Haven'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
For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
That's fair and Microsoft fired their entire update testing team and then pushed multiple updates that bricked Windows installs. And that was just Windows 10.
I'm not defending canonical decisions, but definably when they started working on this there was no other alternative available for them to collaborate at the time
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio).
Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
You can't really control when the updates of snaps are rolled out.
For "regular" software, I have an "apt update" type of script that I can run when I choose to update everything on my system. On some systems, I have this in a weekly crontab. On other systems, there is no scheduled run. On those systems, it's important to keep many apps as-is - so several packages are also locked, as well ("apt-mark hold").
With snap, you basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something. Broken package updated? Well, you can manually roll back that one. Broken update pushed again during the next forced update window? Just roll it back again! (and repeat, every day)
Yes, I understand that, but I also know it's really important to not update some stuff, and I know that broken snaps sometimes get pushed.
Basically, the snap developers have talked down to the users. THEY know better of what WE actually want and need, not us dumb users that actually administer things for a living.
You basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something.
This is incorrect:
snap refresh --hold=forever
In general, I'd advise you to do a bit of research beforehand when giving advice...
The --hold feature was introduced with snapd v2.58 which was released as recently as Dec 1, so less than 9 months ago. So I would consider this a relatively new feature.
Furthermore, as best as I can tell from the documentation, there isn't even a way to configurably hold updates in general or for a specific package like can be done with apt-preferences; refresh.hold only allows 90 days out.
I think it is a perfectly valid criticism that the snap developers didn't implement this feature at all until well into the life of the product and then, even then, done begrudgingly at best evidenced by the minimal implementation.
Now, I feel like I did my research, but feel free to let me know if there's something I can do better or if you have any other general life advice for me.
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
Also a great option. I like their tiling window manager and the other gnome extensions they've done. I'm also generally excited about the work they're doing with Cosmic as a new DE.
We know. I've just grown accustomed how Ubuntu is set up. Its defaults for many packages seem a little more configured "out of the box" compared to the same offerings like from Debian. I seem to recall installing LAMP stuff from both Debian and CentOS having a similar base config (basically just using the defaults from php, apache, mysql, etc), while the Ubuntu versions had some things already pre-configured that made it easier to get a multi-domain site up and running quicker.
A fresh Ubuntu install, followed by a snapd purge and rolling back of its networking is usually easier for me than going with something like CentOS or Debian and manually configuring each and ever package with it.
Then again, I've been using Ansible for a while, so my setups for CentOS and Debian have been getting easier and easier, so it's possible that I may eventually drop Ubuntu if they end up changing their OS so much that I can no longer purge their junk.
Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn't keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.
I wanted to like snaps, and I'm not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.
Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package's installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.
Linux From Scratch is a series of (online) books that walk you through building up your own linux system from the ground up, from compiling the kernel to all the individual systems that turn the kernel into a functional OS.
It's meant to be an educational tool to help people learn about what goes into making a Linux distribution and give you better knowledge of how to build software from source. Some people turn these systems into their own distributions or personal (I guess gentoo-like?) Linux installs
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 <3
@first_must_burn@Lolors17 many hate it being forced onto users. I recently went to install microk8 on my dev machine but chose not to seeing it was primarily via snap.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.
I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.
I miss an /etc structure that wasn't a complete mess.
I miss UFS and its soft updates.
I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.
I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.
And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.
The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I've only needed to use fBSD once professionally.
Well, I like gentoo for it's top notch security and I see why you'd use it for extremely security sensitive applications, but people that use it as a desktop are nuts.
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.
"they put ads in the terminal" isn't really accurate.
Their "ubuntu-advantage-tools" adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing "ubuntu-advantage-tools". It's definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.
'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And also, I have work to do... I don't like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
Search for "how to install Firefox in Arch".
Snapstore page which asks you to first install snap from AUR, and then install Firefox through Snap is the second entry, I kid you not!
And they have same pages for Fedora erc.
This predatory behavior is to try and get any potential new Linux users to use their crapstore instead of their distro's package is disgusting and malicious.
I have mixed feelings about Mir and Unity. Having competition is a good thing. If we only had gnome, Linux would be far less interesting. But at the same time, they could have spent the effort trying to improve Wayland and Gnome, and they would have made a significant difference.
But snaps being forced upon me, they can fuck right off. I don't need my browser in a semifunctional container, when it worked perfectly before. And i hate that they made mount barely unusable.
Ubuntu. I can't stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There's always some random crash that I don't know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you're installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I'm the user and I'm root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I'll go to Windows.
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.
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.
I love Zorin, probably for more superficial reasons than most. I like a clean UI and Zorin provides that by default, no fiddling. I get that people like customisability and ricing and all that, and if I could design my OS as easily as I could write CSS then I probably would, but I've yet to find something that lets me do that. And even if I do find it, Zorin still looks good and just works, which is most of what I care about.
I tried it years ago after years and years of Ubuntu. I installed Mint Cinnamon, it was the shit at the time, #1 distro and all. I wanted to like it but was never able to. After less than 2 years I switched to MX/Xfce and still use it, best distro ever.
How is MX? What do you like over other distros? I see it at the top of the distrowatch list all the time but I've never really found anything special or stand out with the distro.
I used Ubuntu for years, but the forcing of snap really killed it for me.
Ubuntu used to be synonymous with stability and compatibility. It was always a little bloated and slower than a bunch of others. But that was the price for stability....
It is probably still stable but compatibility has taken a back seat. This is what really annoyed me enough to switch.
I'm on Mint now, it is really nice. Flatpak is much better than Snap, my only real issue is the MASSIVE size of flatpak downloads.
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.
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.
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.
Out of all the distros that I've tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don't like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it's not too bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The first time I tried ubuntu I did not install it because it felt like half of the screen space was used up by the sidebar, top bar and window decoration so yeah.
That little detail put me off of installing linux for like a year or so because I did not knowthat you can easily change stuff like that
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.
For me, it's Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I'm looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop lxd, when there is systemd-nspawn, docker and podman?!
No longer using Ubuntu at all because they force snaps down your throat. While I do like snaps on the server environment, (I think a lot of the haters out there don't see how nice they are on servers), I prefer to use Debian and then to just install snapd on my terms.
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 bit of a fear of SLES, purely due to Puredisk using them as their base back in the day (before they were swallowed by Symantec/Veritas/Broadcom/whatever). The amount of time I spent in YaST2 and losing data, again and again, made me genuinely never want to investigate any issues.
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.
This thread has basically devolved into "Ubuntu hate circlejerk party", as expected. I guess I just hate the distro I've spent the majority of my time on Linux using getting constantly dunked on and am a bit sad watching its inevitable death by snap. (Insert Thanos meme here)
I've been using Ubuntu professionally and as a daily driver for more than a decade now. I've tried the other major ones but Ubuntu is just no fuss. I can stand up a fresh system in 20 minutes and there is an enormous support base. I just don't have time to be a Linux hipster these days.
The only thing I can see which might win me over one day is Nix.
Yeah. Part of me is annoyed by snaps. But, tbh, having tried fedora and opensuse over the last few years, I don't quite see how they're so much worse than freaking Flatpaks. And at least they come gods damned fully enabled.
Once upon a time I was into RC helicopters. This combined with working offshore as a bachelor and living in a tiny apartment with a jurassic era (but reliable) car meant that I had a pretty decent income and not a whole lot on which to spend it. So once in a while I visited my local RC store just to browse and chat with the people there and if I stumbled across something interesting I might buy it.
I was not that much into the building part of the helicopters, but I saw it as a means to an end. Something I had to do to be able to fly it. The flying part was the end.
One day I was visiting the store, this clerk I knew showed me this kit he had. Brand new, pre-assembled, perfect craftmanship had gone into putting the kit together. Governor controlling the engine, ability to negate the pitch, extra strong servo for the cyclic controls. She was a beauty, and if it wasn't for the fact that I was, at that point,saving up my money for something unrelated, I would've bought it.
