I really hate to say this, but Lubuntu.

I enjoyed it for a solid few months (it’s a lightweight XFCE LXQt version of Ubuntu, so it worked great on my very underpowered MacBook Pro from ages ago) so it was heartbreaking when one day, randomly, I couldn’t get past the login screen and my TimeShift backups didn’t work.

If it wasn’t for this out-of-nowhere critical failure, I would say I loved it.

VanillaOS looked really promising but it was terribly buggy when I used it.

My least favorite is Linux Lite. It’s supposed to be a lighter, simpler version of Ubuntu but I don’t think it accomplishes this at all. It’s very slow for something that’s supposed to be lightweight, and still includes Snaps, which are also very much not lightweight. Plus its software center is just bad, which is not great for something that’s marketed at Linux noobs. Linux Mint XFCE or SpiralLinux are better options for a Linux noob who needs a lighter distro, IMO.

An improvement I’d suggest: obviously, ditch Snaps. Another would be to take a look at what Bodhi Linux does and have the “software center” run in the browser. I don’t know how good this is security-wise, but it definitely speeds things up from the UX side of things.

For me personally: Something like Arch. I want to spend as little time as possible on installation and configuration, and I don’t want to have to read update notes or break my system. But I get that it’s great for some people, and their wiki is just next level!

In general: Ubuntu. It feels like I read something about Canonical causing trouble every other week, and don’t even get me started on snaps!

I don’t really have a least favorite distribution. I mean, I guess between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, Manjaro, and Gentoo, the least appealing choices to me are Manjaro and Gentoo. Manjaro is just Arch but worse, because the packages are old and likely to cause incompatibilities with AUR packages that need really up-to-date system packages, and I…don’t trust the maintainers to have configured everything better than I could have myself. Just based on history.

Debian has ancient packages. That’s the only reason. I’d just end up using Flatpak packages or compiling from source.

Any other distribution I could use, including Gentoo, but Arch is the sweet spot for me.

Fedora. It doesn’t really add anything and is just more stuff for people to get distracted by.

Also, red hat is responsible for shilling a lot of bullshit.

Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.

I’m about to piss off a lot of people.

It’s Arch and Arch-derivatives. And I’m saying it as an Arch user, btw, and I actually love it.

Between the Big Three (Fedora, Debian, Arch), it is the least likely to have an official package for somewhat niche applications. If something is not available as a flatpak or appimage, I have to compile it from source or an AUR PKGBUILD, but we all know the dangers of doing that. Some software will just assume that it’s running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.

That being said, it would take a lot to make me switch to a stable point-release distribution. Arch’s advantages more than make up for the sub-par software support.

(actually, I lied. Fuck Canonical and *Ubuntu. And IBM.)

RHEL - for obvious reasons

My worst experience was on Linux Void.

The iso has an encryption key problem. I tried the distro one year after, the same problem 😆 . Its the only distro that has that kind of problem. Once the problem is solved thanks to the forum, the shell didn’t switch the language properly, the “-” prints a wierd character, most keys on the that row was wrong. Maybe all the praise for that distro comes from non-french speaking people, so they didn’t saw the problem.

I know, the DE versions of the iso should works nice, but Void is advertised as minimalist, I want my WM. If this is that hard to switch the installation to french language, why Alpine is able to provide a correct installation experience (not easy, but correct) ?

My least favourites are probably ubuntu and manjaro, not so much because of the distros themselves but the organizations behind them being a bit dodge.

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Ubuntu: It’s not a lack of features that pushed me away; it’s more about the way things are going. I am not a fan of snap packages. I have run into odd issues trying to use them. I used Ubuntu server for my Dell Poweredge and I shut it down until I can find a suitable replacement. I struggled with it respecting my DNS settings which in turn killed my reverse proxy setup.

Manjaro: While I love Arch and some of its derivatives, I can’t stand by Manjaro. I thought it would have been a good OS to use since I was familiar with Arch, but it had enough dependency issues where updates broke them. Funny enough, never have I had a dependency issue with just plain old Arch.

I use Arch btw. But besides the meme on it, I legitimately eo use arch and couldn’t be happier.

Evil Linux Suprise™

idk why people even use it. too scary for me.

I’m going to say Gentoo Linux. It’s a good learning tool and I suppose maybe a tiny bit faster if you actually custom-compile everything for your hardware from source, but that’s a crazy waste of time.