For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
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Ubuntu is massively overrated. It’s a bloated distro owned by a greedy corporation.
I respect a lot what they did though. Ubuntu and Fedora worked and improved a lot of Linux’s new technologies. Plus their focus and model is more focused on the server side.
Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.
the snaps are terrible and they now have ads in the server version (CLI)
Wait they just include lines of advertisements or something in the command line??
It’s in the MOTD. Very easy to permanently disable, but still annoying.
What??
What??
The shell MOTD defaults to an Ubuntu Premium ad. It’s low-key but it’s indisputably an ad.
Misinformation.
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Pearl clutching is an exaggerated outage. They didn’t even show any outrage. Just noted a fact.
ads in the server version (CLI)
Dude, what?
I see it is in motd, but is it dynamic? I mean does it fetch new ad when needed?
I run the newest version of ubuntu server and it’s pretty much adds for ubuntu pro. But to be honest I don’t really mind it. They offer the extended updates for free for a handful of computers if you sign up for it. If the tradeoff for 10 years of support is some adds I am okay with it
Have to agree. They had a great start by enhancing Debian and being user friendly but, then they just kind of lost their way.
It should probably take Mint’s place on this list.
Although, speaking as a fan of Mint who used it as my “daily driver” for years, I think the time has come for them to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and embrace Wayland. I know that, if I’d stayed with Mint, I’ve have gone to LMDE by now.
I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.
Linux Mint surely is disabling more “features” from Ubuntu than it’s using at this point.
That’s why some people at wondering why wont Mint not rebase to Debian, and go from there… would be better than ‘repairing’ everything Ubuntu breaks.
Only issue I can see with LMDE compared to the Ubuntu variant is that some of their homegrown tools and stuff aren’t included in LMDE for whatever reason. But, if they shifted their focus to LMDE and added all the tools there to give you the proper Mint experience, I think it would be amazing.
indeed. Mint became what Ubuntu used to be, afaik.
I’ve never really used Ubuntu or Mint. I think I’ve installed both in VM but that’s it.
I agree with this entirely. Back when it was like V 3 or 4, it was amazing to get non-tech people into the Linux userspace. Now, it is atrocious and the last distro I’d ever suggest to someone.
Based.
All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is “fine” at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.And arch. Arch is godly.
(I use Arch btw.)
I’m gonna say “no”, but just by personal preference.
I agree that, if you’re skilled enough, 90% of distributions out there are completely useless once Arch and Debian are available.Couldn’t agree more. Arch is great if you need a malleable distro, Debian is for everything (else).
Debian is great if you want a stable distro. If you want the latest software run… Debian + Flatpak
Do you install ffmpeg via Flatpak?
In the spirit of your comment though, I have been meaning to try Debian Stable with Distrobox / Arch.
malleable distro
Hi. Gentoo user here. 👏
I’ve not used Gentoo in years but I really ought to give it another go. Do you still have to compile everything from scratch or are there binary repos now?
Bu the more you diverge from the default the more portage will compile packages for your setup.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t mail my disteos; rsync is much faster.
I’ve used Arch on many different computers over the years. It’s not stable, it breaks. I don’t understand why it’s great. Debian (minimal install) is better.
I’ve only had one problem with arch (it broke after an update once) except for that one problem it was always very stable and solid in my experience.
Debian is too “old” for me. I prefer bleeding edge and i refuse to use any flatpaks or such because they are a pain in the ass to set up right in my experience
Been at Ubuntu for a couple of years but I was pleasantly surprised when I went back to debian. Sticking to that one like shit on shingles.
Mint is definitely not overrated. It has done much for the community because they created a distro that is easy to understand if you switch to Linux, easy to maintain and mostly works out of the box. Also they don’t use snap.
Agreed. I just have better things to do than muck about with my OS. Just slap Mint on that fucker and get on with your life. Now, of course I i know that many people like to tinker and have everything just so. I’m not in any way knocking that. But if you just want minimal hassle Mint is the shit.