"You guys pre-assemble kits now?" I asked out of curiosity. "Oh no, we don't have the time for that" the clerk replied. "But this one customer" he began "he buys new kits, builds them, and sells them back to us at a 10% loss"
My brain short circuited. Why?? The flying part was the reward. Why would you not fly it? Well, in retrospect I understand it. The guy liked building complex machines. He had no interest in flying the kits. He loved the building process and the craftmanship that went into it, and once he had assembled it as perfectly as could ever be done, he was finished with the kit, and on the lookout for something new. He had the time to do what he loved, so why not. Rumor has it that he could spend an entire day with a tachometer and an IR thermometer just to get the fuel mixture perfect, whereas I used to do that in 10 minutes and call it "good enough".
I never met the guy. But he sounds like an interesting character. If he ran Linux he'd be running arch. Not from the bragging rights, not for its usability, not for (insert common reason here). But simply because he loved the craftmanship that went into setting it up.
I hate Arch's installation process but love AUR, and having always up-to-date packages. The new archinstall script that comes with it is actually really straight forward. Also, I install a complete, bloated gnome desktop environment, set up everything once and the resulting OS is really user friendly.
The chaotic AUR singlehandedly makes Arch great (on weaker machines).
I use EndeavorOS (99% Arch) and I haven't looked back. Up to date software, knowing what's in my system, minimal bloat, but I would recommend Fedora or openSUSE to beginners and intermediates. I can't recommend Ubuntu or Manjaro. Using either one of those is like signing your sanity away.
This is such a weird take for me, and it's popular enough of a take that it makes it weirder.
Arch is, by default, a barebones distro. The whole point is you start from nothing with very few defaults and learn how to get everything up and running yourself.
Complaining that the way arch works sucks cos you don't want to do that is bizarre.
Imagine complaining that Linux From Scratch sucks cos you have to do it from scratch.
Endeavor OS exists, it's what Endeavor OS should be. You can just use it, no one will complain. The Arch folk might be less inclined to help with it, but that's why there are Endeavor OS folks to talk to.
There's an installer ISO called Calam Arch Installer that uses the calamares installer (I think this is what all the Arch based GUI installer distros use - Garuda, Manjaro, etc). This one installs vanilla Arch though.
If you want to run straight Arch but don't want to deal with Arch's painful install process, this one is for you. I've used it on all of my Arch systems and it has been reliable.
Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.
I don't like Canonical and Red Hat, so I wouldn't use their distros out of principle. On top of that, I don't like Snaps, and Ubuntu's customizations done to GNOME.
From Fedora, I don't like Calamares. The rest is great.
Manjaro doesn't play nice with either upstream nor downstream and has GTK apps that don't follow GNOME's design guidelines, this last point also applies to Endeavor OS.
Vanilla OS is unusable for me, AB Root is hard, and I can't follow any online guides, tutorials or scripts. But their UX/UI is drool worthy. Blend OS has Waydroid out of the box but it's immutability is hard for me.
Debian is awesome but I don't like it for my work / gaming rig. Old kernel and packages. Best ever for servers.
All Ubuntu derivatives are old for me, so no. But I liked Zorin the best.
Deepin, I'm afraid of Chinese gov backdoors. Most probably paranoia.
I settled on Crystal Linux (arch based), has the nicest UI but they don't provide a GUI for package management, and they have handled their repos irresponsibly. It's more of a hobby distro, but a beautiful one.
For me it's Ubuntu. Whenever I tried it it was buggy and crashing. It kinda feels like Windows of GNU+Linux.
About Manjaro, I like it. I kinda feel sad seeing Manjaro get so much hate. The only thing I disliked was the accidental DDoS of AUR. But so far it's been working relatively well for me. I use Manjaro with Plasma.
And my favorite is Linux Mint. It just works, and it does so reliably. Also the Linux Mint community is really nice.
As such, I donated to Manjaro, Arch, and Linux Mint. Not much, but at least something.
Ubuntu. Snaps are a buggy mess. I know you can remove them but I like sane defaults. Snap drives me insane. Mint, PopOS, Debian are better choices for a stable distro.
edit: I also don't like Fedora and CentOS. The installers tend to be very buggy for me.
Just the Oracle Red Hat clone, because, well, Oracle. Also those distros that disappear spontaneously because they were mainly maintained by one person only.
Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I've been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I've never use them myself.
Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.
Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.
I much prefer the AUR and native system packages to flatpak. It's the big advantage Arch has over other distros, just how much software is natively available due to the AUR. There are a few cases where flatpak works better but generally I prefer all my apps to share one set of up to date dependencies.
Android. Google doesnt invest anything in AOSP it seems, GrapheneOS is the only really well made Distro.
Androids security model is a joke as every phone is bloated with malware that has full access over everything.
Banking apps need Google, map apps need Google.
There is no split screen in AOSP since forever.
No tools on the lockscreen. I am not talking about crazy ios like tools that are basically a seperate OS, its still a lockscreen. But camera and torch?
So many restrictions. RootlessJamesDSP is a good example of crazy workarounds that still dont work in the end. No FOSS appstore with autoupdates is also a pain.
Well, scrolling through every comment, it looks like very few people hate Fedora. I've always been using Debian and Debian based distros but recently moved to Fedora, and I'm not surprised people like it.
OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)
I have literally never had any upgrade issues on debian that wasn’t something mentioned in release notes(been using it since debian 7). I am guessing you did a lot of things they tell you specifically not to do on this page:
Fwiw, I’ve had great results with upgrading Debian derivatives. A machine in my closet has been upgraded from version 8 -> 12 without any major issue. Usually, upgrade problems come from custom or third party software in my experience.
I've had the opposite experience. Updating my apt sources.list and running dist-upgrade always worked for me on Debian (though most of the time I just run unstable which is rolling) but on Arch it seems like if I don't upgrade regularly sometimes I'll get hit with signature key errors because the key database is outdated and then have to go run some other command to update the keys before a pacman -Syu will work. I love both distros, but there's no better way to make your users not give a shit about security than making said security interrupt their workflow. Most of the time I just disable the key check in pacman.conf so that the damn thing will upgrade successfully.
Arch and any arch based distro.
It's overused, deb is better and the absolute chads will always be distros like NixOS or Guix System. There is no use for an unstable, beginner-unfriendly, distro where you constantly encounter dependency hell.
Of course I'm just being edgy, every Linux Distro is good for the sole fact of it not being Windows.
CentOS. We were stuck on an old version at work. The OS is already designed to use old packages for security/stability, so imagine how outdated they are on an old version. It was a nightmare getting new software running on it. That coupled with the other news surrounding CentOS and RHEL, I'm not touching those anymore w a 10 foot pole. I wish it just crumbles and Debian takes over. I have had amazing success with like 20 years on Debian and it just gets better and better.
Ubuntu because of forced Snaps
SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company's rumored?stance on antisemitism (google banned Jewish holidays)
Fedora for it's update mechanism with the forced reboot
Arch as the necessary evil
SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company’s rumored?stance on antisemitism
I was really surprised to read about the antisemitism allegation. That's a very serious accusation. I've looked into it and it seems that these claims are controversial. First thing to mention is that the accuser said himself that this was about the company SUSE, and not the distribution openSUSE.
The article claims there are emails and other employees' statements as proof, but provides none. The article is also over a year old, so why hasn't this led to any public statements from SUSE or any legal or other actions? Antisemitism is a serious offense in Germany.
Discussions on reddit and hacker news all state that the writer has gone off the rails. When being called out on reddit for deadnaming a trans woman, he plays dumb. I don't think he's dumb. It seems to me like he's transphobic and acting like a troll about it in good old American conservative fashion.
For me, this seriously calls into question any claims he makes about social justice stuff, even if it concerns himself. He apparently views other people's social justice as something to play with, so my gut feeling is that it would be no concern to him to lie or bend the truth about stuff like this in order to achieve something. It's all a game to him in the political arena, not serious life issues.
If I'm wrong, all he has to do is provide the proof he claims there is, even if only anonymized.
