Which Distros Are Doing Best Currently?
from atmorous@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 28 Jun 19:20
https://lemmy.world/post/32179512
from atmorous@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 28 Jun 19:20
https://lemmy.world/post/32179512
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
threaded - newest
Linux Mint DE and Arch, the ultimate duo of Stability/Freindlyness & Power/Control
EndeavourOS, it’s Arch with a familiar installer, several useful helper scripts, and a friendly community.
Same, endeavorOS has been my default install for years now.
Its nice enough that I’m even considering putting it on my parents PC when windows decides to stop updating here in a couple months
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.
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.
But because the apps are running in containers, the performance will take a hit. And also the customization.
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.
Ok, but it’s still less customizable.
Q: Would a normal system (read: I’m not talking about Guix System or NixOS) allow you to install multiple branches/versions of the same software natively without introducing a lot of headaches?
A: No. This is literally unsupported.
Then, if using containers (or any other similar platform) allows one to breach that limitation, would it be fair to call containers (and their like) to be strictly limited/limiting in customization?
Tell me a situation that where will need 2 different versions of the same app then.
Sure fam. This is actually a situation that might come up a lot. Basically any instance of dependency hell caused by conflicting dependencies would be resolved if two different versions of the same software could coexist.
Fine. Guess I’m trying Fedora Kinonite.
Excellent choice fam! However, as much as I adore Fedora Kinoite, it might not provide the best onboarding 😅. If you’re fine with that, then please feel free to go ahead and embark on your journey. However, I would suggest you to at least look into uBlue’s offerings:
Regardless, fam, enjoy! And please consider to report back on your findings 😉! I would love to read your adventures of venturing the exotic waters of Fedora Atomic 😊!
Apologies for the ‘spam’, but I was afraid editing my previous message would be in vain. If you desire/crave for decent documentation, then Bazzite deserves another endorsement. While its documentation isn’t as expansive as the excellent ArchWiki, it should be more than able to answer your questions.
Secondly, if you happen to come across an issue that has been painstakingly difficult to resolve, then please consider consulting its many community channels for support. There’s a Discourse, a Discord and an AnswerOverflow. So pick your poison 😉. FWIW, I’ve always had great experiences on their Discord.
İçimden, “Bunca lafın üzerine kankim asaletine yakışanı yapar da bir teşekkürü esirgemez herhalde,” diye düşünmüştüm. Ama maalesef, Türkiyeli olması hasebiyle daha level atlayamamış 😂. Olsun, demek ki henüz kalkınma vakti gelmemiş 🤣.
O_O
Tekte türkçe konuştuğumu bildin. Aferin. Neyse, dediğim gibi; Immutable dağıtımlardan birini şu an ki Fedora KDE ile dualboot edeceğim. Ona göre Immutable dağıtımlara geçebilirim. (GRUB sayesinde kolay olur.)
alakasız bir rastgele düşünce
yoksa beni bir yerden tanıyor musun?
Ee, ne demişler: Tek akıllı sen değilsin 😉.
Eyv, ama dikkat et, o iş biraz karışık bir mesele. Şu bulduğum iki kaynağa mutlaka başvur ki güzelim sistemin b*k uğruna güme gitmesin.
Yoo. Sadece “Bu eleman hangi distro’yu kullanıyor acaba?” diye merak edip profiline göz atınca fark ettim ki… meğer babacan Türkiyeliymiş.
Distrobox isn’t the only way to install/run software on immutable.
I do this too, being able to use Arch’s packages while having Kinoite’s stability is a really, really nice combo.
Simply not true.
There’s also secureblue, which is a fedora atomic fork with nice security hardening
The one I installed, obviously.
this is the best answer haha
Sample size: 1
That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.
Even with uncertainties, it gets close to 100%
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?
You absolutely can. There’s a small learning curve for using immutable distros, but once you get a handle on it, it works great.
I would say that development is the one thing that can get very annoying on immutable distros.
Flatpaks can only get you so far (as seen by the VS Code Flatpak’s limitations that have to be worked around). I don’t even use VS Code, so I can get around that pretty comfortably, but I have to use Distrobox for a lot of miscellaneous developer tools, and even then, I still run into problems and I can’t install container tools inside of the containers that I’m already working in.
Not to discourage you from trying. I can still get by with some dev work on Bazzite, but it’s waaay easier to do the same dev work on CachyOS (Arch-derivative) because I can just install shit normally and it will work.
If you leave alone the haters, Ubuntu is doing great. Mint LDME also fantastic if you wish to have a rock solid base.
