You're going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
Also they put ads in search long before Windows did and as much as I hate Microsoft we should never forget that.
Putting ads in foss is an irredeemable sin
Bring out the guillotine!
Not to defend them, but it was trivial to remove the adverts and they stopped after the "feedback". Unlike Windows.
You know that snaps existed before Flatpaks right?
So it would have been that much easier for Ubuntu to be first to market and open source the snap server software…
But they didn’t. And alternative solutions had to be created.
I'm not defending canonical decisions, but definably when they started working on this there was no other alternative available for them to collaborate at the time
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio).
Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
Thanks for the explanation. Now I understand the dislike for snap.
Oh! I forgot another one! Updates.
You can't really control when the updates of snaps are rolled out.
For "regular" software, I have an "apt update" type of script that I can run when I choose to update everything on my system. On some systems, I have this in a weekly crontab. On other systems, there is no scheduled run. On those systems, it's important to keep many apps as-is - so several packages are also locked, as well ("apt-mark hold").
With snap, you basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something. Broken package updated? Well, you can manually roll back that one. Broken update pushed again during the next forced update window? Just roll it back again! (and repeat, every day)
Yes, I understand that, but I also know it's really important to not update some stuff, and I know that broken snaps sometimes get pushed.
Basically, the snap developers have talked down to the users. THEY know better of what WE actually want and need, not us dumb users that actually administer things for a living.
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
how about popos?
Also a great option. I like their tiling window manager and the other gnome extensions they've done. I'm also generally excited about the work they're doing with Cosmic as a new DE.
Been chomping at the bit for cosmic since I learned of it.
Isn't that the one where Linus broke the WM by installing Steam? Lol
Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?
You get a lot of recommendations for Mint here, but I'd like to toss in a recommendation for Pop!_OS. Also based on Ubuntu without all the crap. I would say the biggest difference between pop and mint is the UI, as Mint comes standard with cinnamon and pop with Gnome (soon cosmic) as their DE's.
Just take a look at those two and choose one of them, they are both great distros, and absolutely the two I would recommend to just about anyone. Easy to use and very straightforward for new people trying out Linux.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn't keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.
I wanted to like snaps, and I'm not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.
Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package's installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.
My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
It’s that pesky root user, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.
You can make an OS in Scratch? I didnt know that
Linux From Scratch is a series of (online) books that walk you through building up your own linux system from the ground up, from compiling the kernel to all the individual systems that turn the kernel into a functional OS.
It's meant to be an educational tool to help people learn about what goes into making a Linux distribution and give you better knowledge of how to build software from source. Some people turn these systems into their own distributions or personal (I guess gentoo-like?) Linux installs
Not only can you make your own OS but you can use one of the package managers and build your own repo and do a whole ecosystem yourself.
I used LFS to build a distro for embedded systems I designed at work. Was a fun experience but way too much work.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck's up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That's the Linux community I love, good job people <3
No one gets left behind
Akuna Matata or some shit
Haven't seen Santoku or Kali or several other special use-case distros (E: or Hannah Montana Linux hahahaha). But, yes, this is exactly the community I love and that extreme hate/love for specific distros is the reason I tried Linux in the first place (and the reason I stayed) hahaha
Nobody shits on MX, it's a sign 😁
Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the "gamer aesthetic".
Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I'm sure it's good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it's a lot less flamboyant about it.
My desktop "breathes" in RGB so it sounds perfect for me. Plug me into the Matrix.
Fwiw it does have a 'Lite' edition that doesn't include any theming.
Ubuntu.It' went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
Serious question: what do you not like about snaps? I find the isolation and dependency desolation to be pretty great.
Snap is vendor lock in. They don’t work on many distros, tooling pushes their platform, and they control the only store.
For desktop apps Flatpak is just technically better anyway so what’s the point.
Snap is the reason I started looking for something else. Flatpak is the reason I went Fedora. It's been great.
Manjaro, for its incompetence.
I don't hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.
Upvoted for Manjaro, downvoted for gentoo. (no vote as a result)
Console issued server command: /force_vote @a
Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
How does Manjaro add incompetence? I've not used either for a while, buy Manjaro never failed me, while arch did manage to make my system nuke itself a couple times just running pacman -Syyu. Granted, this was a long time ago, but it's the only distro to so this to me ever.
The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.
The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.
The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.
Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.
Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.
did they ever start backporting security patches? I know that was a major issue in the early days that really soured me on the competence of the project. you cannot take a rolling release distro, bless some package versions as "stable" and call it a day.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that's gentoo.
I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
You're not wrong, lol.
'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
Removing things others tell you not to do. Yes, that sounds familiar. Maybe I should try Arch sometime.
I've just finished my current version of my script to change ubuntu around to my liking. At 4:23 in the night/morning. I'm back on ubuntu because I can never seem to get the graphics working just right on other distro's. There's always that screen tearing happening whenever I play youtube videos in firefox. But in ubuntu it just works out of the box.
So what you're actually saying is: you don't like Arch because you don't want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.
(Which is fine)
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't want to use a kit/show car for commuting.
Fair. Though I will say (more for others who may see this in the future), that Arch's new installer is great and definitely reduces the load on new users. That said, it's never going to be explicitly designed for people who have no Linux experience.
Just use Arch in a Distrobox on Fedora or openSUSE. That's the best of both worlds.
Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.
Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn't worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.
I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.
And also, I have work to do... I don't like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.
Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
Every time I have used manjaro on x86 it has been broken within a few months. Their Raspberry Pi 4 port is pretty stable though for some reason.
Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.
Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.
RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.
Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.
Damn I'm contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?
I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.
I miss an /etc structure that wasn't a complete mess.
I miss UFS and its soft updates.
I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.
I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.
And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.
The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I've only needed to use fBSD once professionally.
Just thinking about this pisses me off all over again.
"they put ads in the terminal" isn't really accurate.
Their "ubuntu-advantage-tools" adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing "ubuntu-advantage-tools". It's definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.
You can’t easily uninstall the advantage tools package, they set Ubuntu-minimal meta package to depend on it
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.
I'm not sure if I have bad luck but every time I've tried Ubuntu I've had stability issues. Constant crashes and things I've never run into in other distros.
It makes it hard for me to recommend it to new users.
The way they pushed that slow crap that is snap down the throat of everyone killed any appreciation I had for the distro
i share your opinion
Wish Linux Devs help build and polish OS for Pinephone. I really want Linux to go mainstream. Tired of android and Apple.
The issue is a lack of an app ecosystem with actual AAA apps.
This! I used Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver for 1 1/2 years. The OS itself was anything but perfect but the real problem was definetly the app ecosystem. WayDroid(an android "emulator") optimization is probably the way to go for linux on mobile
Yeah there's no way a viable Linux phone could be made without the ability to run Android apps.
I think we're probably at least a few years away from being able to daily drive Linux on modern phones with functioning things like NFC payments and a decent native app collection. It's definitely coming but it has far less momentum than even the Linux desktop does.
I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS... I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
Holy shit, I installed it on my Lenovo tablet laptop, and everything works out the box... Even the gyroscope! I couldn't believe it. It's the first arch based I've tried and I think I'm hooked.
To note, I think I tried like 8 other distros before finding endeavor.
The touchscreen working right out of the box is what surprised me.
ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren't present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn't get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
That's my daily driver. I used the lite version on my old computer and Core on my new desktop. I understand it may have problems on other hardware but for me it looks and feels as good as the promotional screenshots.
Nothing wrong with that, I'm glad it worked well for you! I don't actively hate it, I just was dissapointed with my personal experience.
Huh, this is the opposite of my experience. I've used a handful of distros over the years (including fedora and ubuntu) but Zorin was the most stable and user friendly by far out of the box. I also think their Gnome theme is pretty sleek.
Glad it works for you :) Fedora has been that for me on most of my hardware.
I've always been intrigued by that one. I want to test it out, but finding an image has proven difficult.
too much spyware
That's just capitalist propaganda. There is no spyware! That's just innocent telemetry!
This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It's great if you're just getting into Linux, it's absolutely terrible when you know what you're doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it's always so far behind it's not even worth using if you're on AMD. Thankfully they've realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.
I love Linux Mint: it's perfect for my parents' computer.
I've never cared for mint because I don't really want my Linux to look like Windows. Which is what mint does.
Not really an unpopular opinion. My main desktop runs mint, and we're well aware of that being an issue. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make as long as it works. I haven't had enough issues to look for replacement yet. ZorinOS looks interesting, though.
Ubuntu. I can't stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
I really liked unity 😞
I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There's always some random crash that I don't know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you're installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I'm the user and I'm root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I'll go to Windows.
I used Ubuntu for years, but the forcing of snap really killed it for me.
Ubuntu used to be synonymous with stability and compatibility. It was always a little bloated and slower than a bunch of others. But that was the price for stability....
It is probably still stable but compatibility has taken a back seat. This is what really annoyed me enough to switch.
I'm on Mint now, it is really nice. Flatpak is much better than Snap, my only real issue is the MASSIVE size of flatpak downloads.
Out of all the distros that I've tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don't like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it's not too bad.
I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.
I have fond memories of setting up a FreeBSD desktop while I was in college. It still has a warm place in my heart.
In highschool, I got a desktop from a yard sale (Pentium I) and got an HDD from goodwill, all for $10, just to install FreeBSD. It was awesome. I think I still have the desktop somewhere in storage.
SUSE
I have a bit of a fear of SLES, purely due to Puredisk using them as their base back in the day (before they were swallowed by Symantec/Veritas/Broadcom/whatever). The amount of time I spent in YaST2 and losing data, again and again, made me genuinely never want to investigate any issues.
I must have played with SUSE at some point, these words bring back horrors I'd long forgotten.
Simply because its so old, that anytime I try to find a solution to a problem, I'm wading through 15 years of shit, 99% of which isnt relevant anymore due to age/depreciation.
What makes this weirder is that while all older distros have this problem, none of them come anywhere close to being as bad. This is probably partly because of Ubuntu's start as a noob-friendlier distro, but I don't think that completely explains it.
Being noob friendly is why I chose it.
I'm not a programmer or a sysadmin, My linux experience is entirely contained to the past 5-6ish years I've used it to avoid using Windows 10.
