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Share Your Favorite Linux Distros and Why You Love Them

So we can clearly see the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them, please follow this format:

  • Write the name of the Linux distro as a first-level comment.
  • Reply to that comment with each reason you like the distro as a separate answer.

For example:

  • Distro (first-level comment)
    • Reason (one answer)
    • Other reason (a different answer)

Please avoid duplicating options. This will help us better understand the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them.

hexagonwin ,

Slackware

  • the most rock stable distro imo. No systemd or snap stuff. Packages are almost (if not fully) vanilla version from upstream. Simple yet efficient unix-style approach to everything like package management, slackbuilds are really good too.
downhomechunk ,

Slackware gets a lot of hate, especially from the btw bros. People are spooked about having to manage their own dependencies. But I couldn’t agree with you more on simplicity and stability. I’ve been daily driving slackware since 99 or 00, and I don’t think I’ve ever broken something I couldn’t immediately roll back and fix.

I tried to install Ubuntu on a sbc recently. And within an hour of installing this and that with all the different dependencies, I had a completely unusable system. And I had no idea how to fix it. It was totally my fault but reminded me what I love about slackware.

qjkxbmwvz ,

Slack got me through undergrad on an IBM 600e ThinkPad (which was really old even then — around the time of the early 2.6 series kernels iirc). Great distro, fond memories.

athlon ,

Mint. Easy to setup, fast to run, and very reliable.

hobbsc ,

Mint

Generally works in cases where Ubuntu would and you don’t have to deal with Canonical’s choices.

athlon ,

Yeah, but I rarely if ever leave those constraints, so it does not matter to me at all. Day to day, I use macOS anyway, and Mint only comes on my desktop PC.

mrv0id ,

EndeavourOS

StantonVitales ,

I’m on it right now. Got a new Thinkpad a couple weeks ago and just wasn’t in the mood to install Arch the normal way when I finally had alone time at 11pm, gave Endeavour a shot and was like oh, this is convenient 🤩

BeardedBlaze ,
@BeardedBlaze@lemmy.world avatar

It’s my first time with Arch based Linux, takes some adjustment, but I’ve been loving it.

arcrust ,

Also on endeavor. I like arch, but it’s too much work. Endeavor is good enough for me.

kafka_quixote ,

Does Endeavour get funky like Manjaro does wrt AUR and configs?

BrokenCanoe ,

Endeavour has been my default for a long while now, using Plasma KDE. It supports the flexibility needed to customise and make my own themes for as a low-vision user, and smooths a lot of the rough edges of pure Arch. I had Arch installed previously, but again, having that additional helping hand, coupled with a truly wonderful community, really made all the difference. I left Windows after the mess that was 8, I couldn’t go back…

maniac ,
@maniac@lemmy.world avatar

Arch

  • Minimal and I install whatever the hell I want on it
  • AUR
gobbling871 ,

Arch (BTW)

gobbling871 ,

I’m currently happy with it

gobbling871 ,

So many powerful tools that are not easy to find on other distros.

gobbling871 ,

Basically, have fine tuned my setup so much that it’s almost impossible to think of another distro.

InternetPirate OP ,

dupe

DigitalPortkey ,

And with archinstall I’d argue it’s about as easy to install as most “normal” distros these days.

ReakDuck ,

I’d also agree… but everytime I tried to use archinstall, it always failed, felt impossible for me to install arch

wxboss ,

Debian

kafka_quixote ,

Perfect for running servers

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

Arch linux (btw). Because it’s easy to install and has the most accessible package manager of em all.

…

…before you shoot rocks at me and try to burn me alive… download an arch iso, run it, and then type “archinstall”. Thank me later.

“Oh, but its still veeeeeery hard to inst-”

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e1207b59-0960-4780-910c-85736cbfc883.mp4

MischievousTomato ,

Nixos. For all its complexity and dilemmas and issues it has given me, it’s the comfiest for me and gives me really cool features

gustulus ,

Congrats for making it to the treasure! I’m like half way in and not sure if I can fight through…

MischievousTomato ,

just keep on going. i cant be happy on any other distro, so i have to use nixos

amanwithausername ,

It still blows my mind that with nixos, setting up and continuously renewing an ssl cert is literally just two lines in the config file. I use nixos on my homeserver, thinking about switching my laptop to it too (currently Void linux).

yanutta ,
@yanutta@mastodonapp.uk avatar

@amanwithausername got an older laptop celeron processor running xubuntu? Any better ideas?

amanwithausername ,

Hmmm never used xubuntu per se, but XFCE already seems like a good option for a low-spec computer. You could probably chip away at the resource usage some more by building your own desktop environment around a bare window manager, but honestly at this point the gain is negligible. If anything, you might want to look into tiling window managers just because they can offer a much more fluid and customizeable desktop experience as opposed to floating WMs. I’m using BSPWM right now, but considering switching to wayland with hyprland or qtile.