If the allegation is just from Bryan Lunduke I'd take it with a pinch of salt. The guy is known for espousing some out-there views so it needs independent corroboration.
Yeah, I've not been able to find any allegations by anyone else, except for his vague mentions. There was also a Jewish person who had worked at SUSE who commented in one thread that they felt nothing less than welcomed.
Same here. I have not heard anything after the initial accusations. The company I am working for is using SLES as a main OS and is switching to another OS without any explanation. So I have no idea if the claims are true or the switch has anything to do with anything.
It just goes to show how an accusation like this sticks to a company's reputation. The reason for your company switching could be totally unrelated, yet your mind still jumps to this. Have you asked why they're switching?
The accusation by Bryan is out there, its detailed and looks profounded - there is no response from SUSE anywhere and this seems to follow the described pattern in the accusation of not talking about it.
So as of now the public opinion is that the accusation was not withdrawn and is still standing. Not talking about it won't make it go away for anyone.
Using arch but honestly. I don't "like" any of them. Every distro I've ever used has required more setup and maintenance than I would have liked.
I really just want a system that doesn't bork itself on updates and let's me install whatever software I want. You would think that wouldn't be so impossible to find.
I tried debian stable a week or two ago. Had about 4 different showstopper bugs in 3 or so days. It doesn't seem to help much from my limited experience.
Yes. I had both actually. Hardware and debian specific bugs, on a clean install from the live iso with barely any packages installed from apt and like 10 flatpaks. I'm a bit exhausted rn to find all the links. But let me find at least the worst one for ya.
Sorry mate. I love them all!
All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well.
Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.
I've never had a good experience with an arch based distro. I understand that's kind of the goal, and it's great if you want to use your computer to set up arch, but I want to use my computer for other things.
Well, Ubuntu. I've been skeptical of it from the beginning, but I did use it on and off in the 00's. Canonical has since gone out of their way to make sure I won't install their shit on my computers.
Recent developments have also somewhat soured me on Fedora.
Ubuntu. Pretty sure you already have an idea why. Lol.
OpenSUSE. I've always had issues trying to use it, from zypper to updates to bootloops. It's also sluggish compared to other distros (yes, same DEs usually) on my laptop. I've tried at least 3x trying to get why a lot of people love it. It's just not for me.
I've never tried Manjaro yet, but coming from Arch and EOS I don't think I ever will.
For beginners, and rolling distribution. A beginner should start with something that doesn't break while you don't understand if it's your or the shiny new program that broke the system. But then, I have been using Debian for more that 20 years. For me it's a tool, not a game.
I'm noy going to say I dislike it, but I don't see the point in a source based distro like Gentoo anymore.
I learned a lot from using Gentoo when I was just getting into Linux 20 years ago, but now looking back on it, why would I want to juggle with everyones build systems and compiler flags? Especially now hardware is so homogenous.
gentoo manages compile options globally. This is not only for optimization. It can be used to enable certain features of a program only available via compile options.
freedom between rolling release, stable release, or a mixture of the two. You don't have to opt for one or the other. And you can only make some programs rolling and others stable. Gentoo is the only distro I know that lets you do this without issues
can use any version of a program you want. That's the benefit of the build system. Since you're compiling, you link against the versions you want. No more compatibility issues because you didn't use the specific version your distro has.
super easy to install programs not in the repos and still have them managed by portage. Ebuilds are easy to write, and you don't have compatibility issues if you configure your deps right
super easy patch management. Just drop it the right place and you're done.
Every distribution offers different things. I like debian sid for the simplicity and general software availability, but APT is something i still consider a bit clunky. I like arch because of its barebones philosophy - arch wiki helped me a lot learn about linux.
I like gentoo - the wiki is awesome and portage is a great package manager. It was the first time I saw how the linux kernel gets compiled. It makes you appreciate all the work the devs do.
I now read the title and you ask for the opposite. But someone might find these bad, so i will post it as-is
Gentoo is the best distro when you want to get deeper understanding. If I had to give advice on the path of getting to know deeper the Linux environment I'd say: Debian or Fedora -> Arch -> Gentoo -> lfs
If I had time I'd try NixOS and FreeBSD as a main workstation.
to be honest, i agree with you. Although you can learn the same things through debian or ubuntu for example, their wikis are in no-way comparable to arch+gentoo. Having tried LFS, I think it is a great experience but definitely not something i could daily-drive.
FreeBSD is something I have not tried; nixOS as well. I have used OpenBSD but it feels a bit slow compared to linux - at least as a desktop OS.
I was thinking of switching from Ubuntu to Fedora because of the praise it got for being more up to date and having great default settings as a desktop distro.
What kind of problems did you run into? Can you give examples? I'd like to know before making the switch.
One of the problems, somebody else said lol they have some ideas and updates to new versions that work better for corporate area but for desktop users it gets slower and too bloated for a normal desktop user (or at least for me, was my experience), if for you, the problems that I say below is not a big deal for you when you try Fedora, you can use it, if it doesn't affect you
Somebody would say that Ubuntu is a lot corporate, but if you remove snaps is really okay, on my experience... and there is Debian in anycase lmao
I had more problems with systemd on Fedora than other distros, despite on Ubuntu mostly you will have this issue with snaps only, this was mostly issues here, maybe for you would be different (I tried to install last month but systemd was crashing at boot and returned to my regular debian setup)
I had the kernel issue, on ubuntu it's a bit better to handle previous versions, sometimes an update doesn't work well, bad performance and you don't have so many options of rollback like Ubuntu (Debian too gives more options); and the praise, it's normal because it works well for specific users mostly pure gnome users that works well on any version and don't have issues from like I said before and don't really care losing a bit of performance if we have more "features" that others don't really use so much
You could look into endeavour OS. It's arch-based, but closer to plain arch than manjaro. It should let you choose which kernel version to use.
Another option might be garuda linux. It's a arch-based gaming-focused distro. So it should be flexible as well, but it did break frequently on my system back when I tried it out.
Otherwise Alma Linux (Red Hat based) might be running older kernel versions as well.
The only one that really pissed me off was a distro called biglinux. It's arch based and very popular in Brazil. It's actually very stable. Everything works great. It's got some nice features.
Butttt, it uses latte dock or panel (kde). They have built in presets for how to arrange the panels and what not. It's nice, however, I was trying to move some panels around from the base options and broke kde. I wasn't doing anything more than changing GUI settings and the whole desktop broke. I seriously don't understand.
Debian, as its so MANUAL. Upgrading by manually updating x times and then literally changing the repos manually in the sources list? Wtf? Without any documentation or automation??
QubesOS, as it probably doesnt run on any real hardware. Didnt get beyond a blackscreen, and also AMD consumer GPUs dont support accelerated VMs making it useless.
Ubuntu because its annoying, but unsnap fixes a lot and its actually okay, still outdated Kernel als a bit weird.
KDE Neon because I cant tolerate its not a workstation distro but want it to be one
Linux Mint. Its old, and always had weird crashes for me. Its kinda nice and easy, kinda weird and complicated to do certain things. Some packages dont run as its not Ubuntu. Would always choose any KDE Distro that is newer.
Manjaro because in the few months I've used it, it happened twice that my system didn't boot anymore after I updated it. The second time I didn't reinstall but installed EndeavourOS instead. Been using that for like 2 years and never had that issue again.
I was using Manjaro until the day my install started giving me problems.with dependencies and duplicated packages (?), so I went with Fedora and it's been smooth so far.
Manjaro: it starts as arch but more user friendly (by being preconfigured), until it inevitably breaks (being arch) and you end up with a regular arch that you don't know how is configured
Elementary os: it's too elementary os
All those con distros that are just a bunch of reskinned free stuff ask you money for that. Like zorin os
Any 10 or more year support distro because they increase the range of versions that stuff has to work with by 5 extra years and any knowledge I gain about those ancient versions will never be useful again. They also delay a lot of new features in protocols, file formats,... where a large majority of clients needs support before the next phase of introducing a feature can be started.
