An interactive, drag-and-drop Linux distro recommender. Instead of a text-based questionnaire, you drag in the specific games, tools, and preferences you actually use across five categories (games, work, browsers, security, communication), pick your GPU and device type, and watch match scores for 37 distros update live, with honest, individually-reasoned explanations of the tradeoffs each one involves.
No login, no tracking, no server. Everything runs client-side in your browser.
Most distro-picker sites ask abstract questions ("do you game?") and hand back a single flat verdict. ARL instead:
- Lets you drag in specific, named software, not vague categories
- Lets you rank picks by importance (drag to reorder) so your top priorities actually move the results
- Flags a distro red when something you picked genuinely won't run on it (e.g. an anti-cheat-protected game on any distro), instead of quietly burying it in the score
- Factors in your actual GPU and device type (desktop/laptop/handheld), NVIDIA's proprietary driver cares about kernel freshness far more than AMD/Intel's open-source stack does, and handhelds weight ease-of-use and gaming performance differently than a desktop workstation does
- Explains why each distro landed where it did, not just a number
- Ships a compatibility guide with real, distro-specific NVIDIA driver notes, strengths, and tradeoffs
- Gives every picked item a real, copyable install command resolved for whatever distro you're looking at, not just a match score
A separate /distros page gives every distro its own card: what it's
actually based on, how NVIDIA drivers are handled, and honest
strengths/tradeoffs, not a benchmark, just what's worth knowing before you
install.
Each distro has a 0–10 score on a handful of dimensions (driver freshness, stability, gaming performance, isolation, ease of use). Each draggable item declares how much it needs from each dimension. Your GPU and device type are scored at a fixed, modest weight of their own, and each software item's rank in "Your setup" (drag to reorder) scales how much it influences the result, with a steep falloff so your top pick actually matters more than your sixth.
If a distro is meaningfully weak in a dimension an item cares about, a tradeoff note is generated automatically. If it's critically weak on something an item critically depends on (or the item is a game blocked by kernel-level anti-cheat on Linux entirely), the distro is flagged red as fundamentally incompatible rather than just penalized.
To add a new item: add it to items.ts with a requirements object. To add
a new distro: add it to distros.ts with an attributes object, package
manager, and a blurb. No other code changes needed. Scoring and tradeoffs
are derived automatically.