This is unreadable on a light background.

“Use anything” is unhelpful for people who are looking for specific recommendations.

Mentioning other nodes goes against the whole point of a flow chart. Use the arrows.

I feel like this should be more about DE choice than distro.

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

A few suggestions:

• Start with a question of the user’s technical proficiency. This is probably the biggest deciding factor for picking a distro, since some lean heavily toward technically-adept audiences and some are designed for people who’ve never used a computer before.

• Include questions on device type, such as desktop/laptop. Using Linux on a laptop typically requires more research.

• Instead of asking about Windows specifically, maybe ask “which OS are you most comfortable with?” with arrows for different versions of Windows, macOS, iOS, Android (and even Linux?).

• Make every endpoint self-contained and unambiguous, with at least one concrete recommendation. Avoid vague statements like “use what you want”, and avoid referring to other branches of the flowchart. If it makes sense to converge with other branches, use a labelled arrow to point to that branch instead (this will probably require curve support in your design tool to be legible).

• Write each box in the form of a question, and label the arrows with answers to that question. I honestly have no idea how to read the “gaming focused” box because it has two bullet points and no indication of what each arrow means. I also can’t tell how to read the “general purpose/gaming” box without reading down both paths. And why does the Bazzite box point to popOS? What does this mean? Clearer labels would help.

• The red endpoints on the left could be in a single box, since they follow the same path. Alternatively, add more questions to that path to meaningfully differentiate each option. Same with the two clusters of blue endpoints on the right.

• Be more explicit in the terms for use cases, since “general purpose” is a bit vague (I would consider gaming to fall under “general purpose”, myself). You could have paths for e.g. “web browsing and office work”, “gaming”, “media creation”, “software development or scientific computing”. Some of these paths might converge later, and that’s okay.

• Move the “This is too complicated” box up top. It’s funny and probably more useful there as a kind of “TL;DR”. Since it’s not related to Nvidia, its current placement is odd.

You need to seriously up the contrast on those colors. Pink text on a slightly lighter pink text block is virtually unreadable.

I think beginners spend too much time and effort on the “choose a distro” quest. Choosing a DE is far more important than that.

I can’t read some text on there, you should make the image have a background since, at least my browser (firefox) seems to default to white for PNGs

I don’t have any specific beef with your chart but I do feel like we sometimes do a disservice to newbies by focusing on distros rather than the main desktop environments and what differentiates them. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend basically any of the Fedora spins or Debian-based distros to beginners.

The choice between KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, etc. is much more consequential for a new user than DNF vs. Apt (especially in the Flatpak era).

People who think its too complicated won’t make it to the bottom of the flow chart.

tl;Dr needs to go at the top, not the bottom. That’s the point. They won’t make it to the bottom.

while i find the colours you chose appealing, a bunch of the font colours are too close to stand out well over their backgrounds? there are a few that are genuinely hard to read-- some better contrast would help a lot also, the vertical column is a bit weird to follow? like, what’s the process of going down after being asked about windows versions to get to gaming preference? it’s a weird way to have the path work. even if you just put something like “i don’t particularly care about windows” as the third option would help a little, i think?

sorry that’s mostly about your graphic, and not the actual recommendations, lol

You forgot “I want those cool socks” for arch Linux :P.

I think it’s also worth noting that not everyone’s coming to Linux for an easy time. Or essentially sometimes people are looking for the full experience like I did when I was younger. So it might be worth including path ways for those who want to compile everything themselves or even run so minimalist they essentially just using a terminal.

Debian and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed should be in there somewhere.

Instead of “use anything” you could put in “Debian.”