Every single problem I've had, no matter how ultimately minor it was, has been a enormous fuckin ordeal to figure out and solve, in large part due to the 15+ years of ancient, non-relevant knowledge.
So I'm probably gonna end up switching distros soon, since i'm tired of troubleshooting and still have weird, minor shit happening.. Just frustrated a bout doing it because I finally got steamtinkerlauncher working properly, which was an ordeal in and of itself.
And its gotten to the point I even hate talking about the issues I have, cause someone inevitable swoops in and be like "Well, just run (command) -help" to figure out what to do, and I'm all like.. okay, fucking great. That doesnt help because I dont know whats fucking wrong. Cant use -help if I dont know what command i need to fix this weird problem that no internet searches are showing me any kind of solution or even a hint for.
edit
Sorry, apparently my annoyance boiled over into a rant.
I feel you. I really do. User friendliness is what got me to try out Ubuntu in the first place. My Open Source OS journey has been long and weird, but we have that in common.
If you're looking for an OS with good documentation that's going to make your Steam gaming easier, I can suggest Nobara. It's easy to install, and while it's own documentation is a little sparse (it's less than a year or so old), you can use Fedora documentation 99% of the time. And as a bonus, steamtinkerlaunch is a one click install on Nobara. I think. I did my install for my gaming rig like 8 months ago, so don't quote me.
More importantly, though, is that Nobara has a friendly discord filled with helpful folks, including Glorious Eggroll himself - the guy who made Nobara, and a contributor to many Open Source projects and maintainer for Proton-GE which, if you use Steam on Linux, you might have heard of.
As a bonus, the Fedora community is helpful too, as evidenced by me 😀.
Anything that includes more software than necessary for the system I want. If I need Steam, I'm gonna install it myself.
That's why I don't run one of those many downstream distros that mainly change appearances or improve little things like GUI driver managers etc. For some people that's the reason to use those distros, I might just to look how they achieve the particular feature (e.g. skin, config).
But in general there aren't really distros I don't like, but many which I prefer. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS are all great, especially the more community run distros.
Manjaro feels like a bit of a mess to me and always ends up with problems.
Ubuntu releases too many buggy updates and dumps their idiosyncratic tastes in software on everyone whether people like it or not.
I really don't get why they want to push snaps so much. Flatpak does basically the same thing but better and is already used by more people. Their efforts would be better spent improving that. It's also weird that the server side of snaps is proprietary, I can't help but think that they may have intentions with that, that go against what the users want.
Redhat. Wouldn't touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
Ubuntu.
It's violating many rules of freedom, and just isn't good. Their DE spins aren't good, snaps aren't good
The first time I tried ubuntu I did not install it because it felt like half of the screen space was used up by the sidebar, top bar and window decoration so yeah.
That little detail put me off of installing linux for like a year or so because I did not knowthat you can easily change stuff like that
I get why they do that, but I don't like the [letter]ubuntus because it gives users the wrong idea of what entails a distro. It leads to them confusing distros with DEs. To me, distos are more about the community and release cycle with some major technical differences like package managers. Yes, having different default settings and programs play a role in this as well, so you could be justified in saying MX Linux isn't the same as Debian Stable, but I don't think the [letter]ubuntus deviate that much from just installing the corresponding DE on Ubuntu.
For me, it's Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I'm looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop lxd, when there is systemd-nspawn, docker and podman?!
Not a fan of lxd, but to be fair, not a fan of systemd'isms either.
No longer using Ubuntu at all because they force snaps down your throat. While I do like snaps on the server environment, (I think a lot of the haters out there don't see how nice they are on servers), I prefer to use Debian and then to just install snapd on my terms.
Hannah Montana for being so bloated
Hater. Hannah Montana Linux is a masterpiece
I cannot tolerate Hannah Montana Linux slander
Ubuntu desktop version, it's slow and buggy and the devs push ads and snaps and other crap.
I never saw an ad in Ubuntu.
Really? It's even in the apt update command when you update your system.
Been running Ubuntu 22.04 for the last several months and have yet to see anything resembling an ad. I guess it prompts me why there's system updates every fe days to a week or so. But I'd hardly call that an 'ad'.
I don’t want to set up my whole shit manually from terminal, I want something that works. Go for help on the forums and they’re the most head up the ass unhelpful condescending clowns since Mac users. No, as it turns out, when my driver didn’t work and I asked for help, I do not know how to recompile my armpit hair from source. Bad suggestion.
EndeavourOS is what Arch should be.
Once upon a time I was into RC helicopters. This combined with working offshore as a bachelor and living in a tiny apartment with a jurassic era (but reliable) car meant that I had a pretty decent income and not a whole lot on which to spend it. So once in a while I visited my local RC store just to browse and chat with the people there and if I stumbled across something interesting I might buy it.
I was not that much into the building part of the helicopters, but I saw it as a means to an end. Something I had to do to be able to fly it. The flying part was the end.
One day I was visiting the store, this clerk I knew showed me this kit he had. Brand new, pre-assembled, perfect craftmanship had gone into putting the kit together. Governor controlling the engine, ability to negate the pitch, extra strong servo for the cyclic controls. She was a beauty, and if it wasn't for the fact that I was, at that point,saving up my money for something unrelated, I would've bought it.
"You guys pre-assemble kits now?" I asked out of curiosity. "Oh no, we don't have the time for that" the clerk replied. "But this one customer" he began "he buys new kits, builds them, and sells them back to us at a 10% loss"
My brain short circuited. Why?? The flying part was the reward. Why would you not fly it? Well, in retrospect I understand it. The guy liked building complex machines. He had no interest in flying the kits. He loved the building process and the craftmanship that went into it, and once he had assembled it as perfectly as could ever be done, he was finished with the kit, and on the lookout for something new. He had the time to do what he loved, so why not. Rumor has it that he could spend an entire day with a tachometer and an IR thermometer just to get the fuel mixture perfect, whereas I used to do that in 10 minutes and call it "good enough".
I never met the guy. But he sounds like an interesting character. If he ran Linux he'd be running arch. Not from the bragging rights, not for its usability, not for (insert common reason here). But simply because he loved the craftmanship that went into setting it up.
I hate Arch's installation process but love AUR, and having always up-to-date packages. The new archinstall script that comes with it is actually really straight forward. Also, I install a complete, bloated gnome desktop environment, set up everything once and the resulting OS is really user friendly.
This is such a weird take for me, and it's popular enough of a take that it makes it weirder.
Arch is, by default, a barebones distro. The whole point is you start from nothing with very few defaults and learn how to get everything up and running yourself.
Complaining that the way arch works sucks cos you don't want to do that is bizarre.
Imagine complaining that Linux From Scratch sucks cos you have to do it from scratch.
Endeavor OS exists, it's what Endeavor OS should be. You can just use it, no one will complain. The Arch folk might be less inclined to help with it, but that's why there are Endeavor OS folks to talk to.
You realize EndeavorOS is 99% arch, right? You don't hate arch, you hate the idea of manual setup.
Also, glad you use EndeavorOS! I use it too and it's the only distro I've daily driven for years now.
This thread has basically devolved into "Ubuntu hate circlejerk party", as expected. I guess I just hate the distro I've spent the majority of my time on Linux using getting constantly dunked on and am a bit sad watching its inevitable death by snap. (Insert Thanos meme here)
I've been using Ubuntu professionally and as a daily driver for more than a decade now. I've tried the other major ones but Ubuntu is just no fuss. I can stand up a fresh system in 20 minutes and there is an enormous support base. I just don't have time to be a Linux hipster these days.
The only thing I can see which might win me over one day is Nix.
Same here. Ubuntu user for a loong time. Tried others but Ubuntu is just easy for me.
Yeah. Part of me is annoyed by snaps. But, tbh, having tried fedora and opensuse over the last few years, I don't quite see how they're so much worse than freaking Flatpaks. And at least they come gods damned fully enabled.
I see more manjaro than ubuntu.
Ubuntu had so many years as the "default" that people have some old perfect version of ubuntu that they liked better. Some early version from the gnome2 days, or else people who loved unity.
For my part, the last time I tried it, there were snap and apt versions of so many apps, that when you had an issue it was hard to troubleshoot because there would be two sets of solves. That was enough to get me to bail. I wonder if that's still an issue.
Probably to some degree... But on any other distro, the same is almost certainly true today too. Only it's between... rpm/aur/deb/etc and Flatpaks instead of snap.
Well look at that, no one seems to mention opensuse/Tumbleweed.
Great sign 👍🏻
Fedora also unscathed.
Two of my favorites, if not my absolute favorites.
There are only two distros in the world. Those that people hate and those that no one uses
Ubuntu brings a ton of awkward and shit memories from the course we had on it in secondary school.
Admittedly, Linux Mint is the only distro I have used in a personal capacity.
A question that begs for a hot take. I love it! Manjaro has always made zero sense to me. The power of Arch is in its rolling release cycle and your ability to customize it from the ground up. Both of which you lose when you downloads someone mix of Arch. It always seemed like a flavor for people who want to run Arch but just don't have the ability to read the documentation to actually run it.
I don't like Canonical and Red Hat, so I wouldn't use their distros out of principle. On top of that, I don't like Snaps, and Ubuntu's customizations done to GNOME.
From Fedora, I don't like Calamares. The rest is great.
Manjaro doesn't play nice with either upstream nor downstream and has GTK apps that don't follow GNOME's design guidelines, this last point also applies to Endeavor OS.
Vanilla OS is unusable for me, AB Root is hard, and I can't follow any online guides, tutorials or scripts. But their UX/UI is drool worthy. Blend OS has Waydroid out of the box but it's immutability is hard for me.
Debian is awesome but I don't like it for my work / gaming rig. Old kernel and packages. Best ever for servers.
All Ubuntu derivatives are old for me, so no. But I liked Zorin the best.
Deepin, I'm afraid of Chinese gov backdoors. Most probably paranoia.
I settled on Crystal Linux (arch based), has the nicest UI but they don't provide a GUI for package management, and they have handled their repos irresponsibly. It's more of a hobby distro, but a beautiful one.
Just the Oracle Red Hat clone, because, well, Oracle. Also those distros that disappear spontaneously because they were mainly maintained by one person only.
This. Leave it to Oracle to fork a perfectly core enterprise distro and make it suck.
Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.
