Which distro do you believe deserves more recognition?
Which distro do you believe deserves more recognition?
For me it's PeppermintOS.
I started my Linux adventure a few years ago, and haven't owned a Windows PC since.
I currently use Arch on my main rig, and I wanted to install Linux on two old laptops that I found laying around in my house
I then remembered the first distro I ever used, which is PeppermintOS, and I was amazed at the latest updates they released.
They even have a mini ISO now to do a net-install with no bloat, with a Debian or Devuan base.
Sadly, I believe the founder passed away a few years ago, which is why I was really happy to see the continuation of this amazing project.
Void Linux for the arch and gentoo crowd. It's a system that can be assembled more cohesively.
Nix and Guix - the ideas they bring to the table are revolutionary. I prefer Guix due to its use of Scheme (guile). But Nix is more mature and has more packages.
I've used Debian for years but tried Void on a really low spec netbook and it's pretty nice. The install is pretty painless and not having systemd is an interesting change for me.
Plain ol Debian
I've been using it on servers for over 20 years. It's a great distro.
It's a community project. Every member of the Debian project has equal rights and vote on major decisions. It's not owned by a large company so it's mostly avoided any controversy due to bad decisions (for comparison, see the controversy around CentOS Stream).
They mostly don't change things if they work fine as-is. The network configuration in
/etc/network/interfacesis essentially the same format as it was 20 years ago. (for comparison, see Ubuntu deciding to change how it does things every few years). Probably the biggest recent change was switching to systemd in 2015, but even today they have a compatibility layer to convert packages with sysvinit-style services to systemd, and you can still switch back to sysvinit and completely get rid of systemd.You can upgrade to the next version in-place - just edit the apt repository config to point to the next version,
apt update,apt full-upgrade, and reboot into new kernel version. Most upgrades are seamless (but it's still best to read the release notes).Most packages include a
README.Debianfile in /usr/share/docs somewhere that usually includes very brief instructions on how to get started with the program.It supports practically every system architecture. They still make an i686 build that works with processors as old as the Pentium 4. They also had an i386 build that worked on systems as old as the original Pentium, and only dropped it this year with Debian 12. Supporting an architecture doesn't just mean the base OS - it also includes most of the packages too.
What I love about Debian is there are always instructions regardless of whatever random package I want to use or Linux thing I’m trying to do.
@dan what is the name of the distro.please tell me I am switching to Linux from windows and I don't want to use Ubuntu.
been thinking about moving on from Pop_OS and doing the usual looking around – was going to be a toss up between NixOS, Void, Alpine, and Debian Sid – but recently caught Veronica Explains talking about Debian and realizing enough with all the noise – simple, stable, boring, ubiquitous sounds REALLY appealing …
Using it over years and discovered the expert installer a few months ago. Really good stuff, especially since they decide to build an extra repo for non-free-firmware, because a lot of people ditch Debian when their shitty WiFi doesn't get recognized immediately after install because it needs a non-free-firmware.
Whenever somebody recommends NixOS, I just want to spam the comments with Guix. I prefer configs I can understand, and I think lisp makes that easier. Other than syntax, the only thing I see is people complaining about the free-oftware-only. But the recently hyped distrobox solves that (together with the nonguix repo). Yet nobody recommends guix in all these "immutable" distro threads.
In my opinion Guix is the best mix of:
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Arch (rolling release),
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NixOS ("immutable", atomic updates , rollback, reproducible, declarative configs)
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Gentoo (source code based, write your own package definitions for any source code you find),
with some lispy syntax.
NixOS, and hopefully soon SnowflakeOS which makes it more approachable for more casual users.
Another user mentioned Guix, which I'd like to try soon to compare to NixOS.
It's hard to compete with how much there is in nixpkgs though... as much as I... a professional Haskell programmer... hate to acknowledge the realities of network effects.
NixOS has the worst documentation I've come across. It's difficult to describe just how useless it is despite its wealth. It's neither a manual, nor a reference, nor a guide, but all three jumbled in one and that goes for the package manage with its DSL, the operating system built on top of the package manager, and the tooling.
The best description I can think of the documentation of that project is "everything is everywhere". Bless their documentation team volunteers that are trying to figure out the absolute mess it is. They have my utmost respect.
