Boot into a live boot install of some distro on a USB drive.

Lead image seems a cyanide and happiness cartoon,

It doesn’t claim to be a Cyanide and Happiness cartoon anywhere in the cartoon.

Systemd is unnecessary bloat. Actually, having an init system is unnecessary bloat. All one really needs is the Linux kernel and emacs.

http://informatimago.free.fr/i/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linux.html

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The fanboying to the point of blinders is maddening to deal with among Linux users.

Alien who has arrived on Earth: “I’ve heard that you humans drive motor vehicles to get around. I should get a motor vehicle. Could someone tell me the best type to get?”

Human A: “You want a Prius.”

Human B: “No, that’s for tree-hugging, probably-homosexual hippies. You need a proper truck, a Ford.”

Human C: “Actually, Ford trucks are trash, what you need is a Chevy truck.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgeIiREvafQ

Frankly, the right answer is that pretty much any non-specialized distribution (e.g. don’t use OpenWRT, a Linux distribution designed specifically for very small embedded devices) will probably work fine. That doesn’t mean that they all work the same way, but a lot of the differences are around things that honestly aren’t that big a deal for most potential end users. Basically, nobody has used more than at most a couple of the distros out there sufficiently to really come up to speed on their differences anyway. Most end users can adapt to a given packaging system, don’t care about the init system, are aren’t radically affected by mutability/immutability, can get by with different update schedules, etc. In general, people tend to just recommend what they themselves use. The major Linux software packages out there are packaged for the major distros.

I linked to a timeline of Linux distros in this thread. My own recommendation is to use an established distro, one that has been around for some years (which, statistically, indicates that it’s got staying power; there are some flash-in-the-pan projects where people discover that doing a Linux distro is larger than they want).

I use Debian, myself. I could give a long list of justifications why, but honestly, it’s probably not worth your time. There are people who perfectly happily use Fedora or Ubuntu or Arch or Gentoo or Mint or whatever. A lot of the differences that most end users are going to see comes down to defaults — like, there are people in this thread fighting over distro because of their preferred desktop environment. Like, Debian can run KDE or GNOME or Cinnamon or XFCE or whatever, provides options as to default in the installer, and any of them (or multiple of them) can be added post-initial-installation. You wouldn’t say that a car is good or bad based on the setting of the thermostat as it comes from the dealer, like.

…having their own things to tend to.

“NetBSD!” “No, OpenBSD!” “No, FreeBSD!”

If you know how to edit a comma-separated-value text file and how to submit a PR on GitHub, you could make the image larger.

The present-day Linux kernel tree (not the Debian guys) actually has a target to build a Debian kernel package (make bindeb-pkg) straight out of git if you want, so you can pretty readily get a packaged kernel out of the Linux kernel git repo, as long as you can come up with a viable build config for it (probably starting from a recent Debian kernel’s config). I have run off Debian-packaged kernels built that way before, if you want to play on the really bleeding edge.

“The first place to direct new users was to Linux From Scratch, so that they could determine whether they wanted to use a Linux distribution at all, or a more freeform approach.”

Multiple partitions or single. LLVM-managed or not. Block-level encrypted partitions or not. Do you want your swap on a dedicated partition, as a swap file, and do you want it to be encrypted?

If you decide that you want a multiple-partition installation and then let the installer do the partitioning, Debian’s installer still does a 100 MB /boot partition, which is woefully inadequate for present-day kernels as Debian packages them. 1 GB, maybe.

Exactly. One is a package format and/or local package utility, and the other is a frontend to do downloads and updates for that local package utility.

Should be “rpm or dpkg” — assuming that we’re excluding the other options — and then if someone chooses RPM, you can start talking about the frontend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager

Front ends

Several front-ends to RPM ease the process of obtaining and installing RPMs from repositories and help in resolving their dependencies. These include:

• yum used in Fedora Linux, CentOS 5 and above, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and above, Scientific Linux, Yellow Dog Linux and Oracle Linux
• DNF, introduced in Fedora Linux 18 (default since 22), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and CentOS Linux 8.
• up2date used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS 3 and 4, and Oracle Linux
• Zypper used in Mer (and thus Sailfish OS), MeeGo,[16] openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise
• urpmi used in Mandriva Linux, ROSA Linux and Mageia
• apt-rpm, a port of Debian’s Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) used in Ark Linux,[17] PCLinuxOS and ALT Linux
• Smart Package Manager, used in Unity Linux, available for many distributions including Fedora Linux.
• rpmquery, a command-line utility available in (for example) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• libzypp, for Sailfish OS

Then for dpkg, you can choose from among aptitude, apt, apt-get/apt-query/etc, graphical frontend options like synaptic that one may want to use in parallel with the TUI-based frontends, etc.

That adds the “which windowing system do you want to use” question and under the “Xorg” option, a “do you want to use a window manager without a desktop environment”, and then under “yes”, for the “Which window manager” question, you get Ratpoison as one of the options.

Clearly there’s an unwarranted assumption baked into this comic that one needs a desktop environment. I have my non-headless Linux systems set up to run the emptty display manager using the Linux console:

Which then launches the Sway compositor without having Sway start any desktop environment if I want to log into a graphical environment. That’s my favorite option. Let’s not impose an artificially-restricted set of choices, here. :-)

How many are there?

It depends.

See, that’s not helpful. The right answer is to direct someone to this GitHub project:

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline

The releases page contains a 3420x12488 PNG to provide a simple and concise answer.

https://files.catbox.moe/7q4v52.png

Most of that is setting up third-party apt repos, which I don’t believe is necessary. Steam’s in the Debian trixie repo.

https://packages.debian.org/stable/steam

EDIT: I’d guess that the following would probably work on a Debian trixie system:

If you have your system set up for only 64-bit packages, you’d need this at some point prior to the install, to let your system use 32-bit packages, since Steam’s only available as a 32-bit binary:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

I think that deciding whether to use both 64-bit and 32-bit packages or not is an option in the Debian installer, but I might be misremembering.

You can update your list of packages at this point, upgrade, all that, but that goes for any install operation; there’s nothing specific to Steam there. If you’ve just added 32-bit packages for the first time above, then you probably do want to update the list of packages, since your system won’t have a list of 32-bit packages yet.

$ sudo apt update

But then it’s just like any other installation of software.

$ sudo apt install steam

That actually just contains, as I recall, the Steam installer — enough to pull down and install the current Steam environment for a given user, which happens next time you run the Steam binary.

$ steam

EDIT2: I guess that assumes that you do have “contrib” enabled on the Debian repo, and I don’t know whether that’s enabled by default by the Debian installer or whether it’s an option during install or what. I do distinctly remember one point in time when “non-free-firmware” was not enabled by default, because I always had to turn it on to get support for <random hardware device with closed-source firmware blobs>, but I don’t know whether contrib is always enabled or not. I have main, contrib, non-free, and non-free-firmware enabled. From /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources:

Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://mirror.i3d.net/debian/
Suites: trixie
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware 
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg

If you set up a Kerberos server and use that for sign-in on both the Linux and MacOS systems, then you can have matching goetic demon accounts on both Linux and MacOS. :-)

linuxmemes

I believe that that’s a MacOS X system. One can only imagine what kind of madness goes on over there.

For those of us not in the loop:

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Machine_God

The Machine God, also known as the Omnissiah or Deus Mechanicus, is the supernatural entity worshipped by the tech-priests and other servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus as the embodiment and bestower of all knowledge and technology in the universe.