You can't install a proxy daemon as a flatpak, but you can install it through Nix
Arch
(I use Arch btw)
For me it's Ubuntu. Whenever I tried it it was buggy and crashing. It kinda feels like Windows of GNU+Linux.
About Manjaro, I like it. I kinda feel sad seeing Manjaro get so much hate. The only thing I disliked was the accidental DDoS of AUR. But so far it's been working relatively well for me. I use Manjaro with Plasma.
And my favorite is Linux Mint. It just works, and it does so reliably. Also the Linux Mint community is really nice.
As such, I donated to Manjaro, Arch, and Linux Mint. Not much, but at least something.
I don't particularly like Arch.
I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).
It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.
Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.
I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)
I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.
Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.
Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.
Noooo. You find -Syyu less intuitive than "upgrade"? How dare you.
I agree with all yoyr points. Arch has its place but is not for me.
You aren't even supposed to double the y unless you just installed the system or you feel like it's not picking up on updates.
TIL.
Absolutely understandable, personally I prefer the AUR since I don't ever need to download and compile the source code anymore, since everything I need got an AUR package.
I also had bad experiences with apt, mostly that their release are too slow/I get stuck on an old release (my raspberry pi's python version is still 3.7, which caused problems since I was using a python 3.8 library). That's probably on me for not knowing how to upgrade my release, but I switched to Arch before learning how to fix this
For the pacman flags, I simply use yay, the AUR wrapper instead, yay do a full system upgrade, and yay python will show me a list of packages that have similar names to install. Still not as clear as apt, but at least there's no weird flag letters to remember for most use cases
Ah, yes... Good ol' library mismatches. Definitely not a point in Debian's favor.
Well, at least for Stable. In Sid, different ^(Toy)^ story.
Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I've been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I've never use them myself.
Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.
Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.
I am very conflicted about Arch. I similarly disliked it for actual use, because it's so unstable. On the other hand, the arch docs are a goldmine.
I think it just depends on what you want to do with your system. Do you like to tinker? Arch (and similar distros) are great. Do you just want things to work mostly out of the box? Use an Ubuntu flavor or an Ubuntu derivative.
Interesting that you feel Arch is opinionated. After using several distros I finally settled on Arch because I felt it was not opinionated compared to e.g. Ubuntu. I have to choose and install every part of the system myself, and I like how that gives me a clean system. I like to use the Awesome window manager, and with other distros I would always end up with a different desktop installed next to Awesome.
Can you say how you feel Arch is opinionated?
I feel it is highly opinionated because they only officially support a fairly small amount of packages. They're not particularly more up-to-date than say openSuse Tumbleweed. A Debian netinstall is equally a barebones system I can install exactly what I am looking for, and don't need to fiddle with third party repo's like the AUR. As far as I know, almost every distro will let you do a barebones headless install, then build up your system yourself. Arch is certainly less opinionated than Ubuntu, but that's not a big accomplishment these days.
If I were to desire a highly specific environment where I wanted to exactly manage each program's dependency chain myself, Gentoo seems like a much better tool for the job. For example, Arch officially requires systemD, Gentoo does not. As far as I know Gentoo makes no assumptions on how your system is setup, from preboot to Wayland session.
I could just be out of date, as I use NixOS as my workstation and server OS, using Debian for some older servers I haven't migrated yet. I get the impression from Arch, the few times I have used it, is that its niche is appealing to a particular kind of user, rather than being a good solution to a particular kind of problem. That's not bad, its huge reason why its popular. Other distros do the same thing as Arch, sometimes better sometimes worse, but Arch is selling an aesthetic, rather than a tool.
I never realized how small the number of official Arch packages is compared to Debian (13751 vs 171937 according to wikipedia ).
And I see your point about Arch being opinionated. Thanks.
Ubuntu. Snaps are a buggy mess. I know you can remove them but I like sane defaults. Snap drives me insane. Mint, PopOS, Debian are better choices for a stable distro.
edit: I also don't like Fedora and CentOS. The installers tend to be very buggy for me.
CentOS. We were stuck on an old version at work. The OS is already designed to use old packages for security/stability, so imagine how outdated they are on an old version. It was a nightmare getting new software running on it. That coupled with the other news surrounding CentOS and RHEL, I'm not touching those anymore w a 10 foot pole. I wish it just crumbles and Debian takes over. I have had amazing success with like 20 years on Debian and it just gets better and better.
Not sure you can really blame an OS that is out of support and that you should have upgraded to the new version years prior. I used CentOS in an enterprise environment for close to 10 years and really had no problems, except when we tried to shoehorn new software onto old versions it had no business being on instead of just upgrading.
I remember the upgrade from CentOS 6 to 7. It changed a bunch of stuff including making systemd the default init system. I'm assuming your company just wanted to avoid doing that work? But at the same time most other distros were switching to systemd so you would have had to do that work regardless.
OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)
Also, Manjaro
My only real gripe is their default sudoers config.
Debian. APT sucks, the installer looks like straight out of 1999 and the packages are just wayyy too old. Also apt-autoremove deleted half of my system the 1st time I tried debian...
A minimal and stable distro, kinda expected
Debian is my hometown because back in, I guess 2014?, I had a computer that just sucked. It was like 1GB RAM, I think a single core CPU. Debian was like the only distro that actually installed. Ubuntu, Mint, etc. didn't even finish the installation
SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company's rumored? stance on antisemitism (google banned Jewish holidays)
Fedora for it's update mechanism with the forced reboot
Arch as the necessary evil
SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company’s rumored?stance on antisemitism
I was really surprised to read about the antisemitism allegation. That's a very serious accusation. I've looked into it and it seems that these claims are controversial. First thing to mention is that the accuser said himself that this was about the company SUSE, and not the distribution openSUSE.
The article claims there are emails and other employees' statements as proof, but provides none. The article is also over a year old, so why hasn't this led to any public statements from SUSE or any legal or other actions? Antisemitism is a serious offense in Germany.
Discussions on reddit and hacker news all state that the writer has gone off the rails. When being called out on reddit for deadnaming a trans woman, he plays dumb. I don't think he's dumb. It seems to me like he's transphobic and acting like a troll about it in good old American conservative fashion.
For me, this seriously calls into question any claims he makes about social justice stuff, even if it concerns himself. He apparently views other people's social justice as something to play with, so my gut feeling is that it would be no concern to him to lie or bend the truth about stuff like this in order to achieve something. It's all a game to him in the political arena, not serious life issues.
If I'm wrong, all he has to do is provide the proof he claims there is, even if only anonymized.
If the allegation is just from Bryan Lunduke I'd take it with a pinch of salt. The guy is known for espousing some out-there views so it needs independent corroboration.
Yeah, I've not been able to find any allegations by anyone else, except for his vague mentions. There was also a Jewish person who had worked at SUSE who commented in one thread that they felt nothing less than welcomed.
Same here. I have not heard anything after the initial accusations. The company I am working for is using SLES as a main OS and is switching to another OS without any explanation. So I have no idea if the claims are true or the switch has anything to do with anything.
It just goes to show how an accusation like this sticks to a company's reputation. The reason for your company switching could be totally unrelated, yet your mind still jumps to this. Have you asked why they're switching?
Arch and any arch based distro.
It's overused, deb is better and the absolute chads will always be distros like NixOS or Guix System. There is no use for an unstable, beginner-unfriendly, distro where you constantly encounter dependency hell.
Of course I'm just being edgy, every Linux Distro is good for the sole fact of it not being Windows.
Red Hat for obvious reasons. Used to run and recommend CentOS before all the fuckery.
Easily manjaro, so many headaches
I don't like anything Debian based. The package manager always sits at the core of the experience, and it's just a horrible experience. With a bit of manual intervention, you can upgrade an Arch install from 10 years ago. I've never managed to update any Debian based distribution from the previous release. That aside, a lot of what I do relies on newest packages, and having something that's 5 years out of date just isn't for me
I have literally never had any upgrade issues on debian that wasn’t something mentioned in release notes(been using it since debian 7). I am guessing you did a lot of things they tell you specifically not to do on this page:
Fwiw, I’ve had great results with upgrading Debian derivatives. A machine in my closet has been upgraded from version 8 -> 12 without any major issue. Usually, upgrade problems come from custom or third party software in my experience.
I've had the opposite experience. Updating my apt sources.list and running dist-upgrade always worked for me on Debian (though most of the time I just run unstable which is rolling) but on Arch it seems like if I don't upgrade regularly sometimes I'll get hit with signature key errors because the key database is outdated and then have to go run some other command to update the keys before a pacman -Syu will work. I love both distros, but there's no better way to make your users not give a shit about security than making said security interrupt their workflow. Most of the time I just disable the key check in pacman.conf so that the damn thing will upgrade successfully.
Android. Google doesnt invest anything in AOSP it seems, GrapheneOS is the only really well made Distro.
Androids security model is a joke as every phone is bloated with malware that has full access over everything.
Banking apps need Google, map apps need Google.
There is no split screen in AOSP since forever.
No tools on the lockscreen. I am not talking about crazy ios like tools that are basically a seperate OS, its still a lockscreen. But camera and torch?
So many restrictions. RootlessJamesDSP is a good example of crazy workarounds that still dont work in the end. No FOSS appstore with autoupdates is also a pain.
Does GrapheneOS have microg or similar now? The last time I used it, it didn't have it, and some apps (Signal, I'm looking at you) had a constant notification. I went to CalyxOS, which I like fine, but it's more for the masses (gives up a little privacy for convenience) than GrapheneOS is.
it has something called sandboxed google play services. they claim its more secure and private than microg. also in my experience notifications and location is more reliable with it than microg. also you can disable the constant notification for apps like signal and it still works afaik.
Sorry mate. I love them all!
All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well.
Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.
Manjaro got me unironically back to windows
update: thanks to archcraft i'm back on the linux train
which linux distro do you NOT like, and why?
The one with the most elitist gatekeeping users.
Arch?
arch isn't really elitest though, gatekeeping sure, but the gate is the arch wiki. if that is elitist...
Well, ACTUALLY, they're only being elitist about the kernel, and they're gatekeeping about userspace programs, SO...
Using arch but honestly. I don't "like" any of them. Every distro I've ever used has required more setup and maintenance than I would have liked.
I really just want a system that doesn't bork itself on updates and let's me install whatever software I want. You would think that wouldn't be so impossible to find.
