There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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.

speckonsponge ,

Siduction

speckonsponge ,

Debian testing

speckonsponge ,

KDE Plasma

kelroy ,

This has probably changed but last time I gave KDE plasma a go around 2019 it was a raging dumpster fire.

Jao ,

Garuda Linux

funk ,

Arch. I can’t live without the AUR at this point.

NakedGardenGnome ,

Seriously, the ease of installing any and all programs from the main repo’s or the AUR is such an extreme advantage over all other distros!

And it makes keeping your system and programs updated a breeze.

Contend6248 ,

It is nice to install much normally harder to install crap, but there are so little trusted devs on there, that i rather not install something than getting it from a untrusted source.

It is nice to play around, but i also switched from Windows to have a more secure platform

NakedGardenGnome ,

We cannot forget about the wiki, which is a great resource for not only the Arch distro, but for any Linux install.

SexualPolytope ,
@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Seriously, I realize this every time I have to install something on my server (running AlmaLinux). Now I’ve manually set up a personal LURE repo for some software that I use.

linuxduck ,

Manjaro. It just worked on any device I installed it on. And wifi just worked with no fiddling.

Then I installed it on surface tablet. What didn’t work, I found kernel fixes I could implement.

Of all the distros, for me, it was the easiest to use, install and manipulate!!

HulkSmashBurgers ,

Manjaro is my main distro too! The package manager is great!

linuxduck ,

Manjaro friends unite!

please_lemmy_out ,

Switched to Manjaro after running vanilla Arch for several years and haven’t looked back. I appreciate the slightly less bleeding edge updates and extra added stability around it.

Easy installs are probably less of a big deal nowadays after Arch overhauled their installation process.

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!

ReakDuck ,

Arch Linux

ReakDuck ,

I always am going to run into heavy issues when using Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. On Arch, things also aren’t always smooth, but the issues are mild, always solvable and transparent.

ReakDuck ,

The Arch Wiki is in a language made by users for users. Meaning that its easy to understand because the wiki allows to talk about issues, alternatives and more hints about each small topic, every other wiki has some structure where important details are missing or not taken seriously.

CrabAndBroom ,

Arch and KDE as a DE because I’m a borderline-obsessive tinkerer.

Although NixOS is tempting me, but I haven’t moved past the virtual-machine-specimen-jar phase with that yet lol.

milo128 ,

Starting with a blank slate is so refreshing. It takes time to build everything up from scratch and I understand that you can get a great experience out of the box with other distros, but I love the simplicity of not having any bullshit I didn’t install myself.

ReakDuck ,

True, yeah, didn’t think about the downside that you need to build it up from scratch. But people could use arch based distros I guess? Never used them.

RegularIndependent98 ,

Arch, antix and linuxmint

gortbrown ,

Debian

-Simple distro free of too much bloat without being too bare-bones

-Stable, but can also be changed to be a bit more updated if you want that instead-

Raphael ,
@Raphael@lemmy.world avatar

Now now, saying Debian is free of too much bloat is going way too far, dude, even as as Debian enjoyer I cannot allow such statements to pass.

gortbrown ,

Haha fair, I guess that is a pretty objective statement. In my opinion, compared to some other distros and operating systems, it’s pretty bloat free, but I guess if you’re used to something else that is even more bloat free that you would probably disagree.

alfredb ,
@alfredb@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

LMDE

  • Because it’s Mint & Debian
maniac ,
@maniac@lemmy.world avatar

Arch

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

jabjoe ,
@jabjoe@feddit.uk avatar

– Debian Testing

  • Debian packaging
  • Rolling
  • Newer than Stable
  • Debian Free Software Guidelines ( DFSG)
  • Good support of old systems and random architectures.
dovedozen ,

MX Linux

dovedozen ,

The MX Snapshot utility & other built-in tools make it instantly functional as a daily driver, even for people new to Linux, and the Quick System Info is such a handy baseline for troubleshooting if you run into problems and need help from the community. All the stuff that’s provided out of the box just makes it a really practical distro to learn on!

hobbsc ,

MX Linux

Option for no systemd, great community, good overall appearance, great set of custom tools.

guyman ,

Manjaro. I love it’s simplicity and ease of use. It’s the closest I can get to Windows without actually using Windows. I’m glad it makes using an Arch distro easy and accessible. KDE is a godsend as well.

xoggy ,
@xoggy@programming.dev avatar

Alpine – In praise of Alpine and apk

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •