For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is “fine” at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.And arch. Arch is godly.
(I use Arch btw.)
I’m gonna say “no”, but just by personal preference.
I agree that, if you’re skilled enough, 90% of distributions out there are completely useless once Arch and Debian are available.Couldn’t agree more. Arch is great if you need a malleable distro, Debian is for everything (else).
Debian is great if you want a stable distro. If you want the latest software run… Debian + Flatpak
malleable distro
Hi. Gentoo user here. 👏
I’ve not used Gentoo in years but I really ought to give it another go. Do you still have to compile everything from scratch or are there binary repos now?
Bu the more you diverge from the default the more portage will compile packages for your setup.
I’ve used Arch on many different computers over the years. It’s not stable, it breaks. I don’t understand why it’s great. Debian (minimal install) is better.
I’ve only had one problem with arch (it broke after an update once) except for that one problem it was always very stable and solid in my experience.
Debian is too “old” for me. I prefer bleeding edge and i refuse to use any flatpaks or such because they are a pain in the ass to set up right in my experience
Been at Ubuntu for a couple of years but I was pleasantly surprised when I went back to debian. Sticking to that one like shit on shingles.
Mint is definitely not overrated. It has done much for the community because they created a distro that is easy to understand if you switch to Linux, easy to maintain and mostly works out of the box. Also they don’t use snap.
Agreed. I just have better things to do than muck about with my OS. Just slap Mint on that fucker and get on with your life. Now, of course I i know that many people like to tinker and have everything just so. I’m not in any way knocking that. But if you just want minimal hassle Mint is the shit.
Noob mint user here; first distro, I really like it. What’s up with the snap contention that I keep seeing?
Snap is container Software. It’s a program that runs software in an isolated area. Snaps is made by canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. And it’s really hatred because, IIRC, it’s very slow and not completely open source
Ubuntu is massively overrated. It’s a bloated distro owned by a greedy corporation.
I respect a lot what they did though. Ubuntu and Fedora worked and improved a lot of Linux’s new technologies. Plus their focus and model is more focused on the server side.
Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.
Have to agree. They had a great start by enhancing Debian and being user friendly but, then they just kind of lost their way.
It should probably take Mint’s place on this list.
Although, speaking as a fan of Mint who used it as my “daily driver” for years, I think the time has come for them to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and embrace Wayland. I know that, if I’d stayed with Mint, I’ve have gone to LMDE by now.
I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.
Linux Mint surely is disabling more “features” from Ubuntu than it’s using at this point.
That’s why some people at wondering why wont Mint not rebase to Debian, and go from there… would be better than ‘repairing’ everything Ubuntu breaks.
indeed. Mint became what Ubuntu used to be, afaik.
I’ve never really used Ubuntu or Mint. I think I’ve installed both in VM but that’s it.
I agree with this entirely. Back when it was like V 3 or 4, it was amazing to get non-tech people into the Linux userspace. Now, it is atrocious and the last distro I’d ever suggest to someone.
Based.
Gonna go with Manjaro. I can’t, for the life of me, understand why it gets the support it does. It’s not fantastic to begin with, with an apparently incompetent management team. Add in that all the theming is flat and lifeless, and I’m just confused.
I mean, any Arch derived distro with an “easy installer” kinda confuses me. Archinstall is fairly easy to use (although a bit ugly), and most other Arch based distros seem to miss what I see as the main point of Arch: getting to know and personalize your system. So things like Endeavor, Xero, etc. Don’t make a lot of sense to me either. But at least they’re not effectively accidentally DDOSing the AUR…
One good reason to have distros like EndeavourOS is if you have to use an Enterprise WiFi network while installing Arch. Pain in the ass to get iwd to work with them.
I already gave mine. They’re in the video.
“Gaming” distros, save for Steam OS as that’s for a console-like device.
Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.
For me, every non-mainstream distro. IMO every fork which is just a rebuild .iso should ratherly be an install script and extra repos. Simply because the lack of maintenancers and userbase tends to make those projects to die or getting updates way less often tahn should. People should join any existing project rather than creating new ones.
Or: meta packages! (Debian nomenclature, but it probably exists on non-Debian distros as well)
Much more secure than executing random code online, usually with root privileges. And reuses the existing infrastructure of the “parent” distro.