Sounds like you need an LTS.
I tried debian stable a week or two ago. Had about 4 different showstopper bugs in 3 or so days. It doesn't seem to help much from my limited experience.
Huh. Are you running any kind of exotic setup? What kind of bugs were they? Can you be sure they were Debian bugs and not hardware issues?
Yes. I had both actually. Hardware and debian specific bugs, on a clean install from the live iso with barely any packages installed from apt and like 10 flatpaks. I'm a bit exhausted rn to find all the links. But let me find at least the worst one for ya.
nixos solves this problem by allowing you to boot the last working system state prior to updates. and as a bonus you can manage all of your computers from a single config in a git repo. bit of a learning curve but it takes most of the annoyance out of linux for me.
nixos solves this problem by allowing you to boot the last working system state prior to updates
I kinda don't want that. I want a system that doesn't break in the first place...
My experience with nix was very short lived. It mostly consisted of me wondering how to install something and people telling me to package it myself for a day of two til I gave up.
updates invariably break things, whatever we do. the safety net of being able to roll back makes taking updates a lot more palatable.
yeah, like I said it has a learning curve so it's not for everyone but it's been a lifesaver for me so I thought I'd point it out.
Indeed. Maybe I'll give it another try if/when arch botches itself again.
The idea of a reproducible system is honestly great.
Well, scrolling through every comment, it looks like very few people hate Fedora. I've always been using Debian and Debian based distros but recently moved to Fedora, and I'm not surprised people like it.
Fedora is great! It ended my distro-hopping.
I still hop around, but I always come back to Fedora. It just works. Well, once you enable parallel downloads on DNF it just works.
Well, once you enable parallel downloads on DNF it just works.
Gentoo. I just found it a pain, from spending forever figuring why nothing would work only to realise I hadn't enabled some kernel module for my SSD to updates taking forever and completely annihilating my battery if on battery power, it just felt like more work than it was worth.
Well, Ubuntu. I've been skeptical of it from the beginning, but I did use it on and off in the 00's. Canonical has since gone out of their way to make sure I won't install their shit on my computers.
Recent developments have also somewhat soured me on Fedora.
Ubuntu. Pretty sure you already have an idea why. Lol.
OpenSUSE. I've always had issues trying to use it, from zypper to updates to bootloops. It's also sluggish compared to other distros (yes, same DEs usually) on my laptop. I've tried at least 3x trying to get why a lot of people love it. It's just not for me.
I've never tried Manjaro yet, but coming from Arch and EOS I don't think I ever will.
I've never had a good experience with an arch based distro. I understand that's kind of the goal, and it's great if you want to use your computer to set up arch, but I want to use my computer for other things.
Endeavor, Arch, Manjaro et al.
I’ve used arch for the past 10 years or so as my primary OS, and it only took 7 or 8 of those years to get the OS set up.
/s in all seriousness, I kind of get what you’re saying. But I don’t think that having a bad experience is the goal at all though. I think the goal is to provide an OS that lets users decide on exactly what collection of packages they want on their system, and to provide packages that are up to date and unmodified from their upstream.
Setting up your system additively comes with a cost, though. It’s way less convenient than just installing something that someone else has configured.
To me personally, I think the one-time upfront cost of setting up arch is less burdensome than dealing with configuration files that have been moved to non-default locations (transmission-daemon on Debian-based distros is one example), packages being seriously out of date and thus missing new features and bug fixes (neovim), and dealing with cleaning up packages if you prefer to use non-default software and don’t want a ton of clutter.
Definitely valid to prefer a preconfigured system, I just think it’s a misrepresentation to say that the point of arch is to be difficult, or that configuration takes a ton of time for users of arch. Maybe learning to use arch takes longer, but learning to use arch is just learning to use Linux, so it’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing. And it doesn’t take that long to learn, I was more productive in arch after a couple days than I’ve ever been on *buntu, Debian or Mint.
Every distribution offers different things. I like debian sid for the simplicity and general software availability, but APT is something i still consider a bit clunky. I like arch because of its barebones philosophy - arch wiki helped me a lot learn about linux.
I like gentoo - the wiki is awesome and portage is a great package manager. It was the first time I saw how the linux kernel gets compiled. It makes you appreciate all the work the devs do.
I now read the title and you ask for the opposite. But someone might find these bad, so i will post it as-is
Manjaro because in the few months I've used it, it happened twice that my system didn't boot anymore after I updated it. The second time I didn't reinstall but installed EndeavourOS instead. Been using that for like 2 years and never had that issue again.
For beginners, and rolling distribution. A beginner should start with something that doesn't break while you don't understand if it's your or the shiny new program that broke the system. But then, I have been using Debian for more that 20 years. For me it's a tool, not a game.
Fedora, mostly because of the decisions they make are mostly for corporate areas;
The kernel selection they make, packages and etc;
Sometimes need to deal with kernels they select that don't work well with my hardware
Fuck Ubuntu. Buggy as shit updates, forced snaps, always had problems whenever I was forced to use it, which I've never had again when I switched to Debian.
Debian >>>>>> Ubuntu
I'm noy going to say I dislike it, but I don't see the point in a source based distro like Gentoo anymore.
I learned a lot from using Gentoo when I was just getting into Linux 20 years ago, but now looking back on it, why would I want to juggle with everyones build systems and compiler flags? Especially now hardware is so homogenous.
That's no longer the point of Gentoo either.
gentoo manages compile options globally. This is not only for optimization. It can be used to enable certain features of a program only available via compile options.
freedom between rolling release, stable release, or a mixture of the two. You don't have to opt for one or the other. And you can only make some programs rolling and others stable. Gentoo is the only distro I know that lets you do this without issues
can use any version of a program you want. That's the benefit of the build system. Since you're compiling, you link against the versions you want. No more compatibility issues because you didn't use the specific version your distro has.
super easy to install programs not in the repos and still have them managed by portage. Ebuilds are easy to write, and you don't have compatibility issues if you configure your deps right
super easy patch management. Just drop it the right place and you're done.
although its not mandatory, openRC is great
You can pry gentoo from my cold dead hands. The ability to do things like mix LTS and git HEAD packages at will is yuuge, as well as the dynamic dependency graph based on enabled features. Some newer distros like Nix and Guix come close, and even offer the ability to skip compilation via their package caches, but they have a number of pain points in my personal experience.
I agree. Nix and Guix follow a very unorthodox approach to managing a unix-like system, and while they make it work for most things, there's always those few issues that linger around.
I really like their approach. But Gentoo's approach is much more "just works" and tries to be unorthodox only where it is necessary or highly beneficial.
Ubuntu. Package organization is annoying, versions are out of date, managing multiple versions isn't consistent, and distro upgrades always have unintended consequences. Often ones that aren't easy to figure out. Their reputation for being beginner friendly should have died around a decade ago.
Manjaro is the one that has caused me the most pain and suffering.
The only one that really pissed me off was a distro called biglinux. It's arch based and very popular in Brazil. It's actually very stable. Everything works great. It's got some nice features.
Butttt, it uses latte dock or panel (kde). They have built in presets for how to arrange the panels and what not. It's nice, however, I was trying to move some panels around from the base options and broke kde. I wasn't doing anything more than changing GUI settings and the whole desktop broke. I seriously don't understand.
Ubuntu: it's not bad, I just don't like canonical
Manjaro: it starts as arch but more user friendly (by being preconfigured), until it inevitably breaks (being arch) and you end up with a regular arch that you don't know how is configured
Elementary os: it's too elementary os
All those con distros that are just a bunch of reskinned free stuff ask you money for that. Like zorin os
Having used both Manjaro and Arch, Manjaro breaking has nothing to do with Arch. Arch is far more stable.
Debian, as its so MANUAL. Upgrading by manually updating x times and then literally changing the repos manually in the sources list? Wtf? Without any documentation or automation??
QubesOS, as it probably doesnt run on any real hardware. Didnt get beyond a blackscreen, and also AMD consumer GPUs dont support accelerated VMs making it useless.
Ubuntu because its annoying, but unsnap fixes a lot and its actually okay, still outdated Kernel als a bit weird.
KDE Neon because I cant tolerate its not a workstation distro but want it to be one
Linux Mint. Its old, and always had weird crashes for me. Its kinda nice and easy, kinda weird and complicated to do certain things. Some packages dont run as its not Ubuntu. Would always choose any KDE Distro that is newer.
Anything even tangential to Red Hat.
RPM's are hot garbage when it comes to packaging formats.
Having said that, I use Fedora at work and Ubuntu at home.
Whyfore the hate for .rpms? I've never had an issue on Fedora in a decade.
Issues with building RPM's. There's no specification for what an RPM is (unlike say deb).
Well the specification is "whatever rpmbuild version x.y.z does" and whatever other tangential packages happen to be installed on the build system.
Try building an RPM for CentOS 6 on a RockyLinux 8 system, or building for both of those on Fedora.
You can do it, but it's real ball ache, and you have to jump through a lot of hoops.
Compare to building a deb for any version of Debian/Ubuntu on Fedora/RHEL it's a doddle and predictable.
I was using Manjaro until the day my install started giving me problems.with dependencies and duplicated packages (?), so I went with Fedora and it's been smooth so far.
Any 10 or more year support distro because they increase the range of versions that stuff has to work with by 5 extra years and any knowledge I gain about those ancient versions will never be useful again. They also delay a lot of new features in protocols, file formats,... where a large majority of clients needs support before the next phase of introducing a feature can be started.
EndeaverOS. On two systems it installed but lots of error popup windows right from desktop launch. just seemed Janky compared to plain Arch or any other popular distro.
Perhaps look at what they are saying? I daily drive Endeavour and have no problems with it
You're going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
Also they put ads in search long before Windows did and as much as I hate Microsoft we should never forget that.
Putting ads in foss is an irredeemable sin
Bring out the guillotine!
Not to defend them, but it was trivial to remove the adverts and they stopped after the "feedback". Unlike Windows.
You know that snaps existed before Flatpaks right?
So it would have been that much easier for Ubuntu to be first to market and open source the snap server software…
But they didn’t. And alternative solutions had to be created.
I'm not defending canonical decisions, but definably when they started working on this there was no other alternative available for them to collaborate at the time
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
Thanks for the explanation. Now I understand the dislike for snap.