So, I have only ever known Windows, but am becoming more and more Linux curious. I see all these different distros you guys talk about and I have to ask, do all the distros run any of the available software or would I have to try to try to find one that will run what I'm interested in running? If so which distro will run the available music production software? I'm sick of microshaft. Help a brother out?
How is Guix for disk user use? As soon as I install nix (the tool, not the OS), it immediately eats up 2Gb of hd space... before installing anything. I wipe the install and then forget for a few months, rinse repeat.
Guix looks a lot cleaner to me, but I haven't tried it yet.
In fairness, when you install the nix package manager you’re going to get a full toolchain with all necessary dependencies in addition to your system ones. On NixOS these are your system ones as well so you don’t necessarily have duplicates. The same will be true of Guix afaik.
Maybe use btrfs, which has reduplication and compression capabilities. I never tried it in Guix but it's like magic.
Intuitively, without doing a detailed comparison, I agree that Guix and lisp would make things easier.
Network effects so far has been my reason for not trying Guix sooner along with the free software only... though free software only has also simulatenously pushed me towards it :)
Distrobox, is something, I don't think I'd be too interested in. However I'm probably just annoyed at being forced to use unreproducible docker images all the time and biased against containers because of it.
I'll have to give it a try!
I love Guix and want to see it get more recognition but I've never been able to get Distrobox working on Guix System, have you? I opened a discussion on the Distrobox GitHub but it was quickly closed.
I love the idea of guix, the syntax and docs seem much nicer, but the most important feature of NixOS for me is reproducability. If i'm installing all my software in distrobox, it is no longer reproducoble. Guix also seems to lack an alternative to Flakes.
the most important feature of NixOS for me is reproducibility
Reproducibility is a big topic for Guix developers and users as well, just have a look at how many times they talk about that: https://hpc.guix.info/blog/2022/07/is-reproducibility-practical/
Also correct me if I'm wrong but I think Guix goes further on reproducibility than Nix, because everything they package is from source, whereas my understanding is that a lot of Nix packages are built from binaries.
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EndeavorOS btw.
Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it's history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.
If there was only a way to get automatic tiling on cinnamon it’d be my favorite desktop by far. Everything you need, nothing you don’t, sensible by default. It’s the right option for most people I think
@jennraeross Agreed. I was seduced by the GNOME tiling extension and switched to Manjaro, but otherwise I’d have stayed on Mint.
Excellent - I'm about to install it for my aged mother, because windows keeps moving her cheese.
I want something that doesn't change the workflows once she's learned how to do a task, and that local techs can help her with, and that I can VNC to when I have to.
You can configure the system for backup and auto updates which is handy to keep it secure without any interaction. Only reason I ever had it fail was entirely me screwing it up, usually by distro hopping and formatting wrong.
How can someone speak such truth. Agree it is not perfect. But it just works and really well. Only big controversy I can think of is the website being hacked a couple of years ago, but they were open and transparent in my opinion about the hole thing. Also disto hoped a lot but I am always brought back to "green Ubuntu". Can Mint team get ontop of Wayland please
Speaking as a relative linux noob, Mint is probably the most recommended distro I've seen now that Ubuntu jumped the shark. Not sure how anyone could think it needs more recognition.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Like Peppermint this is a fantastic distro for anyone wanting to use Debian without the pain of self installing. Plus you always have the latest cinnamon.
It's also good for anyone wanting to get away from Ubuntu all together.
I'd also like to get away from the stigma that mint is only a newbie distro. It's not. It's full fat Linux so pros can use it too, and should. It's very reliable, fast and use friendly.
Above all, it's true FOSS and LMDE is 100% community 💪
All of them, thanks a lot for all the Devs hard work, I've tried and loved so many distros that I can't choose any of them but lately I have been using cachyos which is a clean and fast arch based distro.
Hannah Montana Linux
Puppy. Tiny, quick, hard to break, runs on everything.
Puppy got me through a rough year after a nasty virus corrupted my windows boot sector and I couldn't afford a replacement at the time.
Technically, I had the money a month later but I was enjoying Puppy & just stuck with it.
