What's your favourite Linux distribution and why?
My favourite distro is Arch Linux because I love AUR and need a rolling distribution. Also archwiki is amazing :)
P.S: Guys you can use this post to recommend distributions to each other.
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Top comments (70)
Nowadays, Mint definitely. I have used a lot of distros during my life from debian-based to arch Linux. However, because of the bigger community in Debian-based distros (Ubuntu in Mint's case), I migrated to Mint because it is, for me, one of the biggest and most beautiful distros- I mean, you could personalize anyone but mint has its facilities - with an active community.
TBH Clement's temper tantrum over Snap was absurd, when he could easily have added the vaapi Chromium deb PPA and pinned its packages (as I do in Ubuntu), or just added them to the Mint repos, without making it harder for Mint users to install snaps if they want to. Especially when you consider the overwhelming majority of "Mint" packages are actually mirrored from Ubuntu repos.
I'd be willing to move to Debian if they manage to pull of something like AUR, the only reason I'm not using Ubuntu based distributions' is because of the whole PPA thing.
PPAs (and other third-party APT repos) are typically FAR more stable than AUR in my experience (just over 12 years now with Ubuntu in particular, Ubuntu Studio 8.04 was my first taste - it's also worth noting that you need far fewer third party packages for any sort of multimedia creation in Ubuntu because of Ubuntu Studio).
I agree Mint is one of the best Distribution out there. It is solid, stable and the community is awesome.
Manjaro for me.
1) I really love the wide selection of packages between aur, official repositories, snaps and flatpak, there's not much you can't get. And it can all be done through pamac! I don't hate the command line, but it's nice to be able to search and browse all available installation sources, especially when I don't know the name of what I'm looking for.
2) Being arch based the arch wiki has very few differences and is an amazing resource. I honestly still use arch wiki even when working on Debian derivatives.
3) rolling release is excellent, and I appreciate the extra testing manjaro goes through.
4) The net installer allows me to set up everything I want to an incredible level of detail, while still saving me time I would have spent configuring an arch installation. Setup with minimal kde, set zsh as my console, add my favorite apps to the install list and I'm all set!
5) the manjaro hardware manager is very useful, and makes installing nvidia drivers a breeze. It's not perfect, in fact I really had to fight it when I was running an egpu, but now that I have a desktop computer I've had no issues.
6) I find a lot of the manjaro tweaks to be very thoughtful, even if they're things I could do myself. For example, F12 to open a drop down console, good taste in default apps, meta key opening the app launcher (though that may be a kde thing, I'm not sure) and the default manjaro theming is a lot more coherent than some of the defaults desktop environments ship with (at least in kde).
Yakuake is best console i've seen. Quick, responsvie, hidden when not used. Add vs code console to mix and without taking any screen space you have two terminals ready for action.
Also maintianed flavors so no matter the prefered DE you can just download, boot up and install.
I have two favorites:
Arch - because I can fine tune it and squeeze a lot of performance out, and have the latest and greatest stuff.
Pop!_OS - for getting work done. It's an excellent "daily driver" that's easy to use and doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Lots of software available that's easy to install. These days I think it's just as fast as Arch.
Totally agreed after driving Pop Os and arch together for nearly 6 months.
Ubuntu by far. Started experementing with it in High School and have used it ever since. I thought about switching to different distros but every time I think about it I always come back to the fact that they are all pretty much the same with the exception of package maangers and other things.
I first tried to use Ubuntu as it is a kind of general distro. But I have problems as it was not running smoothly so I had to switch to a couple of distros, after Ubuntu I switched to Elementry but the problem was same so I then finally switched to KDE Neon Plasma as its UI is very simple and it is very lightweight as compared to the other distros the only draw-back is that it does not come with any pre-installed software so you would have to put some effort to install Libre Office and some other basic software but it totally depends on the user.
I use KDE Neon. It's easy enough to add PPAs for apps that aren't in the repos, such as the latest Libre office
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa
Yes, that is nice, but the simpler way is to use the Discover (pre-installed) application manager in order to install the applications in an easy way.
Or you can use the Built-in software Installer and That is a bit slow but you get your work done easily.
Arch Linux is my fave one. I love pacman so much and I think Arch forces you to really understand how Linux works
I love Mint, it's solid and the Cinnamon desktop is so usable and extensible. However, I've been running Ubuntu 20.04 the last few months and I must say this is the best Ubuntu ever. Modern, stylish and functional, I think right now it's slightly better than Mint overall.
The only downside is that some of the gnome-shell extensions are buggy. Cinnamon's spices on the other hand never gave me any hassle.