Oh! I forgot another one! Updates.
You can't really control when the updates of snaps are rolled out.
For "regular" software, I have an "apt update" type of script that I can run when I choose to update everything on my system. On some systems, I have this in a weekly crontab. On other systems, there is no scheduled run. On those systems, it's important to keep many apps as-is - so several packages are also locked, as well ("apt-mark hold").
With snap, you basically have no control. It updates as many times as it wants, when it wants. You can try to adjust some timers to change the window when forced updates are rolled out, but can never tell it to NOT update something. Broken package updated? Well, you can manually roll back that one. Broken update pushed again during the next forced update window? Just roll it back again! (and repeat, every day)
These are the words direct from a snap developer on why you cannot lock an app: "You need to keep your software up to date."
Yes, I understand that, but I also know it's really important to not update some stuff, and I know that broken snaps sometimes get pushed.
Basically, the snap developers have talked down to the users. THEY know better of what WE actually want and need, not us dumb users that actually administer things for a living.
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
how about popos?
Also a great option. I like their tiling window manager and the other gnome extensions they've done. I'm also generally excited about the work they're doing with Cosmic as a new DE.
Been chomping at the bit for cosmic since I learned of it.
Isn't that the one where Linus broke the WM by installing Steam? Lol
Are we just going to pretend Debian doesn’t exist?
You get a lot of recommendations for Mint here, but I'd like to toss in a recommendation for Pop!_OS. Also based on Ubuntu without all the crap. I would say the biggest difference between pop and mint is the UI, as Mint comes standard with cinnamon and pop with Gnome (soon cosmic) as their DE's.
Just take a look at those two and choose one of them, they are both great distros, and absolutely the two I would recommend to just about anyone. Easy to use and very straightforward for new people trying out Linux.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn't keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.
I wanted to like snaps, and I'm not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.
Follow-up: The icing on the cake was a release or so ago when apt started queueing the snap package's installation instead. Very clever, but also a confusing user experience. It took a few iterations before I understood the snap was getting installed instead of the deb.
For the record...
My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
It’s that pesky
rootuser, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.You can make an OS in Scratch? I didnt know that
Linux From Scratch is a series of (online) books that walk you through building up your own linux system from the ground up, from compiling the kernel to all the individual systems that turn the kernel into a functional OS.
It's meant to be an educational tool to help people learn about what goes into making a Linux distribution and give you better knowledge of how to build software from source. Some people turn these systems into their own distributions or personal (I guess gentoo-like?) Linux installs
Not only can you make your own OS but you can use one of the package managers and build your own repo and do a whole ecosystem yourself.
I used LFS to build a distro for embedded systems I designed at work. Was a fun experience but way too much work.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck's up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That's the Linux community I love, good job people <3
No one gets left behind
Akuna Matata or some shit
Haven't seen Santoku or Kali or several other special use-case distros (E: or Hannah Montana Linux hahahaha). But, yes, this is exactly the community I love and that extreme hate/love for specific distros is the reason I tried Linux in the first place (and the reason I stayed) hahaha
Nobody shits on MX, it's a sign 😁
Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the "gamer aesthetic".
Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I'm sure it's good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it's a lot less flamboyant about it.
My desktop "breathes" in RGB so it sounds perfect for me. Plug me into the Matrix.
Fwiw it does have a 'Lite' edition that doesn't include any theming.
Ubuntu.It' went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
Serious question: what do you not like about snaps? I find the isolation and dependency desolation to be pretty great.
Snap is vendor lock in. They don’t work on many distros, tooling pushes their platform, and they control the only store.
For desktop apps Flatpak is just technically better anyway so what’s the point.
Snap is the reason I started looking for something else. Flatpak is the reason I went Fedora. It's been great.
Manjaro, for its incompetence.
I don't hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.
Upvoted for Manjaro, downvoted for gentoo. (no vote as a result)
Console issued server command: /force_vote @a
Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
How does Manjaro add incompetence? I've not used either for a while, buy Manjaro never failed me, while arch did manage to make my system nuke itself a couple times just running
pacman -Syyu. Granted, this was a long time ago, but it's the only distro to so this to me ever.The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.
The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.
The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.
Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.
Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.
did they ever start backporting security patches? I know that was a major issue in the early days that really soured me on the competence of the project. you cannot take a rolling release distro, bless some package versions as "stable" and call it a day.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that's gentoo.
I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
You're not wrong, lol.
'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
Removing things others tell you not to do. Yes, that sounds familiar. Maybe I should try Arch sometime.
I've just finished my current version of my script to change ubuntu around to my liking. At 4:23 in the night/morning. I'm back on ubuntu because I can never seem to get the graphics working just right on other distro's. There's always that screen tearing happening whenever I play youtube videos in firefox. But in ubuntu it just works out of the box.
So what you're actually saying is: you don't like Arch because you don't want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.
(Which is fine)
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't want to use a kit/show car for commuting.
Fair. Though I will say (more for others who may see this in the future), that Arch's new installer is great and definitely reduces the load on new users. That said, it's never going to be explicitly designed for people who have no Linux experience.
Just use Arch in a Distrobox on Fedora or openSUSE. That's the best of both worlds.
Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.
Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn't worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.
I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.
Lol, how does booting quicker prevent you from doing work?
It doesn't. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.
And also, I have work to do... I don't like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.
Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
Every time I have used manjaro on x86 it has been broken within a few months. Their Raspberry Pi 4 port is pretty stable though for some reason.
Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.
Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.
RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.
Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.
Damn I'm contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?
I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.
I miss an /etc structure that wasn't a complete mess.
I miss UFS and its soft updates.
I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.
I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.
And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.
The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I've only needed to use fBSD once professionally.
Ubuntu because they put ads in the terminal
Just thinking about this pisses me off all over again.
"they put ads in the terminal" isn't really accurate.
Their "ubuntu-advantage-tools" adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing "ubuntu-advantage-tools". It's definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.
You can’t easily uninstall the advantage tools package, they set Ubuntu-minimal meta package to depend on it
They do? I've never seen any.
https://nitter.net/omgubuntu/status/1574759306544701443 https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/10/ubuntu-pro-terminal-ad The advertised product is literally free under certain conditions so I don't consider this offending.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.
I'm not sure if I have bad luck but every time I've tried Ubuntu I've had stability issues. Constant crashes and things I've never run into in other distros.
It makes it hard for me to recommend it to new users.
The way they pushed that slow crap that is snap down the throat of everyone killed any appreciation I had for the distro
i share your opinion
Wish Linux Devs help build and polish OS for Pinephone. I really want Linux to go mainstream. Tired of android and Apple.
The issue is a lack of an app ecosystem with actual AAA apps.
This! I used Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver for 1 1/2 years. The OS itself was anything but perfect but the real problem was definetly the app ecosystem. WayDroid(an android "emulator") optimization is probably the way to go for linux on mobile
Yeah there's no way a viable Linux phone could be made without the ability to run Android apps.
I think we're probably at least a few years away from being able to daily drive Linux on modern phones with functioning things like NFC payments and a decent native app collection. It's definitely coming but it has far less momentum than even the Linux desktop does.
I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS... I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
Holy shit, I installed it on my Lenovo tablet laptop, and everything works out the box... Even the gyroscope! I couldn't believe it. It's the first arch based I've tried and I think I'm hooked.
To note, I think I tried like 8 other distros before finding endeavor.
The touchscreen working right out of the box is what surprised me.
ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren't present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn't get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
That's my daily driver. I used the lite version on my old computer and Core on my new desktop. I understand it may have problems on other hardware but for me it looks and feels as good as the promotional screenshots.
Nothing wrong with that, I'm glad it worked well for you! I don't actively hate it, I just was dissapointed with my personal experience.
Huh, this is the opposite of my experience. I've used a handful of distros over the years (including fedora and ubuntu) but Zorin was the most stable and user friendly by far out of the box. I also think their Gnome theme is pretty sleek.
Glad it works for you :) Fedora has been that for me on most of my hardware.
Red Star OS, a little too much spyware.
I've always been intrigued by that one. I want to test it out, but finding an image has proven difficult.
That's just capitalist propaganda. There is no spyware! That's just innocent telemetry!
This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It's great if you're just getting into Linux, it's absolutely terrible when you know what you're doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it's always so far behind it's not even worth using if you're on AMD. Thankfully they've realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.
I love Linux Mint: it's perfect for my parents' computer.
I've never cared for mint because I don't really want my Linux to look like Windows. Which is what mint does.
Not really an unpopular opinion. My main desktop runs mint, and we're well aware of that being an issue. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make as long as it works. I haven't had enough issues to look for replacement yet. ZorinOS looks interesting, though.
For servers and work I use other distros.
Ubuntu. I can't stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
I really liked unity 😞
I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There's always some random crash that I don't know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you're installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I'm the user and I'm root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I'll go to Windows.
I used Ubuntu for years, but the forcing of snap really killed it for me.
Ubuntu used to be synonymous with stability and compatibility. It was always a little bloated and slower than a bunch of others. But that was the price for stability....
It is probably still stable but compatibility has taken a back seat. This is what really annoyed me enough to switch.
I'm on Mint now, it is really nice. Flatpak is much better than Snap, my only real issue is the MASSIVE size of flatpak downloads.
Out of all the distros that I've tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don't like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it's not too bad.
However what really pisses me off,among their numerous other controversies, was when they replaced perfectly functional open source apps with proprietary ones...twice. Though the former has since been reversed.
I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.
I have fond memories of setting up a FreeBSD desktop while I was in college. It still has a warm place in my heart.
In highschool, I got a desktop from a yard sale (Pentium I) and got an HDD from goodwill, all for $10, just to install FreeBSD. It was awesome. I think I still have the desktop somewhere in storage.
I have a bit of a fear of SLES, purely due to Puredisk using them as their base back in the day (before they were swallowed by Symantec/Veritas/Broadcom/whatever). The amount of time I spent in YaST2 and losing data, again and again, made me genuinely never want to investigate any issues.
I must have played with SUSE at some point, these words bring back horrors I'd long forgotten.
Yeah, just reading 'Yast' triggered me
I am growing to dislike Ubuntu.
Simply because its so old, that anytime I try to find a solution to a problem, I'm wading through 15 years of shit, 99% of which isnt relevant anymore due to age/depreciation.