Noob mint user here; first distro, I really like it. What’s up with the snap contention that I keep seeing?
Snap is container Software. It’s a program that runs software in an isolated area. Snaps is made by canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. And it’s really hatred because, IIRC, it’s very slow and not completely open source
Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
Manjaro still hasn’t broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I’ve used the three branches it offers.
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@clobubba @valentino @nerdschleife @VoltaicGRiD I did the exact same thing. Mint and then manjaro got me to stick with Linux but I’d never recommend it now when endeavor os is right there
It’s fine. I have a dozen installs of it out in the wild, with very illiterate users, and have had almost no calls from them for problems in the 5+ years that they’ve been using it.
Everyone likes to hate Manjaro, but frankly it’s bulletproof.
Aaaaand… commence the downvoting.
You have to keep updating it fairly often, otherwise things slip through the cracks. Most recently on a machine that hadn’t been updated in about a year it wasn’t able to install anything because it couldn’t update its GPG keyring anymore. I find the solution to be
pacman-keys --refresh-keysor something like that. Why they can’t do that as part of one of the updates, I don’t know.There’s also small things that crop up during normal installs but that’s to be expected on any distro due to bugs in various packages.
Manjaro is fine. Ran it for a year straight before I broked it.
My 2 cents is this. Don’t install from AUR unless you have to. Thats how i broked my manjaro install when i was uninstalling packages to fix a bad install. So my install order to protect myself is:
Main Repo
Flatpak (if its not a system tool like an IDE)
AUR
But the AUR is the best part of Arch. I agree with you but why not use Arch or EndeavourOS and be free to use the AUR without fear.
Yes the AUR is the best feature of Arch, which is why I am still using an Arch distro and not Fedora or Debain.
However one of Manjaro’s features which other Linux distros don’t have, is how much of the OS’s troubleshooting and repair is in GUIs. For the most part I can setup a fresh Manjaro install without touching the command line once. And that’s how I want to use my machines, I want to just browse the web, play games, or do office tasks (the reason I use a computer), not trying to figure out how to install a GUI package manager from the AUR in EndeavourOS since it doesn’t come with one.
“Ran it for a year straight alright before I broked it”. Exactly.
I personally found Manjaro to be pretty nice, but i do have a lot of linux experience
RIP
Manjaro is amazing ( for a while ).
Great, just in time. Uninstall it and try a serious distro like Fedora or Opensuse TW
I wouldn’t consider Fedora or Opensuse TW better than Manjaro. Just trading one issue for another. Honestly I replaced my 1 year old Manjaro install (when I borked my DE) with Fedora.
Fedora lasted 1 month before the btfs filesystem broke and I lost all of my files with no way to recover. Ontop of the difficulty of adding community copr repos for features like XPadNeo, DNF being so slow that Discover would barley function, and being about 2 months behind software fixes for a specific graphic driver bug that prevented me from playing some UE4 game.
Still no breaks on my side after 3 years of daily use.
Wasn’t Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That’s what I’ve heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn’t (isn’t?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me. I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn’t break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn’t even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated
Stable is a vague concept but Manjaro takes more time than Arch to update software versions. To me both are rock solid.
Ubuntu. I think of it as the Yahoo of linux distros. It used to be good, but then they made terrible decisions that ultimately made them irrelevant.
Seeing Ubuntu now is like seeing your (previously) favourite musician, sold out and washed up.
More like OpenOffice. It still has some power on its branding, but new users should stay away from it and go for LibreOffice, that is any other main distro (Arch, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Debian, etc.). There’s nothing exciting happening in Ubuntu anymore, but a lot of people still know its name.
I wish it were irrelevant. It’s the default in a lot of non-hobby use cases. Even if it’s nobody’s favorite, switching requires a business reason and certain degree of consensus among devs/managers/partners/customers.
