I made the unfortunate post about asking why people liked Arch so much (RIP my inbox I’m learning a lot from the comments) But, what is the best distro for each reason?
RIP my inbox again. I appreciate this knowledge a lot. Thank you everyone for responding. You all make this such a great community.
Arch btw, only been using it for a couple of weeks, only installed it because of the meme. Got my hands on a few years old thinkpad for practically free, so why not. It’s actually quite good so far, been struggling a bit with external monitors, but I don’t miss windows
the mouse is cute
NixOS. I’ve gotten so used to the declarative nature of NixOS, that I simply cannot go back to a “normal” distro anymore.
I love Pop OS because it got me back into Linux after ditching it for windows for the last 10 years, partly to do .net development and partly because I hated the state of Ubuntu/Unity.
As soon as cosmic is stable and easy to install on Nix I’ll switch to it.
A bit of tinkering. Thoughts?
Obligatory “There is not a single distro that’s the absolute best for each and every one.” disclaimer aside, my personal favorite is definitely secureblue for being a hardened-by-default distro that adheres to the
‘immutable’reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm while enjoying a healthy stream of improvements pushed out by an active group of contributors.As with others, I love Debian Stable.
Most packages have sane defaults, and it’s so stable. It’s true that it sometimes means older software versions, but there’s also something to be said for behavior staying the same for two years at a time.
If hardware support is an issue, using the backports repo is really easy - I’ve been using it on my laptop for almost a year with no problems that don’t exist on other distros. If you really need the shiniest new application, Flatpak isn’t that bad.
It also feels in a nice position - not so corporate as to not give a darn about its community, but with enough funding and backing the important stuff gets maintained.
Bazzite.
Super easy install and setup. Ready to start installing games at first boot. Just a wonderful OS to use.
It isn’t. I just don’t feel like swapping
Devuan + Trinity Desktop
Moved over there since Debian switched to Sytemd. It is boring, dusty… but it works and stays out of my way.
Mint Cinnamon. All my hardware works, and it can do the few things I require my work PC to do. It even remembers things like my default audio device - something Ubuntu refused to do for years.
EndeavorOS. It runs smooth, i dont get errors, all my games work, the taskbar and notifications work like I would expect them too. Switching from Windows 2 months ago, I cycled through a few distros but they all were giving something up until i found EoS.
Mint Cinnamon.
It’s easy, stable and gets out of my way.
I haven’t seen the need to dostro hop for years.
I wanted the awesomeness of pacman and like the way Gardua comes pre-configured as well as packages it installs from the get go. The only thing I hate about it is the “gamer” universal KDE theme it comes with.
Man, I wanted to try Garuda a couple of weeks ago and the thing would never even boot into the live environment. Went ahead and installed Cachy OS and it’s been great.
I dunno what to say. It 100% worked on install for my laptop, even the weird ASUS stuff that can be finicky.
I like the way Pop!_OS looks. Not gonna pretend it’s the best. But as far as default UIs, it clicked with the most. Default gnome seemed too spartan and all of the Windows-like DEs remind me too much of Windows. Which I don’t like. If that makes sense.
Debian. Truly the universal operating system. Runs on all of my laptops, desktops, servers, and NAS with no fuss and no need to keep track of distro-specific differences. If something has a Linux version, it probably works on Debian.
Granted, I am a bit biased. All of my hardware is at least 5 years old. Also came from Windows, where I kept only the OS and browser up to date, couldn’t be bothered with shiny new features. A package manager is already a huge luxury.
I know. Stop worrying about your computer and install Debian! It just works. It updates without a problem.