What makes this weirder is that while all older distros have this problem, none of them come anywhere close to being as bad. This is probably partly because of Ubuntu's start as a noob-friendlier distro, but I don't think that completely explains it.
Being noob friendly is why I chose it.
I'm not a programmer or a sysadmin, My linux experience is entirely contained to the past 5-6ish years I've used it to avoid using Windows 10.
Every single problem I've had, no matter how ultimately minor it was, has been a enormous fuckin ordeal to figure out and solve, in large part due to the 15+ years of ancient, non-relevant knowledge.
So I'm probably gonna end up switching distros soon, since i'm tired of troubleshooting and still have weird, minor shit happening.. Just frustrated a bout doing it because I finally got steamtinkerlauncher working properly, which was an ordeal in and of itself.
And its gotten to the point I even hate talking about the issues I have, cause someone inevitable swoops in and be like "Well, just run (command) -help" to figure out what to do, and I'm all like.. okay, fucking great. That doesnt help because I dont know whats fucking wrong. Cant use -help if I dont know what command i need to fix this weird problem that no internet searches are showing me any kind of solution or even a hint for.
edit Sorry, apparently my annoyance boiled over into a rant.
I feel you. I really do. User friendliness is what got me to try out Ubuntu in the first place. My Open Source OS journey has been long and weird, but we have that in common.
If you're looking for an OS with good documentation that's going to make your Steam gaming easier, I can suggest Nobara. It's easy to install, and while it's own documentation is a little sparse (it's less than a year or so old), you can use Fedora documentation 99% of the time. And as a bonus, steamtinkerlaunch is a one click install on Nobara. I think. I did my install for my gaming rig like 8 months ago, so don't quote me.
More importantly, though, is that Nobara has a friendly discord filled with helpful folks, including Glorious Eggroll himself - the guy who made Nobara, and a contributor to many Open Source projects and maintainer for Proton-GE which, if you use Steam on Linux, you might have heard of.
As a bonus, the Fedora community is helpful too, as evidenced by me 😀.
Anything that includes more software than necessary for the system I want. If I need Steam, I'm gonna install it myself.
That's why I don't run one of those many downstream distros that mainly change appearances or improve little things like GUI driver managers etc. For some people that's the reason to use those distros, I might just to look how they achieve the particular feature (e.g. skin, config).
But in general there aren't really distros I don't like, but many which I prefer. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS are all great, especially the more community run distros.
Manjaro feels like a bit of a mess to me and always ends up with problems.
Ubuntu releases too many buggy updates and dumps their idiosyncratic tastes in software on everyone whether people like it or not.
I really don't get why they want to push snaps so much. Flatpak does basically the same thing but better and is already used by more people. Their efforts would be better spent improving that. It's also weird that the server side of snaps is proprietary, I can't help but think that they may have intentions with that, that go against what the users want.
Redhat. Wouldn't touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
Ubuntu. It's violating many rules of freedom, and just isn't good. Their DE spins aren't good, snaps aren't good
The first time I tried ubuntu I did not install it because it felt like half of the screen space was used up by the sidebar, top bar and window decoration so yeah.
That little detail put me off of installing linux for like a year or so because I did not knowthat you can easily change stuff like that
I get why they do that, but I don't like the [letter]ubuntus because it gives users the wrong idea of what entails a distro. It leads to them confusing distros with DEs. To me, distos are more about the community and release cycle with some major technical differences like package managers. Yes, having different default settings and programs play a role in this as well, so you could be justified in saying MX Linux isn't the same as Debian Stable, but I don't think the [letter]ubuntus deviate that much from just installing the corresponding DE on Ubuntu.
Manjaro. Team is really sketch.
For me, it's Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I'm looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop
lxd, when there issystemd-nspawn,dockerandpodman?!Not a fan of lxd, but to be fair, not a fan of systemd'isms either.
No longer using Ubuntu at all because they force snaps down your throat. While I do like snaps on the server environment, (I think a lot of the haters out there don't see how nice they are on servers), I prefer to use Debian and then to just install snapd on my terms.
Hannah Montana for being so bloated
Hater. Hannah Montana Linux is a masterpiece
I cannot tolerate Hannah Montana Linux slander
Ubuntu desktop version, it's slow and buggy and the devs push ads and snaps and other crap.
I never saw an ad in Ubuntu.
Really? It's even in the apt update command when you update your system.
Stuff like this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1434512/how-to-get-rid-of-ubuntu-pro-advertisement-when-updating-apt
Been running Ubuntu 22.04 for the last several months and have yet to see anything resembling an ad. I guess it prompts me why there's system updates every fe days to a week or so. But I'd hardly call that an 'ad'.
Fucking Arch and Arch people.
I don’t want to set up my whole shit manually from terminal, I want something that works. Go for help on the forums and they’re the most head up the ass unhelpful condescending clowns since Mac users. No, as it turns out, when my driver didn’t work and I asked for help, I do not know how to recompile my armpit hair from source. Bad suggestion.
EndeavourOS is what Arch should be.
Once upon a time I was into RC helicopters. This combined with working offshore as a bachelor and living in a tiny apartment with a jurassic era (but reliable) car meant that I had a pretty decent income and not a whole lot on which to spend it. So once in a while I visited my local RC store just to browse and chat with the people there and if I stumbled across something interesting I might buy it.
I was not that much into the building part of the helicopters, but I saw it as a means to an end. Something I had to do to be able to fly it. The flying part was the end.
One day I was visiting the store, this clerk I knew showed me this kit he had. Brand new, pre-assembled, perfect craftmanship had gone into putting the kit together. Governor controlling the engine, ability to negate the pitch, extra strong servo for the cyclic controls. She was a beauty, and if it wasn't for the fact that I was, at that point,saving up my money for something unrelated, I would've bought it.
"You guys pre-assemble kits now?" I asked out of curiosity. "Oh no, we don't have the time for that" the clerk replied. "But this one customer" he began "he buys new kits, builds them, and sells them back to us at a 10% loss"
My brain short circuited. Why?? The flying part was the reward. Why would you not fly it? Well, in retrospect I understand it. The guy liked building complex machines. He had no interest in flying the kits. He loved the building process and the craftmanship that went into it, and once he had assembled it as perfectly as could ever be done, he was finished with the kit, and on the lookout for something new. He had the time to do what he loved, so why not. Rumor has it that he could spend an entire day with a tachometer and an IR thermometer just to get the fuel mixture perfect, whereas I used to do that in 10 minutes and call it "good enough".
I never met the guy. But he sounds like an interesting character. If he ran Linux he'd be running arch. Not from the bragging rights, not for its usability, not for (insert common reason here). But simply because he loved the craftmanship that went into setting it up.
I hate Arch's installation process but love AUR, and having always up-to-date packages. The new archinstall script that comes with it is actually really straight forward. Also, I install a complete, bloated gnome desktop environment, set up everything once and the resulting OS is really user friendly.
This is such a weird take for me, and it's popular enough of a take that it makes it weirder.
Arch is, by default, a barebones distro. The whole point is you start from nothing with very few defaults and learn how to get everything up and running yourself.
Complaining that the way arch works sucks cos you don't want to do that is bizarre.
Imagine complaining that Linux From Scratch sucks cos you have to do it from scratch.
Endeavor OS exists, it's what Endeavor OS should be. You can just use it, no one will complain. The Arch folk might be less inclined to help with it, but that's why there are Endeavor OS folks to talk to.
You realize EndeavorOS is 99% arch, right? You don't hate arch, you hate the idea of manual setup.
Also, glad you use EndeavorOS! I use it too and it's the only distro I've daily driven for years now.
This thread has basically devolved into "Ubuntu hate circlejerk party", as expected. I guess I just hate the distro I've spent the majority of my time on Linux using getting constantly dunked on and am a bit sad watching its inevitable death by snap. (Insert Thanos meme here)
I've been using Ubuntu professionally and as a daily driver for more than a decade now. I've tried the other major ones but Ubuntu is just no fuss. I can stand up a fresh system in 20 minutes and there is an enormous support base. I just don't have time to be a Linux hipster these days.
The only thing I can see which might win me over one day is Nix.
Same here. Ubuntu user for a loong time. Tried others but Ubuntu is just easy for me.
Yeah. Part of me is annoyed by snaps. But, tbh, having tried fedora and opensuse over the last few years, I don't quite see how they're so much worse than freaking Flatpaks. And at least they come gods damned fully enabled.
I see more manjaro than ubuntu.
Ubuntu had so many years as the "default" that people have some old perfect version of ubuntu that they liked better. Some early version from the gnome2 days, or else people who loved unity.
For my part, the last time I tried it, there were snap and apt versions of so many apps, that when you had an issue it was hard to troubleshoot because there would be two sets of solves. That was enough to get me to bail. I wonder if that's still an issue.
Probably to some degree... But on any other distro, the same is almost certainly true today too. Only it's between... rpm/aur/deb/etc and Flatpaks instead of snap.
Well look at that, no one seems to mention opensuse/Tumbleweed.
Great sign 👍🏻
Fedora also unscathed.
Two of my favorites, if not my absolute favorites.
There are only two distros in the world. Those that people hate and those that no one uses
Ubuntu brings a ton of awkward and shit memories from the course we had on it in secondary school.
Admittedly, Linux Mint is the only distro I have used in a personal capacity.
A question that begs for a hot take. I love it! Manjaro has always made zero sense to me. The power of Arch is in its rolling release cycle and your ability to customize it from the ground up. Both of which you lose when you downloads someone mix of Arch. It always seemed like a flavor for people who want to run Arch but just don't have the ability to read the documentation to actually run it.
I don't like Canonical and Red Hat, so I wouldn't use their distros out of principle. On top of that, I don't like Snaps, and Ubuntu's customizations done to GNOME.
From Fedora, I don't like Calamares. The rest is great.
Manjaro doesn't play nice with either upstream nor downstream and has GTK apps that don't follow GNOME's design guidelines, this last point also applies to Endeavor OS.
Vanilla OS is unusable for me, AB Root is hard, and I can't follow any online guides, tutorials or scripts. But their UX/UI is drool worthy. Blend OS has Waydroid out of the box but it's immutability is hard for me.
Debian is awesome but I don't like it for my work / gaming rig. Old kernel and packages. Best ever for servers.
