For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn’t a differentiation people are after.
Removed by mod
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 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
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.
AH, so this is a “tell me your favourite distro” post again. Tribalism isn’t cool, man.
My list overrated list additions:
-
Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.
-
Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.
-
RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.
-
Any Linux without systemd or glibc: Mistakes were made, and then different mistakes were made trying to prove systemd made mistakes. Musl based Linux distros are going to have compatibility problems, so I might as well run a different OS. The BSDs are *nix-like systems without glibc with a history and larger communities.
-
Mint isn’t a bad ditro its just overhyped for new users.
Nobara is very overrated. Comes with so much bloat apps and is confusing for new users. Don’t understand why people recommended it.
It has some kernel tweaks and niche bug fixes for certain games but its just overrated.
Ubuntu is decent but definitely lost its touch over the years.
I think Pop!OS is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is now.
Also I definitely agree about Mint. I don’t think it really sets out to hype itself up to be fair, it’s just a nice-looking, easy to use and stable distro that does exactly what it’s supposed to, and people tend to over-sell it a bit.
I definitely agree when it comes to Nobara. I’ve used Fedora for some time now, and I was curious about how it would be tailored to gaming. I made up my mind within three minutes using a live USB to go back to standard fedora. Too much preinstalled nonsense.
Gentoo. Gentoo users have pretty much supplanted Arch (btw) users in the “annoying poweruser” niche.
I agree with you a bit on Garuda, even as someone myself who uses it. I’ve had it break multiple times on me, I still use it mainly because it has all the stuff I like by default (and a cool dragon theme, which should be a requirement of all distros).
Other than that, I’m gonna be boring and say Ubuntu. Just a worse Debian.
IMHO NixOS, which is what I’m using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use “a long time ago”, which leads me to believe he doesn’t fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the “nix package manager”, which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.
What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.
So it’s like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel’s, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.
It is however overtly complex, there’s a disconnect between old nix (“stable”) and new nix (flakes, “unstable”, experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.
Thought I’d just chime in, because this guy’s take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive…
…though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.
Last time I tried NixOS, I tried to get some newer and lesser known wayland window managers to work. After like an hour of trying to get a custom session option into gdm, I had to give up. The nix package manager is fantastic, truly, but NixOS imho alters the way the system works way too much. Either it supports whatever you’re trying to do out of the box, then it’s very nice, or you’ll be in hell trying to map whatever explanations you find online to the clusterfuck that is NixOS’s altered file structure. You don’t simply add a
.desktopfile to the xsessions folder.Whatever solutions to problems like these you build in NixOS are always meant to be beautiful and reproducible, but building such solutions is a lot of work. For a window manager that I only wanted to try for a couple days, way too much work. For a system that I don’t intend to install on any other machine, probably not worth it.
I.e. NixOS trades initial time invested with beauty and future time invested. A solution in NixOS is more beautiful, and much quicker to reproduce on another machine, but it takes way more time to set up the first time around (e.g. just doing it as opposed to writing a script that does it). As someone that does a lot of experimenting with new setups, NixOS was frustrating as hell. But for someone that needs to frequently install the same system on multiple machines, it’s a game changer no doubt.
Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they’ve had their heydays, but it’s time to move on.
