List of European Linux Distributions (inspired by blaze's post)
A note! the desktop field is completely optional! You can install any other desktop you like, but the listed are the "main" ones, usually recommended by the distro.
Linux Mint
Country: Ireland ๐ฎ๐ช
Experience: Simple
Desktop: Cinnamon
Best distro for beginners. has two versions: One based off of ubuntu (default), and another one debian (recommended, LMDE)
My second favorite :) Arch based, easy installer and updater, friendly community and beautiful themes. I recommend this distro if you are into arch based distros without wanting the painful part of it.
My personal favorite <3 Great for servers. It's not for the faint of heart, though hah. It's an immutable distro, where there is no package manager, or manually modifying config files; your entire system is created with .nix files, not commands. Reproducable.
Country: Canada ๐จ๐ฆ (Yes yes, it's not european but how can you not mention arch???)
Experience: Advanced
Desktop: None
Most popular distro for dedicated users, and for good reason; bleeding edge, full power over your system. Though you have to manually set up everything, from internet to your deskop environment.
Void
Country: Spain ๐ช๐ธ
Experience: Advanced
Desktop: XFCE
Great distro if you want something like arch, but without systemd or slightly more stable (Also, musl support). Obscure but amazing.
That should cover a lot. Please heed the desktop warning, and please correct me/comment suggestions. This is not perfect, so please do criticize where possible c:
one word about SuSE - one of the oldest still active distros. Is one of the few "real" enterprise distros with features like SAP certification. 10+ years support for SLES releases (Suse Linux Enterprise Server). Has Tumbleweed as rolling release like Arch and Leap for non-rolling. Also Micro OS (which is IMHO the future), and desktop is of course not only KDE but also GNOME and every other major and minor DE available. Don't get discouraged by the Installer, it's very powerful but also not simplest point and click. Also zypper and YaST take getting used to if you come from apt or pacman lands. Disclaimer I use Tw ;)