All Ubuntu derivatives are old for me, so no. But I liked Zorin the best.
Deepin, I'm afraid of Chinese gov backdoors. Most probably paranoia.
I settled on Crystal Linux (arch based), has the nicest UI but they don't provide a GUI for package management, and they have handled their repos irresponsibly. It's more of a hobby distro, but a beautiful one.
Just the Oracle Red Hat clone, because, well, Oracle. Also those distros that disappear spontaneously because they were mainly maintained by one person only.
This. Leave it to Oracle to fork a perfectly core enterprise distro and make it suck.
Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.
You can't install a proxy daemon as a flatpak, but you can install it through Nix
Arch
(I use Arch btw)
For me it's Ubuntu. Whenever I tried it it was buggy and crashing. It kinda feels like Windows of GNU+Linux.
About Manjaro, I like it. I kinda feel sad seeing Manjaro get so much hate. The only thing I disliked was the accidental DDoS of AUR. But so far it's been working relatively well for me. I use Manjaro with Plasma.
And my favorite is Linux Mint. It just works, and it does so reliably. Also the Linux Mint community is really nice.
As such, I donated to Manjaro, Arch, and Linux Mint. Not much, but at least something.
I don't particularly like Arch.
I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).
It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.
Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.
I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)
I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.
Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.
Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.
Noooo. You find -Syyu less intuitive than "upgrade"? How dare you.
I agree with all yoyr points. Arch has its place but is not for me.
You aren't even supposed to double the
yunless you just installed the system or you feel like it's not picking up on updates.TIL.
Absolutely understandable, personally I prefer the AUR since I don't ever need to download and compile the source code anymore, since everything I need got an AUR package.
I also had bad experiences with apt, mostly that their release are too slow/I get stuck on an old release (my raspberry pi's python version is still 3.7, which caused problems since I was using a python 3.8 library). That's probably on me for not knowing how to upgrade my release, but I switched to Arch before learning how to fix this
For the pacman flags, I simply use yay, the AUR wrapper instead,
yaydo a full system upgrade, andyay pythonwill show me a list of packages that have similar names to install. Still not as clear as apt, but at least there's no weird flag letters to remember for most use casesAh, yes... Good ol' library mismatches. Definitely not a point in Debian's favor.
Well, at least for Stable. In Sid, different ^(Toy)^ story.
I think the users are off-putting. Can get very blunt in the forums.
What determines the importance of a distribution?
Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I've been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I've never use them myself.
Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.
Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.
I am very conflicted about Arch. I similarly disliked it for actual use, because it's so unstable. On the other hand, the arch docs are a goldmine.
I think it just depends on what you want to do with your system. Do you like to tinker? Arch (and similar distros) are great. Do you just want things to work mostly out of the box? Use an Ubuntu flavor or an Ubuntu derivative.
Interesting that you feel Arch is opinionated. After using several distros I finally settled on Arch because I felt it was not opinionated compared to e.g. Ubuntu. I have to choose and install every part of the system myself, and I like how that gives me a clean system. I like to use the Awesome window manager, and with other distros I would always end up with a different desktop installed next to Awesome. Can you say how you feel Arch is opinionated?
I feel it is highly opinionated because they only officially support a fairly small amount of packages. They're not particularly more up-to-date than say openSuse Tumbleweed. A Debian netinstall is equally a barebones system I can install exactly what I am looking for, and don't need to fiddle with third party repo's like the AUR. As far as I know, almost every distro will let you do a barebones headless install, then build up your system yourself. Arch is certainly less opinionated than Ubuntu, but that's not a big accomplishment these days.
If I were to desire a highly specific environment where I wanted to exactly manage each program's dependency chain myself, Gentoo seems like a much better tool for the job. For example, Arch officially requires systemD, Gentoo does not. As far as I know Gentoo makes no assumptions on how your system is setup, from preboot to Wayland session.
I could just be out of date, as I use NixOS as my workstation and server OS, using Debian for some older servers I haven't migrated yet. I get the impression from Arch, the few times I have used it, is that its niche is appealing to a particular kind of user, rather than being a good solution to a particular kind of problem. That's not bad, its huge reason why its popular. Other distros do the same thing as Arch, sometimes better sometimes worse, but Arch is selling an aesthetic, rather than a tool.
I never realized how small the number of official Arch packages is compared to Debian (13751 vs 171937 according to wikipedia ). And I see your point about Arch being opinionated. Thanks.
http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/
[Edit] Sorry I've just picked up Sync and the UI has apparently confused me. I was trying to respond to this comment.
https://lemmy.world/comment/2287892
But I guess I messed up.
http
It's a static site with a single page, HTTPS does nothing because the domain name is still exposed.
Ubuntu. Snaps are a buggy mess. I know you can remove them but I like sane defaults. Snap drives me insane. Mint, PopOS, Debian are better choices for a stable distro.
edit: I also don't like Fedora and CentOS. The installers tend to be very buggy for me.
CentOS. We were stuck on an old version at work. The OS is already designed to use old packages for security/stability, so imagine how outdated they are on an old version. It was a nightmare getting new software running on it. That coupled with the other news surrounding CentOS and RHEL, I'm not touching those anymore w a 10 foot pole. I wish it just crumbles and Debian takes over. I have had amazing success with like 20 years on Debian and it just gets better and better.
Not sure you can really blame an OS that is out of support and that you should have upgraded to the new version years prior. I used CentOS in an enterprise environment for close to 10 years and really had no problems, except when we tried to shoehorn new software onto old versions it had no business being on instead of just upgrading.
I remember the upgrade from CentOS 6 to 7. It changed a bunch of stuff including making systemd the default init system. I'm assuming your company just wanted to avoid doing that work? But at the same time most other distros were switching to systemd so you would have had to do that work regardless.
OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)
Also, Manjaro
My only real gripe is their default sudoers config.
Debian. APT sucks, the installer looks like straight out of 1999 and the packages are just wayyy too old. Also apt-autoremove deleted half of my system the 1st time I tried debian...
A minimal and stable distro, kinda expected
Debian is my hometown because back in, I guess 2014?, I had a computer that just sucked. It was like 1GB RAM, I think a single core CPU. Debian was like the only distro that actually installed. Ubuntu, Mint, etc. didn't even finish the installation
Ubuntu because of forced Snaps
SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company's rumored? stance on antisemitism (google banned Jewish holidays)
Fedora for it's update mechanism with the forced reboot
Arch as the necessary evil
I was really surprised to read about the antisemitism allegation. That's a very serious accusation. I've looked into it and it seems that these claims are controversial. First thing to mention is that the accuser said himself that this was about the company SUSE, and not the distribution openSUSE.
The article claims there are emails and other employees' statements as proof, but provides none. The article is also over a year old, so why hasn't this led to any public statements from SUSE or any legal or other actions? Antisemitism is a serious offense in Germany.
Discussions on reddit and hacker news all state that the writer has gone off the rails. When being called out on reddit for deadnaming a trans woman, he plays dumb. I don't think he's dumb. It seems to me like he's transphobic and acting like a troll about it in good old American conservative fashion.
For me, this seriously calls into question any claims he makes about social justice stuff, even if it concerns himself. He apparently views other people's social justice as something to play with, so my gut feeling is that it would be no concern to him to lie or bend the truth about stuff like this in order to achieve something. It's all a game to him in the political arena, not serious life issues.
If I'm wrong, all he has to do is provide the proof he claims there is, even if only anonymized.
If the allegation is just from Bryan Lunduke I'd take it with a pinch of salt. The guy is known for espousing some out-there views so it needs independent corroboration.
Yeah, I've not been able to find any allegations by anyone else, except for his vague mentions. There was also a Jewish person who had worked at SUSE who commented in one thread that they felt nothing less than welcomed.
Same here. I have not heard anything after the initial accusations. The company I am working for is using SLES as a main OS and is switching to another OS without any explanation. So I have no idea if the claims are true or the switch has anything to do with anything.
It just goes to show how an accusation like this sticks to a company's reputation. The reason for your company switching could be totally unrelated, yet your mind still jumps to this. Have you asked why they're switching?
Arch and any arch based distro. It's overused, deb is better and the absolute chads will always be distros like NixOS or Guix System. There is no use for an unstable, beginner-unfriendly, distro where you constantly encounter dependency hell.
Of course I'm just being edgy, every Linux Distro is good for the sole fact of it not being Windows.
Red Hat for obvious reasons. Used to run and recommend CentOS before all the fuckery.
Easily manjaro, so many headaches
I don't like anything Debian based. The package manager always sits at the core of the experience, and it's just a horrible experience. With a bit of manual intervention, you can upgrade an Arch install from 10 years ago. I've never managed to update any Debian based distribution from the previous release. That aside, a lot of what I do relies on newest packages, and having something that's 5 years out of date just isn't for me
I have literally never had any upgrade issues on debian that wasn’t something mentioned in release notes(been using it since debian 7). I am guessing you did a lot of things they tell you specifically not to do on this page:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
Fwiw, I’ve had great results with upgrading Debian derivatives. A machine in my closet has been upgraded from version 8 -> 12 without any major issue. Usually, upgrade problems come from custom or third party software in my experience.
I've had the opposite experience. Updating my apt sources.list and running dist-upgrade always worked for me on Debian (though most of the time I just run unstable which is rolling) but on Arch it seems like if I don't upgrade regularly sometimes I'll get hit with signature key errors because the key database is outdated and then have to go run some other command to update the keys before a pacman -Syu will work. I love both distros, but there's no better way to make your users not give a shit about security than making said security interrupt their workflow. Most of the time I just disable the key check in pacman.conf so that the damn thing will upgrade successfully.
Android. Google doesnt invest anything in AOSP it seems, GrapheneOS is the only really well made Distro.
Androids security model is a joke as every phone is bloated with malware that has full access over everything.
Banking apps need Google, map apps need Google.
There is no split screen in AOSP since forever.
No tools on the lockscreen. I am not talking about crazy ios like tools that are basically a seperate OS, its still a lockscreen. But camera and torch?
So many restrictions. RootlessJamesDSP is a good example of crazy workarounds that still dont work in the end. No FOSS appstore with autoupdates is also a pain.
Does GrapheneOS have microg or similar now? The last time I used it, it didn't have it, and some apps (Signal, I'm looking at you) had a constant notification. I went to CalyxOS, which I like fine, but it's more for the masses (gives up a little privacy for convenience) than GrapheneOS is.