As for choice of distro: Not sure if NixOS would run well on your machine – my homeserver is also a pretty low-spec computer (dual-core Intel Atom), and nixos-rebuild switch takes ages to run. Otherwise, go for Debian Testing if you want stability, Void if you want to not have systemd. There’s also Devuan, which is basically Debian without systemd, but iirc it’s not as popular as Void. But honestly if xubuntu works for you, then it’s fine.

Also, some miscellaneous tweaks for improved performance:

  1. IF YOU BOOT FROM A HARD DRIVE REPLACE IT WITH AN SSD! Solid-state drives are pretty cheap nowadays, and the upgrade from hdd to sdd is the single biggest performance improvement you can do for an old laptop
  2. If on x11, disable compositing. On XFCE, there should be an option for it somewhere in the settings. If on a bare window manager, simply don’t install any compositing manager (picom, xcompmgr, etc.). The downside is screen tearing and no proper window transparency, but it does put less strain on the CPU.
  3. Consider looking into a custom linux kernel? I boot linux-tkg on my main laptop and it gives some pretty good performance improvements. But I’m not so sure whether it would translate well to a low-spec system.
  4. Again, not exactly a performance tip, but consider formatting your boot partition as btrfs. Apart from all of the other cool features that you get with BTRFS, transparent file compression can, in some cases, be a win-win-win situation: less disk usage, faster file access, and longer SSD longevity. On low end system tho it may actually be the case that the CPU is the bottleneck as opposed to the disk, so transparent file compression may actually slow things down. Here are the settings I use for btrfs on my laptop (thinkpad with a core i7-5600U, mSATA solid state drive): lazytime,noatime,autodefrag,compress=zstd:3,discard=async,space_cache=v2,ssd. Again, not sure how well these translate to a low-end system, you should do your research.
  5. If your system supports uefi, consider using EFISTUB as opposed to Grub. Much faster boot times. Another option is to add two efi entries: one for EFISTUB (and have that be the default), and a second one for Grub, for when you need to change boot options or boot into recovery mode.
yanutta ,
@yanutta@mastodonapp.uk avatar

@amanwithausername comprehensive and good advice. Thank you. I tuck a look at linux, because other laptop isn't win11 compatible "soon".

Corngood ,

Since you mentioned slow build times…

You can do nixos-rebuild --target-host to build locally and deploy over ssh. You can also use something like nixops.

amanwithausername ,

No way, that’s awesome! I’ll give it a try for sure!

vikingtons ,
@vikingtons@lemmy.world avatar

Fedora

I want to preface this by saying that Red Hat absolutely deserve your ire in light of the recent news.

I appreciate that Fedora has relatively recent packages for a fixed release distribution. I really appreciate how they’ve pioneered in desktop-oriented technologies to help make Linux a more palatable experience for regular users, and I’m glad to see these gradually be adopted by others over time.

I’m happy to hear that the Fedora project still mostly operates Independently under redhat / IBM, but I’d be lying if I said the IBM acquisition didn’t worry me to the point of looking into alternatives.

starryoccultist ,
@starryoccultist@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Agreed. I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue for about a year. I love the immutable OS paradigm but IBM/Red Hat’s recent actions have left me feeling uneasy and I want to find an alternative.

vikingtons ,
@vikingtons@lemmy.world avatar

Silverblue is cool. I’ve been playing around with it on a portable NVMe drive. Planning on making the switch soon.

artkub , (edited )

I’ve also been using silverblue for about a year, it works well. Didn’t know about IBM acquiring Rad Hat, sad news.

For a similar experience there is Vanilla OS that I tried briefly and that seams to have similar immutability features and hastle free setup with a vanilla gnome desktop. It’s based on Ubuntu.

