For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
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Manjaro Zorin Garuda Nobara. Any Gaming Oriented distro except SteamOS. These 3 especially feel overbloated
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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.
100% distro watch
I was an MX user. It looks nice out of the box (better than Mint at the time) and the “flagship” version runs smooth on old laptops, probably thanks to Xfce. Side note, MX has a rare feature, it provides a choice between two init systems.
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.
Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.
It’s not bad by any means, but it’s a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.
It also still doesn’t come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
The third party thing is outdated, you can enable it at install and have access to flathub and fusion repo. So installing Steam or Nvidia drivers is dead simple now. I would still say it’s not great for new users because it’s ultra minimal.
I ran Fedora 33, and upgraded it in place through to fedora 36. Ran pretty well the whole time.
I had snapper running for btrfs snapshotting, and did a double hop release jump to 38. Somehow I messed up my high water mark config for snapper in the mean time, and ran out of disk space mid-install without realizing. Symptom was firefox crashing. So I rebooted. Borked.
I agree with all of your complaints about it, and there’s plenty to dislike, but it’s still probably a good landing point for new users.
For me, it was the right amount of itjust.works at the right time, coming from debian (an update in 2018 killed my gdm, and I rage switched to fedora). Next stop is Gentoo!
Nobara fixes quite a few aspects of this.
I really don’t understand why backup tools like Timeshift or Snapper aren’t shipping preinstalled & preconfigured in all mainstream type distros when you go with btrfs, or at least have an option in the installer for that.
Currently my answer is ubuntu. I tried to use lubuntu recently but just so much wasn’t working out of the box like nm-applet wasn’t running on startup. The apt package manager is really tedious to use too.
This could also be boiled down to my general incompetence when it comes to Ubuntu based systems though :p
Mint. Cinnamon is weird. I’ve had more problems and weird glitches with Cinnamon than any other DE. And it looks like it’s straight out of 2004. That’s why I’m a KDE junkie on KDE Neon now.
As a KDE junkie, I’d still choose Cinnamon as the backup.
Yeah Mint is really ancient, not shitting on the Devs but everybody is moving to Wayland. While they keep their old project that runs only because of nostalgia. Opensuse TW is better than Neon. The latter is used for testing dunno why people keep using it
And I’m sitting here not understanding why people like KDEs’ looks so much.
But then again, looks don’t matter when you can theme everything. Nightfox Dusk with Tela Purple icons is a banger
I like a pretty much stock with tweaks KDE, personally. Nice and simple, utilitarian, but not necessarily minimal.
I’ve never really cared for the MacOS visual style though.
I shouldn’t really care, but I may have to change DEs if I get a new high refresh rate monitor.
I’m currently using EndeavourOS with XFCE, so Wayland is a No. Could become a problem. Kinda is a problem already, because I’d like to overclock my main monitor to 75Hz, whereas the second one can only run 60.
Last time I tried to get Wayland on KDE a few months ago, it was a bit of a pain to get it working properly and then it was pretty buggy. Admittedly this was months ago, on Nvidia, and regular updates on making it better have been coming pretty consistently.
They’ve recently made some changes to the style that make it a lot more modern, mostly switching to the papyrus icon pack and making the accent colors more saturated.
Seeing a lot of Manjaro here, what’s the deal? I installed it just yesterday on a test machine to check it out as I plan on steering over from windows long-term so just browsing what’s out there. Don’t really have issues and it ticks the boxes of a more user-friendly installation and comes out of the box with Plasma. I may try out pure Arch or the GUI fork just not to have the hassle of setting up the DE
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.
Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you’re not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They’ve made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for “stability” will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.
ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore.
I see this stability argument come up a lot but it’s not like Arch is a paragon of stability. I wouldn’t use Arch for a server, for example, I would use Debian stable.
For a desktop machine it depends on what your needs are. If it’s a personal, non-critical desktop machine then I don’t care about stability that much. Yeah Manjaro screws the pooch sometimes but the way it makes Arch simpler to use makes up for the occasional hiccup.
AUR does not figure into any of this IMO. Using “stability” or “compatibility” when it comes to AUR is nonsense. You take AUR packages as they come, there are no guarantees of stability or security or anything, and you should expect them to break at any time. If I need to rely on a 3rd-party package I use flatpaks or appimages not AUR.
I hear that. I wasn’t saying that the AUR is what causes the problems though. The AUR works better in Arch where everything is kept up to date, since that’s what the AUR targets. Manjaro holding back packages causes problems because the libraries and other packages might not be as up to date as the AUR scripts expect. This ends up causing more potential issues than the AUR otherwise would. If you’re not using the AUR then this all won’t have any effect on your usage of Manjaro, of course.
Fedora is highly overrated.
@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.
that logo is ancient and unappealing
Gotta appreciate the pettiness of this. 😆
I’ve never seen it before until now, but you’re totally right. I’m going to start hating it too now.
You should take a look at the Gentoo logo. That’s an international hate crime of a logo.
I tried installing NixOS in a VM once and it spent at least 45 minutes doing something with python and I said “That’s enough of that” and killed the VM.
Python works, it’s pip that doesn’t work because it’s trying to install stuff into an immutable distro
waaaat? I like the logo tho!
Gentoo. I say this as someone who used to daily drive it.
And arch too.
Everything other than Debian :D
Mint is hugely over-recommended to new users imo. The fact that it doesn’t have an option for a DE like Gnome 3 or KDE just kinda sucks at teaching newbies what to expect. Cinnamon also feels kinda jank in my opinion, looks old and unattractive.
I don’t do derivatives. Arch based distro? Just use Arch! Ubuntu, Mint, Pop or the hundreds alike, go Debian!
Eh, you’re being lazy. Just compile the kernel from source.
Real men write their own OS in assembly!