Been using Ubuntu for about 4 years now without issue. Even upgraded LTS versions without problems!
I upgraded LTS versions and it failed and left my system in a broken state I couldn’t fix
events like these is how i learned to do back ups lol
Anything in particular I should be wary of switching from Mint to Mint DE?
LDME does not supports PPAs
It’s doing great unless you want to debug why chromium is not connecting to your USB devices
Hint: because they forced snap in you which doesn’t support USB access
What is in LMDE that isn’t in plain Debian out of the box beyond branding?
LMDE comes with some nice packages that just make your life easier. It is basically Debian but… with sane defaults
Do you know which packages and what defaults? I’ve tried to find the differences but I can’t really find what is different, except for wallpaper etc.
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
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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 Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.
Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.
Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.
Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.
Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.
On the other hand:
Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see “I’ll give Slowroll a try.”
PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.
Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.
The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.
Good summary. 👍
I haven’t noticed much difference, Debian has always been the go to distro if you wanted reliability and repositories that cover almost everything. Debian has always been an excellent choice for productivity. It’s not by accident that Debian for more than 20 years has been the distro with by far the most derivatives.
By that standard Arch is the only distro that has achieved something similar, and it may be somewhat telling that SteamOS switched from Debian based to Arch based. Arch is way smaller in scope, and more nimble and easier to maintain. But AFAIK they do not have the democratic process Debian has, so I’m not sure it can really be called community based distro like Debian. Arch has more of a top leadership.
Debian is probably the most true to the Free and Open Source ideals among the big distros.
Oh yeah, there’s a big difference now in distro conversations.
Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around “best distro for me”, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; “of you’re going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the source”.
But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. It’s strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.
Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about “bleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in between”
Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and it’s easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.
Now people will regularly say “use Debian, it’s solid and reliable” and not follow up with “you’ll have to deal with old packages though”
That’s the thing though you really don’t have to deal with old packages. The ones that count are in the backports repo and for everything else there’s is flatpak. Plus I think the reason steamos switched from Debian to arch was the methodology changed from being mutable to immutable and making it more for a handheld vs installed on many systems. It had nothing to do with the quality of the distro.
I’m not discussing quality of distro here, but people’s changing perception of Debian over the years. The way that people currently use/suggest/recommend distros has put Debian more in favour than say 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
It’s always been good depending on use case, but people currently are recommending it more for general use than has been typical before. And I think it is, as you said, that some of those past limiting factors are not a big problem anymore. I did suggest that in my first post.
Back in 2005 when Ubuntu was all the rage, the first alternative to Ubuntu was almost always Debian. Only later when Mint became a thing, that was also an obvious alternative, because it was similarly focused on being easy to use.
And also PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, those were the big recommendations as well. But we’re pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions I think we had in mind by going back that far too.
No we aren’t, Linux fora were full of them even before Ubuntu more than 20 years ago. Debian, Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, Mepis, PCLinux.
Distro hopping was always a thing people debated.
The rest of that sentence is a bit confusing, who are we? And how am I supposed to read minds? And going back was kind of where we started, because you claimed it was a new thing for Debian. Debian was definitely recommended to general users, for many good reasons. Stability and huge repository among them, but also user friendly install procedure, and good package manager, that handled dependencies way better than Suse and Fedora.
I don’t know mate. I thought we were having a cool discussion about Linux shit but you seem really hostile now. Get lost, clown.
Cosmic desktop shines on an arch distro
Especially if you’re using the Chaotic-AUR to get the latest updates ASAP without recompiling (like with the COPR repo on Fedora)
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.
POPULAR != BETTER
Popular equals more money and more interest. In other words popularity and quality feed into each-other (not 1:1, but more than 1:0).
Yes but popularity subjects them to different pressures, many of which are not beneficial.
And this is how we get Systemd
probably a three way tie between fedora, ubuntu, and arch.
While Void isn’t exactly under rated ( it is very highly rated on distro watch for one ), 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).
Mint is the best apparently
distrowatch.com
I use Arch btw
Wait, MX has finally been supplanted by superior options? Unbelievable!
(Still feels like an outlier when you consider actual popularity of distros)
Obviously. I use Mint, by the way.
Distrowatch does their rankings by page hits, it’s not the best indicator of either usage or popularity.
NixOS by far has the most momentum right now.