Gonna go with Manjaro. I can’t, for the life of me, understand why it gets the support it does. It’s not fantastic to begin with, with an apparently incompetent management team. Add in that all the theming is flat and lifeless, and I’m just confused.
I mean, any Arch derived distro with an “easy installer” kinda confuses me. Archinstall is fairly easy to use (although a bit ugly), and most other Arch based distros seem to miss what I see as the main point of Arch: getting to know and personalize your system. So things like Endeavor, Xero, etc. Don’t make a lot of sense to me either. But at least they’re not effectively accidentally DDOSing the AUR…
https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
Endeavouros is more community welcoming & does not make bad choices with a real copyleft license.
Oh, I totally agree. If I was going to recommend an Arch derivative with an easier installer, Endeavor would be the one.
I still think, though, if you’re looking for an “easy way to install Arch,” you’re gonna be happier with a different distro. Fedora or OpenSuse Tumbleweed maybe.
One good reason to have distros like EndeavourOS is if you have to use an Enterprise WiFi network while installing Arch. Pain in the ass to get iwd to work with them.
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Okay. Then use Endeavor. Easy to install, good tools, and not run by people who’ve let their SSL cert lapse 4 times.
But honestly, if you can’t deal with Arch install, I have to wonder if you wouldn’t be better off with something other than Arch and Arch based distros. Generally speaking, Arch based distros require more command line and config file editing.
I just don’t think Arch and Arch based distros are a good fit for beginners. If you’re intimidated by a TUI installer, you should start somewhere else. Fedora has a… usable installer and great GUI tools, for instance.
I’m not judging or bashing on anyone. But it’s like trying to learn how to knit by starting with a sweater. You’re in over your head before you even get started.
Manjaro is NOT Arch with a user-friendly installer. Once you have installed Manjaro, the system you have is not Arch. Which leads to one of the biggest problems with Manjaro—that it uses the AUR but is totally incompatible with it. Manjaro has its own kernels. Manjaro has its own package repositories. Manjaro uses its own configurations. The crappy management and governance of Manjaro screws all of this up from time to time.
What you described is EndeavourOS.
The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be “one distro to rule them all” because different people have different needs.
Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those “overrated” distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn’t everyone just use Debian?
The issue is new users.
If you have a vague understanding that Linux has distros and to switch to Linux, you’ll likely Google “best Linux distro.” Results that say “they all are good for different reasons” are unhelpful. Having sort through 50 options isn’t helpful.
New users want to know what to install. This means that some distros get hyped up as the best, and then people point out the cracks.
Until there is a clear and objective list of distros with pros and cons labeled the cycle will continue.
I already gave mine. They’re in the video.
You’re going to have to start adding your lemmy contact info in the podcast now lol
@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.
Gotta appreciate the pettiness of this. 😆
waaaat? I like the logo tho!
I tried installing NixOS in a VM once and it spent at least 45 minutes doing something with python and I said “That’s enough of that” and killed the VM.
Python works, it’s pip that doesn’t work because it’s trying to install stuff into an immutable distro
that logo is ancient and unappealing
I’ve never seen it before until now, but you’re totally right. I’m going to start hating it too now.
You should take a look at the Gentoo logo. That’s an international hate crime of a logo.
“Gaming” distros, save for Steam OS as that’s for a console-like device.
Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.
Ubuntu is not overrated. It probably gets more hate than it deserves just because it is so popular. That said, I hate it. Slow and opinionated ( by bad opinions ).
Manjaro because it is lipstick on a pig. Looks gorgeous, seems to offer the benefits of Arch with less pain, is total garbage.
But it is less pain. Distros that package Arch to make it fit for human consumption perform a vital service for it IMO. Arch is a fine distro that I could never use otherwise because it’s too much work to keep it together. With Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda etc. you get to use Arch albeit indirectly.
Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you’re not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They’ve made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for “stability” will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.
ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore.
I see this stability argument come up a lot but it’s not like Arch is a paragon of stability. I wouldn’t use Arch for a server, for example, I would use Debian stable.