Mint. I just don't get it. It's Ubuntu but "different"? I heard a lot of people have issues with it. But also a lot of people love it and always recommend it.
To be fair I never used it and it's probably fine/great but I just have a weird unfounded hate for it
EndeaverOS. On two systems it installed but lots of error popup windows right from desktop launch. just seemed Janky compared to plain Arch or any other popular distro.
Oh I did. Permissions, things it couldn't find, other errorS...From default install. No thanks, no time to fix stuff that other distros had clean installs with.
Yep, hardware can make a difference, so I recognize that (I have one machine that will not install any deb based distro, some notify of the bug. some ignore it and do an install but cannot boot due to hardware bug. RPM based distros acknowledge the issue amd work around it) But permission issues and missing files from default install are just not something I have time to deal with.
Just their approach aren't as good as Alma or CentOS as upstream. It's just my personal opinion...
I just don't like the CIQ narrative and Oracle that keep pushing Red Hat to corner...
Red Hat being dick because most of downstream being dick, especially CIQ/Rocky.. they steal about 30% of Red Hat contract, while offer cheaper package (quite a lot cheaper, and they don't even work on SIG like AlmaLinux Does), but using RHEL code, and just rebrand it as the best RHEL compatible, Rocky Linux.
OL is worst... Overprice Oracle DB, provide free OL, fork from Red Hat, and slap much higher cost until your company can't pay... well at least OL is honest than CIQ...
People need to see from Red Hat perspective regarding their dick move on exercising their GPLv2, and the upstream code still in git.centos.org. It depends now on downstream for repackage it. So it's still open source... and you can still have Rocky, Alma, OL, just you need to maintain the build pipeline...
And Rocky is broken on Old Thinkpad with 7 row keyboard. Alma, RHEL, and Fedora isn't.
I still can't find the cause, but end up using Fedora on most Thinkpad I have.
Other than that Is Ubuntu... It's... simpler to use, but when you deploy to production or Enterprise env... mostly sucks when they push broken update, and we need to rollback, it's not as simple as dnf history undo... it's also personal opinion, YMMV.
I'm agree with this point of view.. CIQ narrative have too much conflict of interest. In my place, most corp are happy with CentOS Stream being able to be the upstream test before landed on RHEL. At least now they don't need to long to put on Fedora to be landed on 3 years cycle like old times...
Was going to comment similar. it has all thinks thought about and tweaked so it runa great and functions like it should. Maybe they didn't enjoy system rollbacks and GUI admin?
Yast. I love zypper and opi but yast is super weird. Like if you want to do things that you can do with yast, you probably know how to do it on terminal.
I don’t like Mint because it’s just Ubuntu with even more stuff added.
Mint removes snaps and card games and replaces some GNOME utility apps like image viewer, video player, store etc. with its own apps. Mint also comes with additional apps like Hypnotix, Transmission, Hexchat, Timeshift but worst case they need additional disk space. Like 500 MiB maximum in a 10+ GiB install. I wouldn't consider these apps "bloat".
No one can dictate what tickles your fancy and ticks your boxes bud. If you're into debian, that's cool by me. Not my jam personally, but wtf does my opinion matter?
@vettnerk I don’t like Mint, because it looks ugly and dated. (But it is good that there is this distribution for all the boomers out there).
I don’t like arch, because what is the point, if you can use Fedora instead.
I don’t like Ubuntu, but the hate against it is much worse than the distribution itself.
Fedora and Arch are very different. That's like saying openSUSE and Fedora are the same, even that's not as extreme as your claim because they at least use the same package format.
Haven'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
You're going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
Also they put ads in search long before Windows did and as much as I hate Microsoft we should never forget that.
Putting ads in foss is an irredeemable sin
Bring out the guillotine!
Not to defend them, but it was trivial to remove the adverts and they stopped after the "feedback". Unlike Windows.
That's fair and Microsoft fired their entire update testing team and then pushed multiple updates that bricked Windows installs. And that was just Windows 10.
You know that snaps existed before Flatpaks right?
So it would have been that much easier for Ubuntu to be first to market and open source the snap server software…
But they didn’t. And alternative solutions had to be created.
I'm not defending canonical decisions, but definably when they started working on this there was no other alternative available for them to collaborate at the time
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
Thanks for the explanation. Now I understand the dislike for snap.
Oh! I forgot another one! Updates.
You can't really control when the updates of snaps are rolled out.
For "regular" software, I have an "apt update" type of script that I can run when I choose to update everything on my system. On some systems, I have this in a weekly crontab. On other systems, there is no scheduled run. On those systems, it's important to keep many apps as-is - so several packages are also locked, as well ("apt-mark hold").
With snap, you basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something. Broken package updated? Well, you can manually roll back that one. Broken update pushed again during the next forced update window? Just roll it back again! (and repeat, every day)
These are the words direct from a snap developer on why you cannot lock an app: "You need to keep your software up to date."
Yes, I understand that, but I also know it's really important to not update some stuff, and I know that broken snaps sometimes get pushed.
Basically, the snap developers have talked down to the users. THEY know better of what WE actually want and need, not us dumb users that actually administer things for a living.
This is incorrect:
snap refresh --hold=forever
In general, I'd advise you to do a bit of research beforehand when giving advice...
Edit: Downvotes for factual information? Really?
The
--holdfeature was introduced with snapd v2.58 which was released as recently as Dec 1, so less than 9 months ago. So I would consider this a relatively new feature.Furthermore, as best as I can tell from the documentation, there isn't even a way to configurably hold updates in general or for a specific package like can be done with apt-preferences;
refresh.holdonly allows 90 days out.I think it is a perfectly valid criticism that the snap developers didn't implement this feature at all until well into the life of the product and then, even then, done begrudgingly at best evidenced by the minimal implementation.
Now, I feel like I did my research, but feel free to let me know if there's something I can do better or if you have any other general life advice for me.
Thanks, this is a very good reply, and it would have been wonderful, when the original reply would have been similar.
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
how about popos?
Also a great option. I like their tiling window manager and the other gnome extensions they've done. I'm also generally excited about the work they're doing with Cosmic as a new DE.
Been chomping at the bit for cosmic since I learned of it.
Isn't that the one where Linus broke the WM by installing Steam? Lol
Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?
We know. I've just grown accustomed how Ubuntu is set up. Its defaults for many packages seem a little more configured "out of the box" compared to the same offerings like from Debian. I seem to recall installing LAMP stuff from both Debian and CentOS having a similar base config (basically just using the defaults from php, apache, mysql, etc), while the Ubuntu versions had some things already pre-configured that made it easier to get a multi-domain site up and running quicker.
A fresh Ubuntu install, followed by a snapd purge and rolling back of its networking is usually easier for me than going with something like CentOS or Debian and manually configuring each and ever package with it.
Then again, I've been using Ansible for a while, so my setups for CentOS and Debian have been getting easier and easier, so it's possible that I may eventually drop Ubuntu if they end up changing their OS so much that I can no longer purge their junk.
Zorin is my fav.
Thanks for the suggestion, but this doesn't give me any info.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn't keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.
I wanted to like snaps, and I'm not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.
Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package's installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.
For the record...
My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
It’s that pesky
rootuser, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.You can make an OS in Scratch? I didnt know that
Linux From Scratch is a series of (online) books that walk you through building up your own linux system from the ground up, from compiling the kernel to all the individual systems that turn the kernel into a functional OS.
It's meant to be an educational tool to help people learn about what goes into making a Linux distribution and give you better knowledge of how to build software from source. Some people turn these systems into their own distributions or personal (I guess gentoo-like?) Linux installs
Not only can you make your own OS but you can use one of the package managers and build your own repo and do a whole ecosystem yourself.
I used LFS to build a distro for embedded systems I designed at work. Was a fun experience but way too much work.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck's up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
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 <3
No one gets left behind
Akuna Matata or some shit
Ubuntu.It' went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
Serious question: what do you not like about snaps? I find the isolation and dependency desolation to be pretty great.
