path (12 questions), the advanced path (22) or the expert path (36). The suggestion is only a suggestion — you can switch modes at any point, including mid-questionnaire, without losing your answers.
• Follow-ups where it counts. Naming Adobe, Microsoft Office or CAD software as a blocker triggers a targeted follow-up: would an alternative actually work for you? Answering yes clears the blocker and replaces the warning with a concrete account of what GIMP, Darktable, LibreOffice or FreeCAD do well — and what does not carry over (VBA macros, PSD smart objects, native CAD files). No follow-up for anti-cheat games or line-of-business software: there is no honest alternative to suggest there.
• 55 researched distributions, each with ~45 attributes: release model, init system, libc, package manager, Secure Boot, NVIDIA handling, Wayland/X11 status, snapshot support, minimum RAM, architectures, governance, telemetry policy, German-language support, maintenance load and more. Every entry cites its sources and carries a check date.
• Traceable scoring. For each result you can open the score breakdown and see which rating dimension contributed how many points. Distributions that were ruled out are listed separately, each with the specific requirement it failed.
• Honest hard requirements. If you say you never want to use a terminal, Arch is excluded — not merely down-ranked. Requirements are only relaxed when nothing at all would remain, and the result tells you exactly which one was dropped.
• A desktop recommendation, separately. The desktop often matters more day to day than the distribution beneath it, and on almost any distribution you can swap it — so it gets its own short verdict ("Cinnamon fits your answers because it comes closest to the way Windows works"), with its caveats and whether the recommended distribution actually ships it.
• Side-by-side comparison. Tick any distributions and desktops to compare up to six of each. They are compared in two separate tables rather than one: they have different attributes, and shortlisting "Mint or Fedora" and "Cinnamon or Plasma" at the same time is a perfectly normal thing to do. A filter hides rows where the entries agree.
• What will not work. Adobe Creative Cloud, kernel-level anti-cheat, CAD, German tax software, old NVIDIA cards on Wayland, accessibility, free-software purity: an 18-entry catalogue of things that decide a switch regardless of distribution — each with the alternatives that actually exist.
• Shareable results. Answers are encoded in the URL, so a result link reproduces the exact recommendation.
• Try before installing. Links to DistroSea, where 80+ distributions and their desktops run live in the browser.
• German and English throughout, light and dark themes, keyboard accessible, prints cleanly to PDF, no tracking, no cookies, no external requests.

How the recommendation is produced

Every answer acts in three ways:

1. It weights rating dimensions — 16 of them, from stability to germanSupport to upstreamPurity.
2. It can set a hard requirement, expressed as one of 39 named predicates over a distribution (secure-boot, ram-2gb, no-systemd, x11-session, …).
3. It can favour specific distributions when an answer points at one unambiguously — "the system should follow from a configuration file" is a description of NixOS, not a preference.

The base score is a weighted average across the rating dimensions, normalised to 0–100 and then spread and soft-capped so that results do not all cluster in the high nineties and 100 stays reserved for a theoretical perfect fit. Preference and distribution bonuses are added on top with saturation, so a single strong match cannot run away with the total while a genuinely defining answer still wins.

See src/engine/score.ts for the implementation and src/engine/score.test.ts for the behaviour that is pinned by tests.

Data

All distribution data lives in src/data/distros/, grouped by family, and is fully typed against src/data/types.ts. Every entry carries checkedAt and a sources list. The data was verified in September 2026 against official release announcements, release notes and project pages.

Version numbers and support windows go stale quickly. If you find something that is no longer correct, an issue or a pull request is the fastest way to fix it.

Development

npm install
npm run dev        # local dev server
npm run test:run   # 29 data-integrity and scoring tests
npm run typecheck
npm run build      # production build into dist/

Deployment happens automatically: every push to main runs type checking, tests and the build in GitHub Actions and publishes the result to GitHub Pages.

Contributing

Corrections to version numbers, ratings or wording are explicitly welcome, as are new distributions and translations. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Prior art

distrochooser.de and The Morpheus' LinuxChooser showed that this kind of tool is needed and how to structure it sensibly. LinuxKompass is an independent implementation with its own data set, its own scoring logic and its own design.

License

Code under the MIT License. The distribution data in src/data/ is released under CC BY 4.0 — reuse it, but say where it came from.