I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That's the Linux community I love, good job people <3Haven't seen Santoku or Kali or several other special use-case distros (E: or Hannah Montana Linux hahahaha). But, yes, this is exactly the community I love and that extreme hate/love for specific distros is the reason I tried Linux in the first place (and the reason I stayed) hahaha
Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the "gamer aesthetic".
Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I'm sure it's good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it's a lot less flamboyant about it.
My desktop "breathes" in RGB so it sounds perfect for me. Plug me into the Matrix.
Manjaro, for its incompetence.
I don't hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.
Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.
Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.
Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.
How does Manjaro add incompetence? I've not used either for a while, buy Manjaro never failed me, while arch did manage to make my system nuke itself a couple times just running
pacman -Syyu. Granted, this was a long time ago, but it's the only distro to so this to me ever.The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.
The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.
The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.
Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.
Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.
did they ever start backporting security patches? I know that was a major issue in the early days that really soured me on the competence of the project. you cannot take a rolling release distro, bless some package versions as "stable" and call it a day.
it's a reddit imported hate-train because they didn't renew certificates twice in twenty years and a bug in pamac cause the aur to be ddosed for a few hours total, to tell you how much of an empty bandwagon it is, few years back, manjaro tried to push a closed source office suite in their base installers and none of the clowns parroting anti-manjaro mantras ever mention it, they didn't think about adding it to the agreed list of accusations in the early days so their copy pasted opinions don't feature it.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
You're not wrong, lol.
'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
So what you're actually saying is: you don't like Arch because you don't want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.
(Which is fine)
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't want to use a kit/show car for commuting.
Fair. Though I will say (more for others who may see this in the future), that Arch's new installer is great and definitely reduces the load on new users. That said, it's never going to be explicitly designed for people who have no Linux experience.
Just use Arch in a Distrobox on Fedora or openSUSE. That's the best of both worlds.
It doesn't. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.
Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.
It is definitely not a bit more work. It’s hours and hours of reading manuals, following video guides and configuring every last detail.
This is a gross simplification
I think reality lies somewhere in the middle. Yes you have to read and yes you have to configure things but the docs are all on the wiki. There’s a point where this is easier than figuring out how to undo the defaults on, say, Ubuntu and do your own thing without official documentation on it.
Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn't worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.
I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.
Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
Every time I have used manjaro on x86 it has been broken within a few months. Their Raspberry Pi 4 port is pretty stable though for some reason.
ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren't present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn't get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
That's my daily driver. I used the lite version on my old computer and Core on my new desktop. I understand it may have problems on other hardware but for me it looks and feels as good as the promotional screenshots.
Nothing wrong with that, I'm glad it worked well for you! I don't actively hate it, I just was dissapointed with my personal experience.
Huh, this is the opposite of my experience. I've used a handful of distros over the years (including fedora and ubuntu) but Zorin was the most stable and user friendly by far out of the box. I also think their Gnome theme is pretty sleek.
Glad it works for you :) Fedora has been that for me on most of my hardware.
Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.
Wish Linux Devs help build and polish OS for Pinephone. I really want Linux to go mainstream. Tired of android and Apple.
This! I used Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver for 1 1/2 years. The OS itself was anything but perfect but the real problem was definetly the app ecosystem. WayDroid(an android "emulator") optimization is probably the way to go for linux on mobile
Waydroid could fix that gap tho, the same way Wine/Proton does on the desktop
Waydroid already works really well, it's just small things like notification support that are missing
I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.
I have fond memories of setting up a FreeBSD desktop while I was in college. It still has a warm place in my heart.
In highschool, I got a desktop from a yard sale (Pentium I) and got an HDD from goodwill, all for $10, just to install FreeBSD. It was awesome. I think I still have the desktop somewhere in storage.
From memory it has a different layout in /etc, /use, and /opt that kept tripping me up. Simple things seemed harder. I do a fair amount in older versions of Java that caused problems. It's been a while though, so things have likely changed.
I've always been intrigued by that one. I want to test it out, but finding an image has proven difficult.
too much spyware
That's just capitalist propaganda. There is no spyware! That's just innocent telemetry!
This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It's great if you're just getting into Linux, it's absolutely terrible when you know what you're doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it's always so far behind it's not even worth using if you're on AMD. Thankfully they've realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.
I've never cared for mint because I don't really want my Linux to look like Windows. Which is what mint does.