Snap is vendor lock in. They don’t work on many distros, tooling pushes their platform, and they control the only store.
For desktop apps Flatpak is just technically better anyway so what’s the point.
Snap is the reason I started looking for something else. Flatpak is the reason I went Fedora. It's been great.
@first_must_burn @Lolors17 many hate it being forced onto users. I recently went to install microk8 on my dev machine but chose not to seeing it was primarily via snap.
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.
Fwiw it does have a 'Lite' edition that doesn't include any theming.
My desktop "breathes" in RGB so it sounds perfect for me. Plug me into the Matrix.
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!
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.
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.
RHEL code is available with git. Stop this FUD.
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.
Manjaro, for its incompetence.
I don't hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.
Upvoted for Manjaro, downvoted for gentoo. (no vote as a result)
Console issued server command: /force_vote @a
Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.
Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.
RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.
Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.
Damn I'm contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?
I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.
I miss an /etc structure that wasn't a complete mess.
I miss UFS and its soft updates.
I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.
I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.
And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.
The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I've only needed to use fBSD once professionally.
From your experience I don't see red flags for me so I'll probably try for my next reinstall. Thanks for your honest opinion
Maybe check out Void Linux as well, the creator used to work on NetBSD before starting Void
Well, I like gentoo for it's top notch security and I see why you'd use it for extremely security sensitive applications, but people that use it as a desktop are nuts.
But...
But why bother using gentoo then?
Gentleman Of All Trades
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.
Ubuntu because they put ads in the terminal
Just thinking about this pisses me off all over again.
They do? I've never seen any.
https://nitter.net/omgubuntu/status/1574759306544701443 https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/10/ubuntu-pro-terminal-ad The advertised product is literally free under certain conditions so I don't consider this offending.
"they put ads in the terminal" isn't really accurate.
Their "ubuntu-advantage-tools" adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing "ubuntu-advantage-tools". It's definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.
You can’t easily uninstall the advantage tools package, they set Ubuntu-minimal meta package to depend on it
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that's gentoo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol, how does booting quicker prevent you from doing work?
It doesn't. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.
If booting quicker means to have less/older software or a bloated system once running...
And also, I have work to do... I don't like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.
I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS... I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
Search for "how to install Firefox in Arch". Snapstore page which asks you to first install snap from AUR, and then install Firefox through Snap is the second entry, I kid you not!
And they have same pages for Fedora erc.
This predatory behavior is to try and get any potential new Linux users to use their crapstore instead of their distro's package is disgusting and malicious.
I have mixed feelings about Mir and Unity. Having competition is a good thing. If we only had gnome, Linux would be far less interesting. But at the same time, they could have spent the effort trying to improve Wayland and Gnome, and they would have made a significant difference.
But snaps being forced upon me, they can fuck right off. I don't need my browser in a semifunctional container, when it worked perfectly before. And i hate that they made mount barely unusable.
Red Star OS, a little too much spyware.
Ubuntu. I can't stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
I really liked unity 😞
I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There's always some random crash that I don't know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you're installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I'm the user and I'm root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I'll go to Windows.
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 love Linux Mint: it's perfect for my parents' computer.
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)
I love Zorin, probably for more superficial reasons than most. I like a clean UI and Zorin provides that by default, no fiddling. I get that people like customisability and ricing and all that, and if I could design my OS as easily as I could write CSS then I probably would, but I've yet to find something that lets me do that. And even if I do find it, Zorin still looks good and just works, which is most of what I care about.
I've never cared for mint because I don't really want my Linux to look like Windows. Which is what mint does.
I tried it years ago after years and years of Ubuntu. I installed Mint Cinnamon, it was the shit at the time, #1 distro and all. I wanted to like it but was never able to. After less than 2 years I switched to MX/Xfce and still use it, best distro ever.
But Mint is really bleh 🙁
How is MX? What do you like over other distros? I see it at the top of the distrowatch list all the time but I've never really found anything special or stand out with the distro.
I used Ubuntu for years, but the forcing of snap really killed it for me.
Ubuntu used to be synonymous with stability and compatibility. It was always a little bloated and slower than a bunch of others. But that was the price for stability....
It is probably still stable but compatibility has taken a back seat. This is what really annoyed me enough to switch.
I'm on Mint now, it is really nice. Flatpak is much better than Snap, my only real issue is the MASSIVE size of flatpak downloads.
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.
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.
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.
Out of all the distros that I've tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don't like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it's not too bad.
However what really pisses me off,among their numerous other controversies, was when they replaced perfectly functional open source apps with proprietary ones...twice. Though the former has since been reversed.
Manjaro. Team is really sketch.
Redhat. Wouldn't touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
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.
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.
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
Ubuntu. It's violating many rules of freedom, and just isn't good. Their DE spins aren't good, snaps aren't good
The first time I tried ubuntu I did not install it because it felt like half of the screen space was used up by the sidebar, top bar and window decoration so yeah.
That little detail put me off of installing linux for like a year or so because I did not knowthat you can easily change stuff like that
Ubuntu desktop version, it's slow and buggy and the devs push ads and snaps and other crap.
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.
For me, it's Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I'm looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop
lxd, when there issystemd-nspawn,dockerandpodman?!Not a fan of lxd, but to be fair, not a fan of systemd'isms either.
No longer using Ubuntu at all because they force snaps down your throat. While I do like snaps on the server environment, (I think a lot of the haters out there don't see how nice they are on servers), I prefer to use Debian and then to just install snapd on my terms.
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 a bit of a fear of SLES, purely due to Puredisk using them as their base back in the day (before they were swallowed by Symantec/Veritas/Broadcom/whatever). The amount of time I spent in YaST2 and losing data, again and again, made me genuinely never want to investigate any issues.
I must have played with SUSE at some point, these words bring back horrors I'd long forgotten.
Yeah, just reading 'Yast' triggered me
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.
Hannah Montana for being so bloated
Hater. Hannah Montana Linux is a masterpiece
This thread has basically devolved into "Ubuntu hate circlejerk party", as expected. I guess I just hate the distro I've spent the majority of my time on Linux using getting constantly dunked on and am a bit sad watching its inevitable death by snap. (Insert Thanos meme here)
I've been using Ubuntu professionally and as a daily driver for more than a decade now. I've tried the other major ones but Ubuntu is just no fuss. I can stand up a fresh system in 20 minutes and there is an enormous support base. I just don't have time to be a Linux hipster these days.
The only thing I can see which might win me over one day is Nix.
Same here. Ubuntu user for a loong time. Tried others but Ubuntu is just easy for me.
Yeah. Part of me is annoyed by snaps. But, tbh, having tried fedora and opensuse over the last few years, I don't quite see how they're so much worse than freaking Flatpaks. And at least they come gods damned fully enabled.
Manjaro feels like a bit of a mess to me and always ends up with problems.
Ubuntu releases too many buggy updates and dumps their idiosyncratic tastes in software on everyone whether people like it or not.
Well look at that, no one seems to mention opensuse/Tumbleweed.
Great sign 👍🏻
Fedora also unscathed.
Two of my favorites, if not my absolute favorites.
There are only two distros in the world. Those that people hate and those that no one uses
Once upon a time I was into RC helicopters. This combined with working offshore as a bachelor and living in a tiny apartment with a jurassic era (but reliable) car meant that I had a pretty decent income and not a whole lot on which to spend it. So once in a while I visited my local RC store just to browse and chat with the people there and if I stumbled across something interesting I might buy it.
I was not that much into the building part of the helicopters, but I saw it as a means to an end. Something I had to do to be able to fly it. The flying part was the end.
One day I was visiting the store, this clerk I knew showed me this kit he had. Brand new, pre-assembled, perfect craftmanship had gone into putting the kit together. Governor controlling the engine, ability to negate the pitch, extra strong servo for the cyclic controls. She was a beauty, and if it wasn't for the fact that I was, at that point,saving up my money for something unrelated, I would've bought it.
