For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
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.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.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.
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.
Okay. Then use Endeavor. Easy to install, good tools, and not run by people who've let their SSL cert lapse 4 times.
But honestly, if you can't deal with Arch install, I have to wonder if you wouldn't be better off with something other than Arch and Arch based distros. Generally speaking, Arch based distros require more command line and config file editing.
I just don't think Arch and Arch based distros are a good fit for beginners. If you're intimidated by a TUI installer, you should start somewhere else. Fedora has a... usable installer and great GUI tools, for instance.
I'm not judging or bashing on anyone. But it's like trying to learn how to knit by starting with a sweater. You're in over your head before you even get started.
Manjaro is NOT Arch with a user-friendly installer. Once you have installed Manjaro, the system you have is not Arch. Which leads to one of the biggest problems with Manjaro—that it uses the AUR but is totally incompatible with it. Manjaro has its own kernels. Manjaro has its own package repositories. Manjaro uses its own configurations. The crappy management and governance of Manjaro screws all of this up from time to time.
What you described is EndeavourOS.
Ubuntu. I think of it as the Yahoo of linux distros. It used to be good, but then they made terrible decisions that ultimately made them irrelevant.
Seeing Ubuntu now is like seeing your (previously) favourite musician, sold out and washed up.
More like OpenOffice. It still has some power on its branding, but new users should stay away from it and go for LibreOffice, that is any other main distro (Arch, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Debian, etc.). There's nothing exciting happening in Ubuntu anymore, but a lot of people still know its name.
I wish it were irrelevant. It's the default in a lot of non-hobby use cases. Even if it's nobody's favorite, switching requires a business reason and certain degree of consensus among devs/managers/partners/customers.
You're going to have to start adding your lemmy contact info in the podcast now lol
"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.
Ubuntu is not overrated. It probably gets more hate than it deserves just because it is so popular. That said, I hate it. Slow and opinionated ( by bad opinions ).
Manjaro because it is lipstick on a pig. Looks gorgeous, seems to offer the benefits of Arch with less pain, is total garbage.
But it is less pain. Distros that package Arch to make it fit for human consumption perform a vital service for it IMO. Arch is a fine distro that I could never use otherwise because it's too much work to keep it together. With Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda etc. you get to use Arch albeit indirectly.
Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn't a differentiation people are after.
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.
Yea nobody would ever use Arch for the basis of anything game changing coughSteamOScough
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
I thought I was going insane with Fedora. Literally every flatpack I tried had major issues. Went back to an ubuntu-based distro after a month of fix attempts.
Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.
I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine. But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".
(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).
I still need to give NixOS the college try. The docs are slowly getting better but other than that I have heard great things from all over the Internet about it once you get your head around it. I failed at figuring it out on my own but the day will come where it makes sense I'm sure.
I think one of the issues with nixos learning materials is that they eschew talking about how to write your own packages. but to really understand anything, you have to get your head around writing and modifying packages. in nix, a package is just a build step that can do I/O during particular phases and produces an output to the nix store, so they're an essential building block for anything that isn't utterly trivial.
the other major stumbling block is working out how modules (the things that let you write config for the system) can actually be composed. adding a new module to imports gives you new config params you can set so you can organize your system config in terms of modules and packages to make things work the way you like.
Nix Pills are the canonical learning material for packages. I don't know of any good learning material for modules - I learned by working on nixpkgs and another involved project that made extensive use of modules.
lastly, nix config files are written in the nix language and it's a bit idiosyncratic. it almost looks and feels like Haskell but it's slightly different in important ways. there's no way around learning it if you have multiple systems and want to share config between them.
Funny. Whole reason I use nixos is because I cba to tinker with my systems anymore. Tell me another OS with which I can manage 20+ systems with even less effort and I'd consider switching.
Ah but then you are talking about servers? That would be a different story! The machine that I use for development (laptop) should always work (I would trust nixos with this) and if I want to spin up a container (docker run) or install an application (apt install)or change my vpn client configuration it is currently effortless and I'm not sure nixos can do that.
Actually using nixos for some of my private servers would be a nice use case...
I use it for workstations, laptops and servers alike. I also configure them all on my home pc and remote push the config. Been a while since I manually SSH'd onto one of my machines...
I feel like it is too complicated for a desktop user. Linux is already complicated enough. On Silverblue I had to do some mental gymnastic to make some things work because everything is just made for Workstation. I don't think the advantages outweigh the benefits
I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?