Honestly I've really enjoyed Zorin. It's made life simple when it comes to migrating friends and family to Linux. Specifically the way they handle fonts and scaling in office programs when opening Microsoft files. It's been easy to get my wife to get off of windows after they started bombarding her with adds on her fuckin desktop screen.
Can you send a screenshot please? I'm curious how the fonts look.
Arch. Some of its users take this distro for granted a lot of times but it only goes downhill from here once you start looking at other distros.
Tumbleweed. Solid, Automated QA testing.
Chimera Linux. Security-related compilation flags go brrr. No systemd.
Maybe we'll see SerpentOS sometime before this decade ends but who knows.
On a side note. Aeon 1.0 if/when released, can't wait to see how it all turns out. Especially if they manage to integrate BTRFS snapshots with systemd-boot entries.
Wow. Great to see Chimera Linux on this list, though I do not think it is even out of Alpha yet.
Chimera Linux and Vanilla Linux are two of the distributions that I am most interested in at the moment.
I am also a huge fan of Arch but I typically install EndeavourOS these days. Out of the 80,000 or so Arch packages, EndeavourOS adds only about two dozen more but many of them are great. Installing yay by default is a great decision as well.
Wow. Great to see Chimera Linux on this list, though I do not think it is even out of Alpha yet.
This had me confused for a bit, but I see now that Chimera Linux and ChimeraOS are two different things.
Yeah using Arch (btw) cured me of my distro hopping. Although NixOS is looking tempting...
Bazzite, a gaming-oriented immutable distro with up to date Fedora packages and kernel, a lot of the kernel patches you'd want for gaming, automatic daily updates in the background, the option of installing the Nix package manager and Distrobox out of the box. They even have a Steam Deck version that works just like stock UI/UX wise but with all the added goodies.
Plus, on rpm-ostree/ublue-os as a whole, it just amazes me to no end you can basically look at deploying a distro as if it's a git repo these days. Wanna try Gnome? Rebase to the corresponding image and reboot, your data is still there. Don't like it? Quickly rollback or just pick the previous entry on GRUB. Incredible stuff, I'm sticking with those if I can help it for the foreseeable future.
+1 here. I wanted to write the same. Silverblue/ uBlue in particular has a huge potential.
It already is extremely user friendly, but if someone could develop an even more "noob"-friendly version with a great welcome-starter that shows you how to install stuff, a good looking KDE rice, and sells it as extra-distro with it's own website and iso, then it could easily replace Mint as the #1 best beginner distro!
Heck, Bazzite is most of the way there. With how quickly it's been improving, wouldn't surprise me if it had all that pretty soon.
I'm considering replacing my router with a software router and have been comparing a few options.
I was having a lot of difficulty getting 10Gbps through opnsense. Even after tuning a bunch of tunables, I was only getting 3Gbps or so, with no fancy features like IPS/IDS enabled. It was just a basic out-of-the-box config with my current home network as the "WAN" and a small lab network as a LAN. Something (NAT maybe?) seems to be single-threaded as it was hitting 100% of one core on a six-core i5-9500 (which should be more than powerful enough for this).
While researching I learnt that OpenWrt has an x86-64 build you can run on a computer. I thought it was only for regular routers.
Flashed OpenWrt to a USB stick and tried it instead of opnsense. Out of the box I got full 10Gbps speed, using less CPU power than 3Gbps used in opnsense (~15% per core across all cores). The base system is fast and light, only using 15MB of disk space and less than 100MB RAM. That makes sense given it's designed to run on routers, but in an era where a lot of software is very bloated, it's nice to see lightweight software that does its job with barely any overhead.
I don't think Arch needs more recognition; it seems to be doing just fine. It's been my daily driver on desktop and laptop for years, and on my cloud servers for a little longer than that.
Chimera Linux is doing some novel stuff, rather than the same old reflavoring of other distros; it's one I'm keeping my eye on.
I'm running Artix on a laptop; that's a good one for people wanting to escape the Poettering hive-mind. I'm running EndeavourOS on my desktop, and love it. TBH I should have done it three other way round; Artix is too fussy for a dynamic environment like a laptop.
Chimera is the bees-knees. I've got my son's computer configured with it and have had zero complaints, it just plays games and makes working roms/emulation so easy.
You might be talking about ChimeraOS, while the other person is talking about Chimera Linux, a different project.