"You guys pre-assemble kits now?" I asked out of curiosity. "Oh no, we don't have the time for that" the clerk replied. "But this one customer" he began "he buys new kits, builds them, and sells them back to us at a 10% loss"
My brain short circuited. Why?? The flying part was the reward. Why would you not fly it? Well, in retrospect I understand it. The guy liked building complex machines. He had no interest in flying the kits. He loved the building process and the craftmanship that went into it, and once he had assembled it as perfectly as could ever be done, he was finished with the kit, and on the lookout for something new. He had the time to do what he loved, so why not. Rumor has it that he could spend an entire day with a tachometer and an IR thermometer just to get the fuel mixture perfect, whereas I used to do that in 10 minutes and call it "good enough".
I never met the guy. But he sounds like an interesting character. If he ran Linux he'd be running arch. Not from the bragging rights, not for its usability, not for (insert common reason here). But simply because he loved the craftmanship that went into setting it up.
I hate Arch's installation process but love AUR, and having always up-to-date packages. The new archinstall script that comes with it is actually really straight forward. Also, I install a complete, bloated gnome desktop environment, set up everything once and the resulting OS is really user friendly.
Calam Arch exists.
The chaotic AUR singlehandedly makes Arch great (on weaker machines).
I use EndeavorOS (99% Arch) and I haven't looked back. Up to date software, knowing what's in my system, minimal bloat, but I would recommend Fedora or openSUSE to beginners and intermediates. I can't recommend Ubuntu or Manjaro. Using either one of those is like signing your sanity away.
This is such a weird take for me, and it's popular enough of a take that it makes it weirder.
Arch is, by default, a barebones distro. The whole point is you start from nothing with very few defaults and learn how to get everything up and running yourself.
Complaining that the way arch works sucks cos you don't want to do that is bizarre.
Imagine complaining that Linux From Scratch sucks cos you have to do it from scratch.
Endeavor OS exists, it's what Endeavor OS should be. You can just use it, no one will complain. The Arch folk might be less inclined to help with it, but that's why there are Endeavor OS folks to talk to.
You realize EndeavorOS is 99% arch, right? You don't hate arch, you hate the idea of manual setup.
Also, glad you use EndeavorOS! I use it too and it's the only distro I've daily driven for years now.
There's an installer ISO called Calam Arch Installer that uses the calamares installer (I think this is what all the Arch based GUI installer distros use - Garuda, Manjaro, etc). This one installs vanilla Arch though.
If you want to run straight Arch but don't want to deal with Arch's painful install process, this one is for you. I've used it on all of my Arch systems and it has been reliable.
endevour is the manjaro of arch-based distros
manjaro is the ubuntu of arch-based distros
Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.
You can't install a proxy daemon as a flatpak, but you can install it through Nix
I don't like Canonical and Red Hat, so I wouldn't use their distros out of principle. On top of that, I don't like Snaps, and Ubuntu's customizations done to GNOME.
From Fedora, I don't like Calamares. The rest is great.
Manjaro doesn't play nice with either upstream nor downstream and has GTK apps that don't follow GNOME's design guidelines, this last point also applies to Endeavor OS.
Vanilla OS is unusable for me, AB Root is hard, and I can't follow any online guides, tutorials or scripts. But their UX/UI is drool worthy. Blend OS has Waydroid out of the box but it's immutability is hard for me.
Debian is awesome but I don't like it for my work / gaming rig. Old kernel and packages. Best ever for servers.
All Ubuntu derivatives are old for me, so no. But I liked Zorin the best.
Deepin, I'm afraid of Chinese gov backdoors. Most probably paranoia.
I settled on Crystal Linux (arch based), has the nicest UI but they don't provide a GUI for package management, and they have handled their repos irresponsibly. It's more of a hobby distro, but a beautiful one.
For me it's Ubuntu. Whenever I tried it it was buggy and crashing. It kinda feels like Windows of GNU+Linux.
About Manjaro, I like it. I kinda feel sad seeing Manjaro get so much hate. The only thing I disliked was the accidental DDoS of AUR. But so far it's been working relatively well for me. I use Manjaro with Plasma.
And my favorite is Linux Mint. It just works, and it does so reliably. Also the Linux Mint community is really nice.
As such, I donated to Manjaro, Arch, and Linux Mint. Not much, but at least something.
Ubuntu brings a ton of awkward and shit memories from the course we had on it in secondary school.
Admittedly, Linux Mint is the only distro I have used in a personal capacity.
http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/
[Edit] Sorry I've just picked up Sync and the UI has apparently confused me. I was trying to respond to this comment.
https://lemmy.world/comment/2287892
But I guess I messed up.
http
It's a static site with a single page, HTTPS does nothing because the domain name is still exposed.
fair enough.
Of course, you can have that opinion. After all. linux is about having a choice.
Ubuntu. Snaps are a buggy mess. I know you can remove them but I like sane defaults. Snap drives me insane. Mint, PopOS, Debian are better choices for a stable distro.
edit: I also don't like Fedora and CentOS. The installers tend to be very buggy for me.
Just the Oracle Red Hat clone, because, well, Oracle. Also those distros that disappear spontaneously because they were mainly maintained by one person only.
This. Leave it to Oracle to fork a perfectly core enterprise distro and make it suck.
Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I've been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I've never use them myself.
Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.
Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.
I much prefer the AUR and native system packages to flatpak. It's the big advantage Arch has over other distros, just how much software is natively available due to the AUR. There are a few cases where flatpak works better but generally I prefer all my apps to share one set of up to date dependencies.
Android. Google doesnt invest anything in AOSP it seems, GrapheneOS is the only really well made Distro.
Androids security model is a joke as every phone is bloated with malware that has full access over everything.
Banking apps need Google, map apps need Google.
There is no split screen in AOSP since forever.
No tools on the lockscreen. I am not talking about crazy ios like tools that are basically a seperate OS, its still a lockscreen. But camera and torch?
So many restrictions. RootlessJamesDSP is a good example of crazy workarounds that still dont work in the end. No FOSS appstore with autoupdates is also a pain.
Well, scrolling through every comment, it looks like very few people hate Fedora. I've always been using Debian and Debian based distros but recently moved to Fedora, and I'm not surprised people like it.
Fedora is great! It ended my distro-hopping.
I still hop around, but I always come back to Fedora. It just works. Well, once you enable parallel downloads on DNF it just works.
Thank you. Forgot about that!
Red Hat brought us systemd...
OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)
Also, Manjaro
My only real gripe is their default sudoers config.
I have literally never had any upgrade issues on debian that wasn’t something mentioned in release notes(been using it since debian 7). I am guessing you did a lot of things they tell you specifically not to do on this page:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
Fwiw, I’ve had great results with upgrading Debian derivatives. A machine in my closet has been upgraded from version 8 -> 12 without any major issue. Usually, upgrade problems come from custom or third party software in my experience.
I've had the opposite experience. Updating my apt sources.list and running dist-upgrade always worked for me on Debian (though most of the time I just run unstable which is rolling) but on Arch it seems like if I don't upgrade regularly sometimes I'll get hit with signature key errors because the key database is outdated and then have to go run some other command to update the keys before a pacman -Syu will work. I love both distros, but there's no better way to make your users not give a shit about security than making said security interrupt their workflow. Most of the time I just disable the key check in pacman.conf so that the damn thing will upgrade successfully.
Zorin OS (based off Ubuntu) recently released a wizard to upgrade the OS between major releases. I've not tried it yet.
Arch and any arch based distro. It's overused, deb is better and the absolute chads will always be distros like NixOS or Guix System. There is no use for an unstable, beginner-unfriendly, distro where you constantly encounter dependency hell.
Of course I'm just being edgy, every Linux Distro is good for the sole fact of it not being Windows.
Red Hat for obvious reasons. Used to run and recommend CentOS before all the fuckery.
CentOS. We were stuck on an old version at work. The OS is already designed to use old packages for security/stability, so imagine how outdated they are on an old version. It was a nightmare getting new software running on it. That coupled with the other news surrounding CentOS and RHEL, I'm not touching those anymore w a 10 foot pole. I wish it just crumbles and Debian takes over. I have had amazing success with like 20 years on Debian and it just gets better and better.
Manjaro got me unironically back to windows
update: thanks to archcraft i'm back on the linux train
Ubuntu because of forced Snaps SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company's rumored?stance on antisemitism (google banned Jewish holidays) Fedora for it's update mechanism with the forced reboot Arch as the necessary evil
I was really surprised to read about the antisemitism allegation. That's a very serious accusation. I've looked into it and it seems that these claims are controversial. First thing to mention is that the accuser said himself that this was about the company SUSE, and not the distribution openSUSE.
The article claims there are emails and other employees' statements as proof, but provides none. The article is also over a year old, so why hasn't this led to any public statements from SUSE or any legal or other actions? Antisemitism is a serious offense in Germany.
Discussions on reddit and hacker news all state that the writer has gone off the rails. When being called out on reddit for deadnaming a trans woman, he plays dumb. I don't think he's dumb. It seems to me like he's transphobic and acting like a troll about it in good old American conservative fashion.
For me, this seriously calls into question any claims he makes about social justice stuff, even if it concerns himself. He apparently views other people's social justice as something to play with, so my gut feeling is that it would be no concern to him to lie or bend the truth about stuff like this in order to achieve something. It's all a game to him in the political arena, not serious life issues.
If I'm wrong, all he has to do is provide the proof he claims there is, even if only anonymized.
If the allegation is just from Bryan Lunduke I'd take it with a pinch of salt. The guy is known for espousing some out-there views so it needs independent corroboration.
Yeah, I've not been able to find any allegations by anyone else, except for his vague mentions. There was also a Jewish person who had worked at SUSE who commented in one thread that they felt nothing less than welcomed.
Same here. I have not heard anything after the initial accusations. The company I am working for is using SLES as a main OS and is switching to another OS without any explanation. So I have no idea if the claims are true or the switch has anything to do with anything.
It just goes to show how an accusation like this sticks to a company's reputation. The reason for your company switching could be totally unrelated, yet your mind still jumps to this. Have you asked why they're switching?
The accusation by Bryan is out there, its detailed and looks profounded - there is no response from SUSE anywhere and this seems to follow the described pattern in the accusation of not talking about it. So as of now the public opinion is that the accusation was not withdrawn and is still standing. Not talking about it won't make it go away for anyone.
Using arch but honestly. I don't "like" any of them. Every distro I've ever used has required more setup and maintenance than I would have liked.
I really just want a system that doesn't bork itself on updates and let's me install whatever software I want. You would think that wouldn't be so impossible to find.
Sounds like you need an LTS.
I tried debian stable a week or two ago. Had about 4 different showstopper bugs in 3 or so days. It doesn't seem to help much from my limited experience.
Huh. Are you running any kind of exotic setup? What kind of bugs were they? Can you be sure they were Debian bugs and not hardware issues?
Yes. I had both actually. Hardware and debian specific bugs, on a clean install from the live iso with barely any packages installed from apt and like 10 flatpaks. I'm a bit exhausted rn to find all the links. But let me find at least the worst one for ya.
This was the most egregious one. essentially. On a fresh install updating was broken. Yeah. It was that bad.
In addition to that there was the amd ftpm stutter. Which isn't necessarily debians fault. But it's still bad.
And I was having screen flickers. Not sure why. I was tired enough of it bugging out that I just gave up on the stable dream and went back to arch.
Sorry mate. I love them all! All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well. Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.
I've never had a good experience with an arch based distro. I understand that's kind of the goal, and it's great if you want to use your computer to set up arch, but I want to use my computer for other things.
Endeavor, Arch, Manjaro et al.
Well, Ubuntu. I've been skeptical of it from the beginning, but I did use it on and off in the 00's. Canonical has since gone out of their way to make sure I won't install their shit on my computers.
Recent developments have also somewhat soured me on Fedora.
Ubuntu. Pretty sure you already have an idea why. Lol.
OpenSUSE. I've always had issues trying to use it, from zypper to updates to bootloops. It's also sluggish compared to other distros (yes, same DEs usually) on my laptop. I've tried at least 3x trying to get why a lot of people love it. It's just not for me.
I've never tried Manjaro yet, but coming from Arch and EOS I don't think I ever will.
Yeah, don't even touch Manjaro OR Ubuntu with a 100 foot pole.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is what I'd use if Arch stopped existing, TBH.
Easily manjaro, so many headaches
For beginners, and rolling distribution. A beginner should start with something that doesn't break while you don't understand if it's your or the shiny new program that broke the system. But then, I have been using Debian for more that 20 years. For me it's a tool, not a game.
I'm noy going to say I dislike it, but I don't see the point in a source based distro like Gentoo anymore.
I learned a lot from using Gentoo when I was just getting into Linux 20 years ago, but now looking back on it, why would I want to juggle with everyones build systems and compiler flags? Especially now hardware is so homogenous.
That's no longer the point of Gentoo either.
Every distribution offers different things. I like debian sid for the simplicity and general software availability, but APT is something i still consider a bit clunky. I like arch because of its barebones philosophy - arch wiki helped me a lot learn about linux. I like gentoo - the wiki is awesome and portage is a great package manager. It was the first time I saw how the linux kernel gets compiled. It makes you appreciate all the work the devs do. I now read the title and you ask for the opposite. But someone might find these bad, so i will post it as-is
Gentoo is the best distro when you want to get deeper understanding. If I had to give advice on the path of getting to know deeper the Linux environment I'd say: Debian or Fedora -> Arch -> Gentoo -> lfs
If I had time I'd try NixOS and FreeBSD as a main workstation.
to be honest, i agree with you. Although you can learn the same things through debian or ubuntu for example, their wikis are in no-way comparable to arch+gentoo. Having tried LFS, I think it is a great experience but definitely not something i could daily-drive. FreeBSD is something I have not tried; nixOS as well. I have used OpenBSD but it feels a bit slow compared to linux - at least as a desktop OS.
Fedora, mostly because of the decisions they make are mostly for corporate areas;
The kernel selection they make, packages and etc;
Sometimes need to deal with kernels they select that don't work well with my hardware
I was thinking of switching from Ubuntu to Fedora because of the praise it got for being more up to date and having great default settings as a desktop distro.
What kind of problems did you run into? Can you give examples? I'd like to know before making the switch.
One of the problems, somebody else said lol they have some ideas and updates to new versions that work better for corporate area but for desktop users it gets slower and too bloated for a normal desktop user (or at least for me, was my experience), if for you, the problems that I say below is not a big deal for you when you try Fedora, you can use it, if it doesn't affect you Somebody would say that Ubuntu is a lot corporate, but if you remove snaps is really okay, on my experience... and there is Debian in anycase lmao
I had more problems with systemd on Fedora than other distros, despite on Ubuntu mostly you will have this issue with snaps only, this was mostly issues here, maybe for you would be different (I tried to install last month but systemd was crashing at boot and returned to my regular debian setup)
I had the kernel issue, on ubuntu it's a bit better to handle previous versions, sometimes an update doesn't work well, bad performance and you don't have so many options of rollback like Ubuntu (Debian too gives more options); and the praise, it's normal because it works well for specific users mostly pure gnome users that works well on any version and don't have issues from like I said before and don't really care losing a bit of performance if we have more "features" that others don't really use so much
The one with the most elitist gatekeeping users.
You could look into endeavour OS. It's arch-based, but closer to plain arch than manjaro. It should let you choose which kernel version to use. Another option might be garuda linux. It's a arch-based gaming-focused distro. So it should be flexible as well, but it did break frequently on my system back when I tried it out. Otherwise Alma Linux (Red Hat based) might be running older kernel versions as well.
The only one that really pissed me off was a distro called biglinux. It's arch based and very popular in Brazil. It's actually very stable. Everything works great. It's got some nice features.
