Whats your favourite Linux Distro?

[tpa-pr]

For my personal use it's easily Arch. I like the whole "roll-your-own" philosophy (without having to compile things like Gentoo), I like that it sticks as close to vanilla upstream packages as possible, I like the AUR filling in any gaps the repos don't have and I LOVE the documentation. There's a bit more maintenance and upkeep involved than your average distro but it's worth it for the benefits.

For everyone else, especially beginners, Fedora. Fedora KDE to be specific. You have a relatively vanilla and up-to-date distro (but not TOO much like Arch), you have almost the entire Linux software catalogue at your fingertips with Flathub and RPMFusion, you have some relatively sane defaults and you have a lot of community support coupled with the Arch wiki since Fedora and Arch are configured in quite the parallel. I push Fedora on anyone looking for a first distro to try.

 

[daxfyt]

Arch Linux is my favourite. I like tinkering with it, and the Arch wiki makes it possible to tinker. I use it as my main OS on my home PC.

I have a Raspberry Pi 4, where Arch is not officially supported. I tried Arch Linux ARM and it worked, but ran into some issues with the GPU drivers. I tried Raspberry Pi OS, which is Debian based and it is great, but I needed more recent packages. (It is very easy to change distro on the RPi, you just change the SD card.) Then I installed Ultramarine Linux, which is Fedora based, it is great for non-competent users, but it took too much disk space with all the GUI apps and office tools which I don't need on my RPi. Ultramarine Linux comes with the official RPi Imager, so it is also very convenient to install. Then I installed Fedora without GUI, and I wanted to add LXDE and startx later, but startx didn't work, and didn't have time to figure out why. Finally I moved to Ubuntu LTS which serves me great ever since. I am not a fan of Ubuntu, but i am also pragmatic, and Ubuntu had everything that I needed (gpu driver worked, startx worked, fairly recent packages etc.)

My previous employer had openSUSE. I could never understand why sys-admins like Yast so much. Probably I should have their workflow to understand. To me Arch wiki + command line makes more sense than Yast.

My current employer gave me a Mac. It is certified unix, which is great, but it is not linux. The differences on the command line are negligable, if you are developping user space apps or web. Once you go deeper like fiddling with partitions or the /dev directory, or config files, then your linux knowledge isn't really useful. On the other hand the hardware is the best. And closed sourced stuff like Microsoft Outlook or Slack works wonderfully compared to linux.

 

[_roman_]

My start was with Slackware. Much later I installed myself SUSE and Red Hat.

In 2006, I switched over after 3 days from Windows Vista to Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux. Gentoo won. I experimented later as dual boot with Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I also tried to get Slackware running.

I had several Linux Mint installations. "They somewhat frequently encountered problems while upgrading or updating with NVIDIA-based hardware in the past." "The package manager of Linux Mint is significantly worse."

Gentoo has won. It's a love-hate. I still want to switch, but there isn't really an alternative. The systemd solution restricts my choices anyway these days. The widespread adoption of systemd in numerous Linux distributions limits my options as a user who prefers init systems like OpenRC.

I dislike when people talk about Linux as a generic term. CentOS and Slackware have nothing in common with my Gentoo box. A few years ago I cleaned up very old configuration files from 2006. I regret regularly purging the package manager log and the messages log file. Only a forum account is a witness for the age of my GNU Gentoo Linux installation.

 

[Solaris17]

I switched over after 3 days from Windows Vista to Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux. Gentoo won

because Arch is Gentoo with training wheels. Love me my Opensuse though. Also started with slackware and yellow dog then freeBSD. Then redhat and ubuntu. Always went back to opensuse.

Managed to completely skip the Thinkpad x Debian stage of my life thank god. Still manage freebsd on a few systems and ran my web servers for a long time.

 

[Space Lynx]

The latest 25.04 direct from Ubuntu... it's just so fucking smooth and everything just works...

I absolutely love it.

My work laptop is never going back to Windows ever again. So long M$! Don't let the door hit ya on the way out.


oh, and libreoffice and/or M$ Word, both of them take like an extra 5 seconds to load on Windows 10/11

on Ubuntu its instant for libreoffice writer... its just so damn snappy at everything, no bloat... 10/10

only thing I wish I could have is auto hide the top taskbar, i autohide the bottom one, just wish you could autohide the top one ubuntu has, but not worth trying another distro just for that, cause i dont mind doing fullscreen shortcut on keyboard.

 

[Icon Charlie]

I really like Zorin. I just updated my OS to OS17 and it was so smooth and at my age I don't want to think anymore... Heh.

 

[AusWolf]

only thing I wish I could have is auto hide the top taskbar, i autohide the bottom one, just wish you could autohide the top one ubuntu has, but not worth trying another distro just for that, cause i dont mind doing fullscreen shortcut on keyboard.

You don't need a different distro, just a different desktop. I'm assuming you're using Gnome. Try Cinnamon or KDE.

 

[_roman_]

The desktop environment should be customise able in any distribution. I doubt this changed over the years. Sometimes it was hidden in a small text = config file

Desktop Environment is the base structure for the graphical user interface. Most components you see, that includes the panel. Very easy explanation and not really correct to the last bit.

 

[leonavis]

because Arch is Gentoo with training wheels.

Well back in the day you had to compile everything yourself in Gentoo, which was quite unpractical for a personal daily driver

Dunno if there are more binaries in today

 

[Solaris17]

Well back in the day you had to compile everything yourself in Gentoo

As god intended.

They only in the last year started providing pre built bins.

 

[leonavis]

As god intended.

They only in the last year started providing pre built bins.

Hehe. I remember taking days on my old i5 just installing the base distribution ^^

 

[R-T-B]

They only in the last year started providing pre built bins.

I still refuse to add a bindist server on mine, lol. I have 16 cores, use em.