I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit the mark for us because it can be very helpful.
So, I’d like to ask: What is your least favorite Linux distribution and why? Please remember, this is not about bashing or belittling any specific distribution. The aim is to have a constructive discussion where we can learn about each other’s experiences.
My personal least favorite is probably Manjaro.
Consider:
- What specific features/lack thereof made it less appealing?
- Did you face any specific challenges?
- How was your experience with the community?
- If given a chance, what improvements would you suggest?
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Ubuntu: It’s not a lack of features that pushed me away; it’s more about the way things are going. I am not a fan of snap packages. I have run into odd issues trying to use them. I used Ubuntu server for my Dell Poweredge and I shut it down until I can find a suitable replacement. I struggled with it respecting my DNS settings which in turn killed my reverse proxy setup.
Manjaro: While I love Arch and some of its derivatives, I can’t stand by Manjaro. I thought it would have been a good OS to use since I was familiar with Arch, but it had enough dependency issues where updates broke them. Funny enough, never have I had a dependency issue with just plain old Arch.
I use Arch btw. But besides the meme on it, I legitimately eo use arch and couldn’t be happier.
Same. Both started out good but kept becoming more and more… not good. If nothing else Manjaro taught me how to chroot from a live distro to fix catastrophic failures. Ubuntu really ruined my week when they decided to try becoming a smart phone with the very touch centric looking UI at the time when I didn’t have time to revert or change distros, which is what finally pushed me to run servers headless and use ssh. Last I tried none of the phone like de’s are particularly intuitive as touch interfaces either.
I use KDE on Arch on my Lenovo Yoga 7i, and I don’t particularly use the touchscreen as much as I would have thought. Though for Waydroid it does work fairly nicely.
I’m about to piss off a lot of people.
It’s Arch and Arch-derivatives. And I’m saying it as an Arch user, btw, and I actually love it.
Between the Big Three (Fedora, Debian, Arch), it is the least likely to have an official package for somewhat niche applications. If something is not available as a flatpak or appimage, I have to compile it from source or an AUR PKGBUILD, but we all know the dangers of doing that. Some software will just assume that it’s running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.
That being said, it would take a lot to make me switch to a stable point-release distribution. Arch’s advantages more than make up for the sub-par software support.
(actually, I lied. Fuck Canonical and *Ubuntu. And IBM.)
Some software will just assume that it’s running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.
Name to blame, please.
Twingate Connector. The installer script only works if the OS uses either the APT or the DNF package manager, otherwise it exits. Fortunately it has many deployment methods, including Docker. I ended up using the systemd unit in a Debian container inside Proxmox.
Ubuntu because they’ve the ability to great things and end up just delivering a buggy and mangled version of Debian with proprietary crap, spyware, snaps wtv. After all we’re talking about the distro that had ISOs on their download page with a broken installer multiple times.
I don’t hate them, but this hits hard. They are THE most influential distro for people outside of the community. They have by far the biggest user base and community, but instead of using this to collaborate with other distributions and specially with the freedesktop folks for the improvement of the commons, they have this culture of downstream work that rarely get the effort needed to be upstreamed. It’s usually “it’s good enough for us, so that’s where we’ll leave it”, and they end up with these weird solutions that only they use.
Fedora. It doesn’t really add anything and is just more stuff for people to get distracted by.
Also, red hat is responsible for shilling a lot of bullshit.
Probably PoP_OS!. There isn’t anything wrong with the os itelf, my problem is rather that its often sugested as a beginer friendly distro which in my experience it absolutely isn’t. The amount of issues I encountered while trying to use it almost drove me away from Linux as a whole. (It was the first distro i tried) The time I spent trying to make everything work was comparable to Arch.
I realy like the idea and the DE they ship by default is one of the best ones I’ve seen (it’s like GNOME but in my opinion much better) but the bugs make it a terrible suggestion for new users.
NIXOS. It has a very steep learning curve without acceptable documentation and once I climbed the learning curve, I realized that it was very different from the Linux that I love.
I hope you dont give up on it for too long, I think it’s a great OS once you get the hang of nix. To this day, its the only OS I trust where I could install anything I want and can still rollback without worries. Also I can make sure that my installation is the same as others, which means other people can literally just copy paste my config to test.
Manjaro, because we’re here on arch to use the AUR, and that breaks Manjaro basically every time.
RHEL - for obvious reasons
Manjaro always broke on me. I can’t even trust them to keep their SSL certs up to date.
Sorry Manjaro devs, no hate, I just got burned way too many times by this arch-not-arch frankendistro.
I agree with you.
I don’t hate Manjaro’s developers, but they simply do not know what they are doing. They over promise and under deliver.
Evil Linux Suprise™
idk why people even use it. too scary for me.
OpenSUSE, awfull default software selection on desktop, and pushing users hard to use an “everything configuration tool”.
I tried Tumbleweed on my old main PC. When I finally got around to upgrade it, I immediately wiped it and got back to my beloved Gentoo (for which the old PC was getting a bit too slow)
Now I have Leaf on the family PC, because they pretty much only need Firefox and occasional LibreOffice and I’m lazy to try to find a different distro.
Ubuntu: For shilling all kinds of profrietary garbage by default. If I wanted that I’d be on Windows.
Also the changes they make to GNOME make it worse, they take away what makes it good, the flow.
TL;DR: Ubuntu. Because I want choices.
Ubuntu. And I’ve felt that way for a long time, so it’s not something recentish like snaps.
I don’t want my distro to decide what DE and software I’m using for me. They used to have a minimal iso which gave you, as the name suggests, a very minimal install. But now their minimal image is meant for containerized stuff and if memory serves comes with some extra cruft for that purpose.
I got annoyed and I left. And every distro I’ve tried since, even if I didn’t stick with it, I liked better.
To add some constructiveness, as that’s just complaining. That can be a good thing, just depends on the user. If they want the crafted experience Ubuntu provides, then it’s a good pick. It’s just not for me.
I know it’s probably an odd choice, but ChromeOS. It has the potential to be not just a good starting point for new Linux users but also a distro that could allow Linux to be a lot more accessible to people who aren’t as technologically capable. The main problem is that, similar to android, Google prevents ChromeOS from being used as a proper Linux distro. Right now, it might be a good alternative to Windows and MacOS but as a Linux distro, it’s just not worth using. Especially considering that Linux already has some options available for running android apps, such as Waydroid, that work pretty well.
I really think Google has no idea what it wants ChromeOS to be anymore, they’re just kinda shoving in shoddy solutions to its problems so they can say “hey we can do that too!”
soon they’re gonna introduce Steam and I look forward to that being a big shitshow lol
It’s Pichai’s handiwork from what I understand. He was in charge of it before becoming CEO according to Wikipedia.
Have they ever? ChromeOS’s original “app store” was just Chrome’s extension store. It’s been awhile since I’ve checked but Google doesn’t (or at least didn’t) officially support running android apps in ChromeOS Flex. Instead of focusing on getting more apps running on ChromeOS, they’re actively working on Google Play Games for Windows (which also hurts android). For which I think I saw that there are games that work in Google Play Games but they don’t work in ChromeOS for some reason. I’d imagine that there are a lot of other weird things but it’s been a while since I’ve actually used it.
It’s just one of those things where, ChromeOS has the potential to be a good competitor to Windows and MacOS (and maybe even a good Linux distro) but for some reason Google does nothing with it to make it worth using and actually seems to be actively harming it.