For a desktop machine it depends on what your needs are. If it’s a personal, non-critical desktop machine then I don’t care about stability that much. Yeah Manjaro screws the pooch sometimes but the way it makes Arch simpler to use makes up for the occasional hiccup.
AUR does not figure into any of this IMO. Using “stability” or “compatibility” when it comes to AUR is nonsense. You take AUR packages as they come, there are no guarantees of stability or security or anything, and you should expect them to break at any time. If I need to rely on a 3rd-party package I use flatpaks or appimages not AUR.
I hear that. I wasn’t saying that the AUR is what causes the problems though. The AUR works better in Arch where everything is kept up to date, since that’s what the AUR targets. Manjaro holding back packages causes problems because the libraries and other packages might not be as up to date as the AUR scripts expect. This ends up causing more potential issues than the AUR otherwise would. If you’re not using the AUR then this all won’t have any effect on your usage of Manjaro, of course.
Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn’t a differentiation people are after.
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Maybe. Mint came first, and I wonder what purposes those other ones were trying to serve. I don’t know or care enough about the others. Do they differentiate enough to bother with?
At first, ElementaryOS was really trying to be for MacOS refugees what Mint is for Windows refugees. Later on they were trying to be their own ecosystem, and I haven’t heard from them since. Zorin…yeah Mint exists, what are you doing.
Haven’t heard of Rhino.
For me, every non-mainstream distro. IMO every fork which is just a rebuild .iso should ratherly be an install script and extra repos. Simply because the lack of maintenancers and userbase tends to make those projects to die or getting updates way less often tahn should. People should join any existing project rather than creating new ones.
Or: meta packages! (Debian nomenclature, but it probably exists on non-Debian distros as well)
Much more secure than executing random code online, usually with root privileges. And reuses the existing infrastructure of the “parent” distro.
For all its strengths, Arch is kind of a pain in the ass to maintain. I daily drive it but I risk breaking something if I don’t update regularly. My youtube laptop can’t update at all anymore from something I don’t care to fix (when Firefox breaks then its a big deal lmao) and my main rig needed to use the fallback initramfs for a while after I forgot to update for a while. mkinitcpio -P (I think) fixed it though
What do you mean exactly? A running system shouldn’t spontaneously break from not being updated. It’s just that partial upgrades can break compatibility/dependencies, but running full system upgrades should be fine, as long as you pay attention to breaking changes and major version bumps. Also with timeshift it should always be possible to get back to a working state.
I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don’t run
pacman -Syufor a year, you probably won’t have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you’d still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe “X” in “as long as I update every X, I’ll be fine?” Who knows. That’s not a very well-defined problem.I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I’m picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I’d get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I’m willing to do the occasional bit of “real work” if needed to keep it going, but that’s a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.
Yeah that’s what I meant, not updating for a while makes it more likely to break next time I try. I think the time I had to use the fallback I waited something like close to a month?
I imagine it’s a pacman keyring issue. I had it break on me on multiple occasions, on different machines, all after not having updated for a long-ish while.
I don’t get this either. Before my current PC, my last install was 6 years old. I could count on one hand the number of times I broke that install and every single time was my own damn fault.
I had Manjaro on a laptop that didn’t get updated for about a year. Broken on update because I didn’t check Arch news first to see if manual intervention was needed. Was still faster to fix than a backup-reinstall.
Countless other installs of Arch or derivatives on various PCs and laptops without issue.
There can definitely be more of a learning curve but once you’re set, I find it much easier to maintain than other distros. 🤷🏻♀️
MX Linux.
I don’t know why it gets recommended so often, I don’t actually think many people use it, but for some reason it’s brought up all the time. I blame Distrowatch.
I was an MX user. It looks nice out of the box (better than Mint at the time) and the “flagship” version runs smooth on old laptops, probably thanks to Xfce. Side note, MX has a rare feature, it provides a choice between two init systems.
100% distro watch
