What are the most European Linux distributions?

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.