What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
In my opinion I love CachyOS.
I do like Mint very much, but I think that they are neglecting to update their apps. A lot of apps are not up to date, and that’s just sad…
Love Fedora with KDE, my new daily driver. Tested Endeavour, Manjaro and also Mint and openSuSE but finally went with Fedora. Debian (on the other side) is my preferred base for servers and services.
NixOS by far has the most momentum right now.
Just check the non-unique package counts:
https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique
More than 80K packages that exist in other distros, more than all of packages in AUR combined with 90%+ being the newest version in unstable
And you can run unstable without an issue since you can downgrade individual packages whenever
POPULAR != BETTER
Distrowatch does their rankings by page hits, it’s not the best indicator of either usage or popularity.
Obviously. I use Mint, by the way.
Wait, MX has finally been supplanted by superior options? Unbelievable!
(Still feels like an outlier when you consider actual popularity of distros)
While Void isn’t exactly under rated ( it is very highly rated on distro watch for once), for someone looking for a systemd free distro or a light weight one in general, it is a decent choice. The repos aren’t as broad based as Arch but they do have newer versions of the software that they host.
I could be wrong, but aren’t Linux Mint and Pop OS ultimately based on Debian? (Mint is based on Ubuntu which in return has a Debian base). Debian was my main entry way to the Linux world and there is a reason why so many distros are built on it. Very old as well (not as old as Slack ware but Slack ware isn’t exactly noob friendly).
Fedora has gotten much more stable and reliable in the past decade. 15+ years ago it was generally regarded as nice but unstable. I’d say nowadays for a moderately technical user it offers a better experience overall than Ubuntu or Mint. There are still unfortunately some pitfalls for new users (media codecs come to mind). In fact, the only issues i’ve had in most of those 10 years have been related to GNOME plugins or the Plasma 6 transition, problems that also occured on Ubuntu.
I have 2 computers: one running Ubuntu, one Fedora. This has been my setup for over a decade. I have lately been finding Ubuntu more and more cumbersome to use, with less of the “just works” experience i remember having in the past. Perhaps the focus on cloud computing has caused the desktop to languish a bit.
I would like to try Pop!_OS, but i haven’t had a free evening for a while to do a backup and reinstall on one of my computers. It’s also been a while since i used Mint, so my impression could be out of date.
The nice thing about Linux overall (compared to macOS and Windows) is that each update generally improves on the experience. On commercial platforms the experience gets worse as often as it gets better, usually both at the same time. GNOME and Plasma are both overall much better than they were a decade ago (despite a few regressions) while macOS and Windows are both worse in general.
I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu, then switched to Linux Mint for a while and dabbled with Manjaro for a hot minute, and ultimately found my home on Fedora Workstation for the past several years. Once set up with rpmfusion and 3rd party codecs it’s a very solid and reliable distribution. The new atomic projects (and derivatives) look very interesting too.
I don’t know about the best but Debian has been going strong for 32 years and the backbone of many distros. Its MVP in my book.
You can even get a modern gaming distro based off of it (PikaOS).
The one I installed, obviously.
this is the best answer haha
Sample size: 1
That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.
probably a three way tie between fedora, ubuntu, and arch.
Bazzite has been working so well that even the wife has converted over. It cured my distro hopping so I haven’t played much attention to how other distros have been doing.
A question - can I use Bazzite for uses other than gaming? I game on my laptop, but most of the time I’m writing code. Could I use it for that or should I go for something like Fedora, Debian or Arch?
Fedora Silverblue – a very good balance of immutable distro and user friendliness. Stability and reliability of being immutable without low-level hacking like in Nix / Guix.
There’s also secureblue, which is a fedora atomic fork with nice security hardening
Why go immutable? You can’t install shit on immutable distros.
I use immutable distros for the stability, and the nixOS approach isn’t for me.
You can install whatever you like using a tool called distrobox, which allows you to run containers easily.
I have an arch Linux container, and I have access to the entire AUR if I so please. I use that container to run Steam, and performance was the same as on Bazzite using the natively installed Steam.
I do this too, being able to use Arch’s packages while having Kinoite’s stability is a really, really nice combo.
But because the apps are running in containers, the performance will take a hit. And also the customization.
the performance will take a hit
This is not entirely true. Is there overhead? Sure. But, if the distro used for the container provides (somehow) faster or more performative packages to begin with, then running software within a fast container can be faster that running it natively on the slower host. Link to the comment in which the link to the above benchmark can be found as proof. As can be seen, the Clear Linux container performs better in 90% of the benchmarks. And, the Fedora container is only negligibly (so within margin of error) less performative than the Fedora host.
The whole of Fedora atomic distros are interesting in an exercise in getting good with layering and distrobox. Pop_os 24.04 just to see if a third pillar of Linux frontends with GTK and Qt is viable. People are always pissy about Manjaro but they seem to have an interesting present being pre installed on the Orange Pi Neo handheld
Linux Mint DE and Arch, the ultimate duo of Stability/Freindlyness & Power/Control