Fedora. Believe it or not the RHEL family, including CentOS and Fedora, have given me the least trouble with setup and configuration out of the box for software development.
I’ve also had relatively positive experiences with Debian and Manjaro.
Maybe it's time for you to try Mint. So many positive comments about it on this post. I'm almost tempted to try it out.
I have tried it. It’s a great starting distro to get acquainted with Linux. But I stay away from it due to my preference on package managers. I am not a big fan of apt, which Mint, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu-based distorts ship with.
Yup I have the same issue, sticking to AUR for now
Ha ha, I stay away from CentOS et al. mostly due to my preference on package managers, I'm definitely not a fan of yum 😉 Side note: at work, almost everyone stays away from CentOS 🤷
Using Debian or Ubuntu LTS for servers, Arch on my laptop (fortunately, you don't go through the install steps too often 😉 actually, we even just put the SSD in the new machine when changing laptops so you actually really go through the install steps once)
That’s exactly it, haha. I like to think of distro flavors like ice cream. Pick the one you enjoy and just run with it.
As much as I tried to dislike it I have to give this one to Ubuntu, however, the last release of Pop OS from System 76 has taken the edge of a lot of the smaller issues I have when I use Ubuntu or its flavours so I'm really enjoying using that currently. The thing I like about Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distros is I can just about always find a package for something I want. As much as I enjoy running something arch-based once in a while I hate relying on AUR too much and that's just what ends up happening for me which results in sometimes quite the dependency & stability mess. The only gripe I have with Pop OS is the way I manage mainline kernels in Ubuntu doesn't work and I have to deal with it manually which is a bit annoying as I like to run pretty raw kernels.
My favorite is Manjaro. Is almost like the Ubuntu of Arch. You can have user-friendly OS and still get the benefits from Arch.
Changing the subject a little bit. Anyone here use Debian testing as your main OS for your everyday activities?
I used Debian Testing with KDE for awhile but then i switched to KDE Neon for a better KDE experience.
I'm a fan of Ubuntu Budgie. I really like the ease of Ubuntu coupled with the Budgie desktop. They have a great GUI setup when you login for the first time too. Helping you get set up with other package managers if ya want, and language inputs and all that.
That said: I'm mostly on my work Mac Book as it's a pain to disconnect it from the monitors I would use for my desktop. I also generally just default to my chromebook anyways. Crostini is pretty cool. It's debian but I really like how it integrates with the chromebook.
I've used budgie on Solus. Was pretty good.
I'm mostly using KDE Neon at the moment. Gives me the latest rolling version of KDE and built on LTS of Ubuntu so fairly stable for everything else.
Same, the best of both worlds - latest features of KDE and stable LTS base
Ooh I haven't tried KDE neon yet. Probably will check it out soon.
I’ve used a couple in my computer life, Ubuntu, mint mostly. With some fedora, manjaro, and pop os thrown in there. I seem to keep coming back to pop os because it has a lot of the things I want in a distro and is just more stable than other distros I’ve used.
I do tons of distro hopping, but I always come back to (K)Ubuntu, because no other distro consistently works better with MacBooks. My next laptop won't be Apple hardware, but I'll probably stick with something Ubuntu-based anyway (hopefully getting around to finally making my own distro based on it) because I find other package management collisions to be far worse than Deb/APT, and I want the option of Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, and Homebrew available out of the box or readily available in repos, and because Ubuntu is not only more current than Debian proper, but I find it more stable contrary to popular opinion, and because good luck finding more stable third party repo support (don't even @ me with AUR).
Maybe try out Pop!_OS I wrote a post about it's features.
Pop!_OS - Linux for devs
Sakshat ・ Jul 20 ・ 2 min read
Nah. Loved GNOME 2, HATE GNOME 3. Plus systemd-boot complains about size of an existing EFI partition even if I expand it beyond their 500MiB minimum. On a Touch Bar Macbook Pro, I don't have the luxury of overwriting my EFI partition (at least not if I want to get the Touch Bar working in Linux without reinstalling MacOS for dual boot, which I have no interest in).
With all that said, it is a very developer-friendly distro and an outstanding choice if you like GNOME Shell.
Debian, definitely.
I've had a Debian Server since Woody (Debian 3) that seamlessly went all the way until Buster (Debian 10), without any problems. This is the kind of stability I want and need in my life. Just update, upgrade, dist-upgrade, and you are done. No crashes, broken packages or kernel panics. Gimme my vim and X11 (sometimes an X11-Forward if I really crave UI) and I am as happy as can be.
I tried and worked with many other Distros in my life, but always go back crying to my trusty Debian Box, which never betrayed me.