Butttt, it uses latte dock or panel (kde). They have built in presets for how to arrange the panels and what not. It's nice, however, I was trying to move some panels around from the base options and broke kde. I wasn't doing anything more than changing GUI settings and the whole desktop broke. I seriously don't understand.
Debian, as its so MANUAL. Upgrading by manually updating x times and then literally changing the repos manually in the sources list? Wtf? Without any documentation or automation??
QubesOS, as it probably doesnt run on any real hardware. Didnt get beyond a blackscreen, and also AMD consumer GPUs dont support accelerated VMs making it useless.
Ubuntu because its annoying, but unsnap fixes a lot and its actually okay, still outdated Kernel als a bit weird.
KDE Neon because I cant tolerate its not a workstation distro but want it to be one
Linux Mint. Its old, and always had weird crashes for me. Its kinda nice and easy, kinda weird and complicated to do certain things. Some packages dont run as its not Ubuntu. Would always choose any KDE Distro that is newer.
Manjaro because in the few months I've used it, it happened twice that my system didn't boot anymore after I updated it. The second time I didn't reinstall but installed EndeavourOS instead. Been using that for like 2 years and never had that issue again.
I was using Manjaro until the day my install started giving me problems.with dependencies and duplicated packages (?), so I went with Fedora and it's been smooth so far.
Ubuntu: it's not bad, I just don't like canonical
Manjaro: it starts as arch but more user friendly (by being preconfigured), until it inevitably breaks (being arch) and you end up with a regular arch that you don't know how is configured
Elementary os: it's too elementary os
All those con distros that are just a bunch of reskinned free stuff ask you money for that. Like zorin os
Having used both Manjaro and Arch, Manjaro breaking has nothing to do with Arch. Arch is far more stable.
Ubuntu. I never liked how it becomes a total mess when it goes EOL.
9 month for normal and 5 years for LTS. It's not that difficult
@vettnerk All linux Distros should take example from TROMJARO.
Any 10 or more year support distro because they increase the range of versions that stuff has to work with by 5 extra years and any knowledge I gain about those ancient versions will never be useful again. They also delay a lot of new features in protocols, file formats,... where a large majority of clients needs support before the next phase of introducing a feature can be started.
Mint. I just don't get it. It's Ubuntu but "different"? I heard a lot of people have issues with it. But also a lot of people love it and always recommend it.
To be fair I never used it and it's probably fine/great but I just have a weird unfounded hate for it
Anything even tangential to Red Hat.
RPM's are hot garbage when it comes to packaging formats.
Having said that, I use Fedora at work and Ubuntu at home.
EndeaverOS. On two systems it installed but lots of error popup windows right from desktop launch. just seemed Janky compared to plain Arch or any other popular distro.
Perhaps look at what they are saying? I daily drive Endeavour and have no problems with it
Same. Every problem I’ve had with it, I’ve caused…and have been able to fix from the live image. EndeavourOS is definitely my favorite at this time.
Oh I did. Permissions, things it couldn't find, other errorS...From default install. No thanks, no time to fix stuff that other distros had clean installs with.
Wow. Totally opposite experience.
Yep, hardware can make a difference, so I recognize that (I have one machine that will not install any deb based distro, some notify of the bug. some ignore it and do an install but cannot boot due to hardware bug. RPM based distros acknowledge the issue amd work around it) But permission issues and missing files from default install are just not something I have time to deal with.
Huh thats weird i've found endavour mich faster to setup wthout any issues. But fair enough if thats tour experience
Yeah, it's like all the complaints of nVidia drivers, for me I've never had any issues. The linux user experience is fragmented
Gentoo.
Ain't nobody got time for dat!
😢
Although...
I use a self hosted binhost so that I only compile on one of my devices, share with the rest. Works flawlessly.
Rocky and OL...
Just their approach aren't as good as Alma or CentOS as upstream. It's just my personal opinion...
I just don't like the CIQ narrative and Oracle that keep pushing Red Hat to corner...
Red Hat being dick because most of downstream being dick, especially CIQ/Rocky.. they steal about 30% of Red Hat contract, while offer cheaper package (quite a lot cheaper, and they don't even work on SIG like AlmaLinux Does), but using RHEL code, and just rebrand it as the best RHEL compatible, Rocky Linux.
OL is worst... Overprice Oracle DB, provide free OL, fork from Red Hat, and slap much higher cost until your company can't pay... well at least OL is honest than CIQ...
People need to see from Red Hat perspective regarding their dick move on exercising their GPLv2, and the upstream code still in git.centos.org. It depends now on downstream for repackage it. So it's still open source... and you can still have Rocky, Alma, OL, just you need to maintain the build pipeline...
And Rocky is broken on Old Thinkpad with 7 row keyboard. Alma, RHEL, and Fedora isn't.
I still can't find the cause, but end up using Fedora on most Thinkpad I have.
Other than that Is Ubuntu... It's... simpler to use, but when you deploy to production or Enterprise env... mostly sucks when they push broken update, and we need to rollback, it's not as simple as dnf history undo... it's also personal opinion, YMMV.
I'm agree with this point of view.. CIQ narrative have too much conflict of interest. In my place, most corp are happy with CentOS Stream being able to be the upstream test before landed on RHEL. At least now they don't need to long to put on Fedora to be landed on 3 years cycle like old times...
Everything made sense but OpenSuse, what up with German made stuff?
Some people don't like things that are well made and organized in a sensible manner?
Like sudo requiring you to use the root password?
Isn't one of the principal reasons sudo exists is so you DONT need to know or use the root password to perform root-level tasks?
It's an idiotic choice on OpenSUSE's part IMO.
You can modify the settings to get passwordless sudo.
Of course you can. My point is, it's a ridiculous decision on OpenSUSE's part to ship it this way in the first place.
As far as I remember, sudo ask for the user password, not the root one.
It is "su -c [some_command]" that ask for the root password.
Was going to comment similar. it has all thinks thought about and tweaked so it runa great and functions like it should. Maybe they didn't enjoy system rollbacks and GUI admin?
It's made by Germans, not lawyers.
What does that mean?
Ok, could you give an example? I never used OpenSUSE, just curious.
Yast. I love zypper and opi but yast is super weird. Like if you want to do things that you can do with yast, you probably know how to do it on terminal.
What do you like?
If I had to guess either Debian or TempleOS.
Mint removes snaps and card games and replaces some GNOME utility apps like image viewer, video player, store etc. with its own apps. Mint also comes with additional apps like Hypnotix, Transmission, Hexchat, Timeshift but worst case they need additional disk space. Like 500 MiB maximum in a 10+ GiB install. I wouldn't consider these apps "bloat".
No compatibility with Ubuntu is Ubuntu's fault, no?
I use debian with flatpaks. It is good enough for me. I like it and I am gonna keep using it.
No one can dictate what tickles your fancy and ticks your boxes bud. If you're into debian, that's cool by me. Not my jam personally, but wtf does my opinion matter?
Debian is great for my server.
I use MX, based on Debian, for my laptop so I only have to remember 1 update command.
My laptop is ancient, and I'm not getting any more out of it than I'm getting with MX
@vettnerk I don’t like Mint, because it looks ugly and dated. (But it is good that there is this distribution for all the boomers out there).
I don’t like arch, because what is the point, if you can use Fedora instead.
I don’t like Ubuntu, but the hate against it is much worse than the distribution itself.
Fedora and Arch are very different. That's like saying openSUSE and Fedora are the same, even that's not as extreme as your claim because they at least use the same package format.
@yum13241 I want a distribution with recent packages = Arch | Fedora
I want a stable and polished distribution = Fedora
I don’t care for the AUR as is not needed anymore in times of flatpak and distrobox.
I don't want to use a separate package manager with dumb douche.fuck.shit names, that's a problem for programs like crispy doom for example.
Native packages ftw
Never before I've heard Arch being compared to Fedora.
RebeccaBlackOS
Because I can only use it on Friday Friday!
arch, ubuntu, nix, manjaro, gentoo, debian, redhat, endevour, artix, mint, lfs, fedora, etc