Void, Slackware, Alpine, Gentoo, Devuan (although I'd like for them to remove even the slightest semblance of systemd), FreeBSD
Qubes
I would never go back from qubes. VirtualGL seems promising for the hardware accelerated apps and GPU passthrough for a gaming VM is insane
:-) BedrockLinux, my daily driver for a dozen years. :-)
woah, nice!
Bedrock looks crazy impressive and ambitious but, adding to your point, I have to admit I keep forgetting it exists.
On that note, I'll add Vanilla OS.
I tried it once, and it was hella impressive, but I didn't stick with it, I don't know why. It just seems a little too much for me.
It's a nice one for low end machines
I was a Arch Linux fan for at least 5 years. Tried all the main ones except gentoo. Kept coming back to Arch. But now I'm one week into using NixOS. I don't think I'm ever going back. It has completely blown my mind, and fixes every minor thing I didn't like about arch. Mainly how package dependencies work. I'm sure there will be a downside somewhere, but so far the only issue I've had is just trying to learn how to config everything.
TLDR: NixOS. I don't know how I didn't know about it till recently. Seems like it would be a lot more popular than it is.
Back when I was on NixOS, my main bugbear was that the Nix package language is pretty esoteric. I have some experience in packaging on Linux, so I thought I would be able to be able to put together at least a minimal package. No such luck. You how Haskell has a reputation for being difficult and full of burritos? It was like that, but the burritos were packages.
Artix btw.
+1 for Peppermint. I installed it on a thumb drive and always carry it with me while travelling. This way I can boot it on the company laptop to safely steam video and browse social media while not touching the (encrypted) company disk.
I can't say how popular it is amongst Linux users/fans, but Sparky is pretty cool. I had it on my shitty laptop for a while because I need a distro that worked with low ram and storage.
Also, not Linux based, but I'd love to see more work done on the Amiga based AROS. It's hella niche, but I'd work on it if I had the knowhow and skills.
Have you tried Spiral too?
No. First time hearing about it. I'll definitely have to boot it in a VM on my desktop and check it out.
dietpi. besides rpi and other sbc, there's also vm images and it can be put right on x86 or x64 pc, too.
NixOS
Maybe it's just me, but folks seem to hate ZorinOS for some reason. Which imo, is a perfect distro as is for baby penguins.
Maybe it has more recognition than I'm aware, but Fedora has been really good to me since 2018!
I stopped looking at PepperMint when the founder passed away. It was a sad day.
Another sad day was when they could no longer keep using LXDE because it fell out of support. Very unfortunate
Qubes OS
Just to be an absolute rebel; Solus
SteamOS
I recently switched to Alpine and after seeing how amazing it is I feel like it deserves more recognition in the Desktop Linux space
Nobara, for audio and video production.
+1 for Nobara. All the optimizations make some significant differences in frametimes in my experience.
Nyarch Linux
I love the idea of peppermint OS but it didn't work properly on my laptop both times I tried it, first time it wouldn't install any of the extras I selected during the install process and the second time using the Debian 12 base it just straight up wouldn't give me an option to install extras and the window would instantly close when I tried to open it. I really love the ideology behind it and it is a speedy OS but I've ended up going to LMDE instead while I toy with the idea of Arch.
I don't think it's mentioned here yet: Siduction
More well known but less common as a desktop: Alpine
PCLinuxOS is the bastard child of mageia, itself the child of mandriva, of mandrake and conectiva, the last a very, very excellent RH derivative from way back but loved by its Brazilian parents and truly groundbreaking. Live upgrades between major distro versions!
It's an RPM distro - thus massive validity checks all the way down - with highly versatile app versioning and ranges, and no fucking systemd.
It just has a terrible installer and no templates or boxes for vagrant / etc.
Archcraft
Gnuinos or Trisquel - Trisquel cos its clean and just works. Gnuinos cos its interesting, Devuan based and just fast.
Why does it seem like half the posts on here have the sole intention of having me shill Garuda Linux? Refer to my older comments on why I think it is the best rolling release distro.
As an EndeavorOS user, I agree. Garuda is better for a system you install and it works, with all the goodies, while EndeavorOS is more of a "we gave you the foundation, do whatever you want" type of thing. Both are good.
temple os