For all its strengths, Arch is kind of a pain in the ass to maintain. I daily drive it but I risk breaking something if I don’t update regularly. My youtube laptop can’t update at all anymore from something I don’t care to fix (when Firefox breaks then its a big deal lmao) and my main rig needed to use the fallback initramfs for a while after I forgot to update for a while. mkinitcpio -P (I think) fixed it though
What do you mean exactly? A running system shouldn’t spontaneously break from not being updated. It’s just that partial upgrades can break compatibility/dependencies, but running full system upgrades should be fine, as long as you pay attention to breaking changes and major version bumps. Also with timeshift it should always be possible to get back to a working state.
I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don’t run
pacman -Syu
for a year, you probably won’t have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you’d still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe “X” in “as long as I update every X, I’ll be fine?” Who knows. That’s not a very well-defined problem.I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I’m picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I’d get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I’m willing to do the occasional bit of “real work” if needed to keep it going, but that’s a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.
Yeah that’s what I meant, not updating for a while makes it more likely to break next time I try. I think the time I had to use the fallback I waited something like close to a month?
The good/bad Linux distro circlejerk.
People are constantly speaking about what’s the best or worst distro in long argumentation loosing their time. Instead, it would nice to make people actually switch to a Linux distro and stay on a distro. Each people people switching from another OS is a win. This matters and how making Linux distros more accessible to everyone.
I’ve been on arch for 4 or 5 years now. I think the “distro hopping” is mostly a meme my noobs. No hate.
I didn’t mean distro hopping. I mean people actually staying on Linux after trying it and not going back to another os.
Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn’t a differentiation people are after.
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Maybe. Mint came first, and I wonder what purposes those other ones were trying to serve. I don’t know or care enough about the others. Do they differentiate enough to bother with?
At first, ElementaryOS was really trying to be for MacOS refugees what Mint is for Windows refugees. Later on they were trying to be their own ecosystem, and I haven’t heard from them since. Zorin…yeah Mint exists, what are you doing.
Haven’t heard of Rhino.
Linux Mint. People praise it as the perfect Window replacement yet when I tried it for a week, it didn’t do anything better than default KDE Plasma Desktop. And since the devs haven’t even started to work on Wayland support, the Distro will soon fall way behind.
I use Plasma and like it. I wouldn’t have stuck around or really got started if it wasn’t for Mint.
It might. Then we can still switch. For the time being it works just fine. The maintainers are a bit conservative for good reasons though. Mint is supposed to just work and for the most part it does just that.
I hated Cinnamon, I tried to like Mint. but it’s a botched patched Ubuntu
MX Linux.
I don’t know why it gets recommended so often, I don’t actually think many people use it, but for some reason it’s brought up all the time. I blame Distrowatch.
Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
Still no breaks on my side after 3 years of daily use.
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Manjaro still hasn’t broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I’ve used the three branches it offers.
I personally found Manjaro to be pretty nice, but i do have a lot of linux experience
Great, just in time. Uninstall it and try a serious distro like Fedora or Opensuse TW
Wasn’t Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That’s what I’ve heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn’t (isn’t?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Stable is a vague concept but Manjaro takes more time than Arch to update software versions. To me both are rock solid.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me. I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn’t break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn’t even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated
For me there is only two distros. They are Arch an Debian. But that is only me. I don’t think that any of those distros are overreted they just have their own user types and needs.
I use Arch BTW
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The first distro I feel in love with was Debian (potato I think). Before that I had dabbled here and there but never had something click. Played with Gentoo when it first landed (try a stage one Gentoo build without the internet to go to for answers to really learn it!) and after getting tired of compiling all the time tried this new Ubuntu thing. Stayed with that for years until snaps and decided to try Manjaro to learn about this Arch thing. Got sick of the problems and but the bullet and went “pure” Arch. Feel in love again like I did way back with Debian.
Now I use Debian on important servers and Arch on servers I can afford to play with and my day to day machine.
Never looked back. Debian for stability, Arch for everything else. Never been happier.
AH, so this is a “tell me your favourite distro” post again. Tribalism isn’t cool, man.