Not really an unpopular opinion. My main desktop runs mint, and we're well aware of that being an issue. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make as long as it works. I haven't had enough issues to look for replacement yet. ZorinOS looks interesting, though.
For servers and work I use other distros.
Yeah there's just not really a big enough reason to move away from Ubuntu unless you're really wanting to avoid snaps (which I completely understand)
A question that begs for a hot take. I love it! Manjaro has always made zero sense to me. The power of Arch is in its rolling release cycle and your ability to customize it from the ground up. Both of which you lose when you downloads someone mix of Arch. It always seemed like a flavor for people who want to run Arch but just don't have the ability to read the documentation to actually run it.
Anything that includes more software than necessary for the system I want. If I need Steam, I'm gonna install it myself.
That's why I don't run one of those many downstream distros that mainly change appearances or improve little things like GUI driver managers etc. For some people that's the reason to use those distros, I might just to look how they achieve the particular feature (e.g. skin, config).
But in general there aren't really distros I don't like, but many which I prefer. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS are all great, especially the more community run distros.
I am growing to dislike Ubuntu.
Simply because its so old, that anytime I try to find a solution to a problem, I'm wading through 15 years of shit, 99% of which isnt relevant anymore due to age/depreciation.
What makes this weirder is that while all older distros have this problem, none of them come anywhere close to being as bad. This is probably partly because of Ubuntu's start as a noob-friendlier distro, but I don't think that completely explains it.
Being noob friendly is why I chose it.
I'm not a programmer or a sysadmin, My linux experience is entirely contained to the past 5-6ish years I've used it to avoid using Windows 10.
Every single problem I've had, no matter how ultimately minor it was, has been a enormous fuckin ordeal to figure out and solve, in large part due to the 15+ years of ancient, non-relevant knowledge.
So I'm probably gonna end up switching distros soon, since i'm tired of troubleshooting and still have weird, minor shit happening.. Just frustrated a bout doing it because I finally got steamtinkerlauncher working properly, which was an ordeal in and of itself.
And its gotten to the point I even hate talking about the issues I have, cause someone inevitable swoops in and be like "Well, just run (command) -help" to figure out what to do, and I'm all like.. okay, fucking great. That doesnt help because I dont know whats fucking wrong. Cant use -help if I dont know what command i need to fix this weird problem that no internet searches are showing me any kind of solution or even a hint for.
edit Sorry, apparently my annoyance boiled over into a rant.
I feel you. I really do. User friendliness is what got me to try out Ubuntu in the first place. My Open Source OS journey has been long and weird, but we have that in common.
If you're looking for an OS with good documentation that's going to make your Steam gaming easier, I can suggest Nobara. It's easy to install, and while it's own documentation is a little sparse (it's less than a year or so old), you can use Fedora documentation 99% of the time. And as a bonus, steamtinkerlaunch is a one click install on Nobara. I think. I did my install for my gaming rig like 8 months ago, so don't quote me.
More importantly, though, is that Nobara has a friendly discord filled with helpful folks, including Glorious Eggroll himself - the guy who made Nobara, and a contributor to many Open Source projects and maintainer for Proton-GE which, if you use Steam on Linux, you might have heard of.
As a bonus, the Fedora community is helpful too, as evidenced by me 😀.
I was considering Linux mint, since its something new, but still on a familiar debian base and and familiarity with things like ppas which make getting software easier than compiling it.
but I'll read up more on Nobara. Just concerned that I'll be back to day 1 know nothing switching bases.
It's not that bad, really. Nobara is Fedora based, and has access to their large package base. Nobara's custom update tools are also excellent.
Fedora doesn't have PPAs, but it does have COPR, which is kinda like halfway between PPAs and Arch's AUR. Lots of packages. I hardly ever compile anything from source these days.
Okay okay, stop twisting my arm! :p
I'll back up my files and switch to Nobara as soon as I beat the game I'm playing, since I dont want to risk having that get borked again
I'm a long time Debian user, and I switched to Fedora when 38 was released because I wanted to try something new and shiny (well, Gnome 44 mostly).
It was kind of disappointing. With Debian, I had to work to get it perfectly functional on my laptop. Fedora just... worked happily out of the box. Almost nothing to tweak.
I don't know the nature of your problems and solutions, but be assured that the knowledge you gained will still be useful. Nowadays most distros are more similar than they are different. I successfully used Arch Wiki and Arch Forums on Debian issues, because even if they are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, their building blocks are basically the same.