It has sandboxed google play and services
it has something called sandboxed google play services. they claim its more secure and private than microg. also in my experience notifications and location is more reliable with it than microg. also you can disable the constant notification for apps like signal and it still works afaik.
Sorry mate. I love them all! All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well. Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.
Manjaro got me unironically back to windows
update: thanks to archcraft i'm back on the linux train
The one with the most elitist gatekeeping users.
Arch?
arch isn't really elitest though, gatekeeping sure, but the gate is the arch wiki. if that is elitist...
Well, ACTUALLY, they're only being elitist about the kernel, and they're gatekeeping about userspace programs, SO...
Using arch but honestly. I don't "like" any of them. Every distro I've ever used has required more setup and maintenance than I would have liked.
I really just want a system that doesn't bork itself on updates and let's me install whatever software I want. You would think that wouldn't be so impossible to find.
Sounds like you need an LTS.
I tried debian stable a week or two ago. Had about 4 different showstopper bugs in 3 or so days. It doesn't seem to help much from my limited experience.
Huh. Are you running any kind of exotic setup? What kind of bugs were they? Can you be sure they were Debian bugs and not hardware issues?
Yes. I had both actually. Hardware and debian specific bugs, on a clean install from the live iso with barely any packages installed from apt and like 10 flatpaks. I'm a bit exhausted rn to find all the links. But let me find at least the worst one for ya.
This was the most egregious one. essentially. On a fresh install updating was broken. Yeah. It was that bad.
In addition to that there was the amd ftpm stutter. Which isn't necessarily debians fault. But it's still bad.
And I was having screen flickers. Not sure why. I was tired enough of it bugging out that I just gave up on the stable dream and went back to arch.
nixos solves this problem by allowing you to boot the last working system state prior to updates. and as a bonus you can manage all of your computers from a single config in a git repo. bit of a learning curve but it takes most of the annoyance out of linux for me.
I kinda don't want that. I want a system that doesn't break in the first place...
My experience with nix was very short lived. It mostly consisted of me wondering how to install something and people telling me to package it myself for a day of two til I gave up.
updates invariably break things, whatever we do. the safety net of being able to roll back makes taking updates a lot more palatable.
yeah, like I said it has a learning curve so it's not for everyone but it's been a lifesaver for me so I thought I'd point it out.
Indeed. Maybe I'll give it another try if/when arch botches itself again.
The idea of a reproducible system is honestly great.
Well, scrolling through every comment, it looks like very few people hate Fedora. I've always been using Debian and Debian based distros but recently moved to Fedora, and I'm not surprised people like it.
Fedora is great! It ended my distro-hopping.
I still hop around, but I always come back to Fedora. It just works. Well, once you enable parallel downloads on DNF it just works.
Thank you. Forgot about that!
Gentoo. I just found it a pain, from spending forever figuring why nothing would work only to realise I hadn't enabled some kernel module for my SSD to updates taking forever and completely annihilating my battery if on battery power, it just felt like more work than it was worth.
Well, Ubuntu. I've been skeptical of it from the beginning, but I did use it on and off in the 00's. Canonical has since gone out of their way to make sure I won't install their shit on my computers.
Recent developments have also somewhat soured me on Fedora.
Ubuntu. Pretty sure you already have an idea why. Lol.
OpenSUSE. I've always had issues trying to use it, from zypper to updates to bootloops. It's also sluggish compared to other distros (yes, same DEs usually) on my laptop. I've tried at least 3x trying to get why a lot of people love it. It's just not for me.
I've never tried Manjaro yet, but coming from Arch and EOS I don't think I ever will.
I've never had a good experience with an arch based distro. I understand that's kind of the goal, and it's great if you want to use your computer to set up arch, but I want to use my computer for other things.
Endeavor, Arch, Manjaro et al.
I’ve used arch for the past 10 years or so as my primary OS, and it only took 7 or 8 of those years to get the OS set up.
/s in all seriousness, I kind of get what you’re saying. But I don’t think that having a bad experience is the goal at all though. I think the goal is to provide an OS that lets users decide on exactly what collection of packages they want on their system, and to provide packages that are up to date and unmodified from their upstream.
Setting up your system additively comes with a cost, though. It’s way less convenient than just installing something that someone else has configured.
To me personally, I think the one-time upfront cost of setting up arch is less burdensome than dealing with configuration files that have been moved to non-default locations (transmission-daemon on Debian-based distros is one example), packages being seriously out of date and thus missing new features and bug fixes (neovim), and dealing with cleaning up packages if you prefer to use non-default software and don’t want a ton of clutter.
Definitely valid to prefer a preconfigured system, I just think it’s a misrepresentation to say that the point of arch is to be difficult, or that configuration takes a ton of time for users of arch. Maybe learning to use arch takes longer, but learning to use arch is just learning to use Linux, so it’s hard for me to see that as a bad thing. And it doesn’t take that long to learn, I was more productive in arch after a couple days than I’ve ever been on *buntu, Debian or Mint.
Every distribution offers different things. I like debian sid for the simplicity and general software availability, but APT is something i still consider a bit clunky. I like arch because of its barebones philosophy - arch wiki helped me a lot learn about linux. I like gentoo - the wiki is awesome and portage is a great package manager. It was the first time I saw how the linux kernel gets compiled. It makes you appreciate all the work the devs do. I now read the title and you ask for the opposite. But someone might find these bad, so i will post it as-is
Manjaro because in the few months I've used it, it happened twice that my system didn't boot anymore after I updated it. The second time I didn't reinstall but installed EndeavourOS instead. Been using that for like 2 years and never had that issue again.
For beginners, and rolling distribution. A beginner should start with something that doesn't break while you don't understand if it's your or the shiny new program that broke the system. But then, I have been using Debian for more that 20 years. For me it's a tool, not a game.
Fedora, mostly because of the decisions they make are mostly for corporate areas;
The kernel selection they make, packages and etc;
Sometimes need to deal with kernels they select that don't work well with my hardware
Fuck Ubuntu. Buggy as shit updates, forced snaps, always had problems whenever I was forced to use it, which I've never had again when I switched to Debian.
Debian >>>>>> Ubuntu
I'm noy going to say I dislike it, but I don't see the point in a source based distro like Gentoo anymore.
I learned a lot from using Gentoo when I was just getting into Linux 20 years ago, but now looking back on it, why would I want to juggle with everyones build systems and compiler flags? Especially now hardware is so homogenous.
That's no longer the point of Gentoo either.
You can pry gentoo from my cold dead hands. The ability to do things like mix LTS and git HEAD packages at will is yuuge, as well as the dynamic dependency graph based on enabled features. Some newer distros like Nix and Guix come close, and even offer the ability to skip compilation via their package caches, but they have a number of pain points in my personal experience.
I agree. Nix and Guix follow a very unorthodox approach to managing a unix-like system, and while they make it work for most things, there's always those few issues that linger around.
I really like their approach. But Gentoo's approach is much more "just works" and tries to be unorthodox only where it is necessary or highly beneficial.
Ubuntu. Package organization is annoying, versions are out of date, managing multiple versions isn't consistent, and distro upgrades always have unintended consequences. Often ones that aren't easy to figure out. Their reputation for being beginner friendly should have died around a decade ago.
Manjaro is the one that has caused me the most pain and suffering.
The only one that really pissed me off was a distro called biglinux. It's arch based and very popular in Brazil. It's actually very stable. Everything works great. It's got some nice features.
Butttt, it uses latte dock or panel (kde). They have built in presets for how to arrange the panels and what not. It's nice, however, I was trying to move some panels around from the base options and broke kde. I wasn't doing anything more than changing GUI settings and the whole desktop broke. I seriously don't understand.
Ubuntu: it's not bad, I just don't like canonical
Manjaro: it starts as arch but more user friendly (by being preconfigured), until it inevitably breaks (being arch) and you end up with a regular arch that you don't know how is configured
Elementary os: it's too elementary os
All those con distros that are just a bunch of reskinned free stuff ask you money for that. Like zorin os
Having used both Manjaro and Arch, Manjaro breaking has nothing to do with Arch. Arch is far more stable.
Debian, as its so MANUAL. Upgrading by manually updating x times and then literally changing the repos manually in the sources list? Wtf? Without any documentation or automation??
QubesOS, as it probably doesnt run on any real hardware. Didnt get beyond a blackscreen, and also AMD consumer GPUs dont support accelerated VMs making it useless.
Ubuntu because its annoying, but unsnap fixes a lot and its actually okay, still outdated Kernel als a bit weird.
KDE Neon because I cant tolerate its not a workstation distro but want it to be one
Linux Mint. Its old, and always had weird crashes for me. Its kinda nice and easy, kinda weird and complicated to do certain things. Some packages dont run as its not Ubuntu. Would always choose any KDE Distro that is newer.
Anything even tangential to Red Hat.
RPM's are hot garbage when it comes to packaging formats.
Having said that, I use Fedora at work and Ubuntu at home.
Whyfore the hate for .rpms? I've never had an issue on Fedora in a decade.
Issues with building RPM's. There's no specification for what an RPM is (unlike say deb).
Well the specification is "whatever rpmbuild version x.y.z does" and whatever other tangential packages happen to be installed on the build system.
Try building an RPM for CentOS 6 on a RockyLinux 8 system, or building for both of those on Fedora.
You can do it, but it's real ball ache, and you have to jump through a lot of hoops.
Compare to building a deb for any version of Debian/Ubuntu on Fedora/RHEL it's a doddle and predictable.
I was using Manjaro until the day my install started giving me problems.with dependencies and duplicated packages (?), so I went with Fedora and it's been smooth so far.
Any 10 or more year support distro because they increase the range of versions that stuff has to work with by 5 extra years and any knowledge I gain about those ancient versions will never be useful again. They also delay a lot of new features in protocols, file formats,... where a large majority of clients needs support before the next phase of introducing a feature can be started.
EndeaverOS. On two systems it installed but lots of error popup windows right from desktop launch. just seemed Janky compared to plain Arch or any other popular distro.
Perhaps look at what they are saying? I daily drive Endeavour and have no problems with it
Wow. Totally opposite experience.
@vettnerk All linux Distros should take example from TROMJARO.