There is also NixOS which takes the immutability to another level. The entire system with all packages are configured in a config file. Which is nice if you want to have an identical setup on multiple machines but makes it a bit less user friendly imo.

minorsecond ,

Gentoo

minorsecond ,

Control

ctr1 ,
@ctr1@fl0w.cc avatar

Excellent package and dependency management with a wide variety of up-to-date software

ctr1 , (edited )
@ctr1@fl0w.cc avatar

Out-of-box security configurations supported by the organization (SELinux, hardening)

ctr1 ,
@ctr1@fl0w.cc avatar

Encourages hardware-based optimization and kernel specialization

minorsecond ,

Yep, these are all true. Throw in overlays and the package availability is unbeatable.

ctr1 ,
@ctr1@fl0w.cc avatar

Absolutely! I haven’t had any problems setting up dependencies for various projects and have only needed overlays a few times. Sometimes USE flags can be tricky but most things are pretty well documented

boonhet , (edited )

There are dozens of us! And you can join us at !gentoo if you haven’t yet!

I love it because it’s super configurable, lets you choose compiler optimizations (and through USE flags, features that you need in your packages - you don’t have to include everything).

My Linux knowledge has skyrocketed compared to before I used Gentoo. Which of course means it’s NOT the distro for people who want something that just works, but honestly, now that it’s working properly, I feel it’s actually pretty hard to break, and when it does break, I know how to fix it! Versus with Linux Mint a decade ago, if I broke it, I had no idea where to get started and just reinstalled it.

Of course, about half a year ago I decided to move from x11 and OpenRC to Wayland and systemd. And I use KDE. And have Nvidia graphics. Soooo it was a fun ride both relearning how my init system works, and also running into problems with Steam, etc.

I also try to keep my kernel in single digit megabytes, but occasionally I find something missing and have to recompile with more “bloat”. So right now I believe it’s around 11 MB, but I’ll see about improving it over my next vacation. Not that 11 MB takes long to load off a gen4 NVMe drive, but the ePeen needs to be stroked! Also no initial ramdisk, to save even more boot time.

minorsecond ,

I just reinstalled Gentoo and switched to a Systemd setup as well. I held off for as long as I could but it’s just so nice!

I’m using the binary kernel for now, but I’ll compile my own when I find the time. 11MB is nuts!

boonhet ,

Great to hear! Though I will admit that it took me HOURS of reading the kernel config options I was disabling. But it was also very informative so it didn’t feel like a waste of time at all.

minorsecond ,

I usually run some commands while running the binary kernel that will disable every module not currently running in the config file, and then build the kernel from that.

I’m guessing you prefer building everything as a module if your kernel is that small?

GerryMandering ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    digger ,
    @digger@latte.isnot.coffee avatar

    This is subjective, but after distro hopping, Linux Mint XFCE requires the least amount of post install configuration for my use case and personal preferences.

    Also, they show a preference for flatpack over snap but don't lock you in/out of either.

    jaykstah , (edited )

    Arch Linux

    jaykstah ,

    Up to date packages

    jaykstah ,

    Pacman package manager works well and PKGBUILD files are simple enough to edit if you want to alter how a package builds

    jaykstah ,

    AUR offers a lot of resources for a straightforward way to install software that isn’t in the main repositories

    jaykstah ,

    Comments in the AUR can be a helpful troubleshooting source or indicate the quality of a package hosted there

    jaykstah ,

    Build the system from the ground up choosing how you want it to work

    jaykstah ,

    Extensive documentation with useful troubleshooting sections for many articles

    jaykstah ,

    Easy config with archinstall script if you want to choose options from a list when installing

    tetris11 ,
    @tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

    Incredibly easy to hack with it’s no-security by default policy

    tetris11 ,
    @tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

    AUR’s developer change hands faster than british prime ministers that it gets harder and to trust upstream devs

    zbb ,

    Debian.

    ThesePaycheckAvenging ,

    Rock solid.

    metacolon ,
    @metacolon@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Lightweight.

    Phoenix3875 ,

    NixOS

    Phoenix3875 ,

    Reproducibility is a blessing for both software development and daily use.

    DataDreadnought ,
    @DataDreadnought@lemmy.one avatar

    Backing up NixOS is very straight forward and easy. It’s kinda the same as docker-compose in that respect.

    zalphoid ,

    This is the way

    mvirts ,

    This is the way

    InternetPirate OP ,

    Manjaro

    InternetPirate OP ,

    I don’t need to install anything manually because of how extensive the AUR is.

    mawkler ,

    AUR is amazing

    Lemmyin ,

    Rolling release model.

    Lemmyin ,

    more out of the box than what Arch comes with.

    maeries ,

    Nice default configuration. Good choice of gnome extensions and themes pre installed

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