Just check the non-unique package counts:
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
All those packages, but terrible/lacking documentation and LSP support 😭 And, yes, I’ve tried
nixdandnil, and they’re not even close.I’ve tried to learn Nix multiple times, and even got by okay running NixOS for a year or so, but doing almost anything that isn’t just adding a package to a list in a nix file or flake was like pulling teeth because everything is documented so poorly (or not at all). It would take me hours to do what I could have done in seconds with any other package management tool or configuration management because I’d have to scour hundreds of search results to find someone that did the thing I’m trying to do because there was little-to-no documentation for it.
Nix is a tool with amazing promise that could solve so many problems if they could get their documentation and LSP support up to the standard of something like Rust.
I discovered they have a Matrix server where people will literally debug your config for you and help you solve issues. But you are right, if you try doing it yourself without help you’ll be pulling your hair out
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.
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…
In my opinion I love CachyOS.
I’m not an expert but …
Ton of comments, and I havent read them all, but I wanted to ask if you really meant popular or if you wanted something for a specific reason. Easy for new ppl to linux, good for desktops, etc etc.
I dont really use GUIs on linux, except for when I want to have a fancy pants riced network monitor type situation. I am a big fan of NixOS except for python Dev stuff. Big fan of being able to clone a machine or recover a machine with a single conf file.
What is a better choice for python dev please ?
If the only thing holding you back from NixOS is my python comment, my issue was with Numpy, which really really demands that you install it globally. Pretty sure you can make it work by using a dev-shell, installing it globally in that shell, then doing everything else in that dev environment normally. I was newish to nixos at the time.
Otherwise I tend to fall back to ubuntu server, but only because it was something I knew. I prefered Centos7 back in the day before RedHat killed Centos. NixOS was my move from there. Been using Alpine as the os in my docker images, but havent really explored a lot of other recent linux os’s at the moment.
We don’t know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know… Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.
Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.
OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years… I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.
Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won’t be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today
The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting… but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross… partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don’t see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.
Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won’t be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public… maybe KDE’s new bet?!
Can I get a summary of what’s going on in Chinese Linux land? That seems pretty interesting; I always wonder what programs the East uses vs the West
I haven’t play much with them but this is my take:
Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets… for better or for worse, but I like their take.
Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven’t tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu’s or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.
OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch…). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.
There are others but for niches.
China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.
Garuda absolutely nails it with their helper app that sets you up with a choice of popular software, handles updates, and gives you easy access to common settings.
It makes it very approachable for people new to Linux.
MX Linux. Best at what it does.
gentoo! still kicking it
Gentoo is sooo insanely versatile. I just love it.
Whats the purpose of gentoo over arch and when do you draw the line of diminishing returns? It sounds like gentoo is a lot harder for not much more reward.
Hard to say without having used Arch. I just really like Portage. It does some really neat things.
i really love portage and i like compiling from source everytime i used Arch i got trapped in dependency hell
Tried Manjaro and Opensuse for a presentation machine lately: issues over issues, that just shouldn’t exist on new installation (problems with USB disks, input). Came back to Debian asap because Debian, weirdly, "just works ™ now.
I daily drive Fedora and I think it has the best Gnome desktop.
But in terms of “best at what they do” I’m blown away by Mint as an apporoachable easy to use “just works” OS. It instantly became my recommendation to new linux converts. Everything is easy to set up. It’s remarkably user friendlly. Good software store, flatpack support out of the box. Brilliant hardware support. I like the aesthetics as well.
I have an old Core 2 machine and I tried to get every potato grade distro running on it. I tried Puppy, and Linux Lite, and AntiX and all the “this will run on your toaster” type distros and had problems with every one of them. Mint XFCE installed no problem. It ran beautifully. I pressed my luck and installed a Quadro K620 and an old firewire card (trying to back up old Mini-DV videos). It handled ancient hardware perfectly. Butter smooth 1440p desktop computing and light video editing on an 18 year old machine.
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I’ve started using Nobara recently, and I like it a LOT. Makes it really easy for a noob like me to both play games and edit videos. I actually made a Monster Hunter video entirely in Linux with Davinci Resolve, and it worked really well. I’ve been an adobe tool my entire editing life, but I really like the switch I recently made :)
NixOS is amazing, but it’s also got a crazy learning curve. Once you grok it though, it really changes the way you configure your computer.
Fedora is always my favorite big name distro, they’re constantly pushing the envelope and adopting new features that need some stability and exposure to mature.
I’m currently using Pop!_OS, which is a great desktop distro.
I was using MX Linux a lot which is amazing for both times when you need a portable distro with lots of features and when you need something that will still run well on older machines.