What's your current favorite distro that isn't Arch, Debian or Fedora?

const_void@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 115 points –

I'm wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

147

NixOS for me. It's a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there's also an entire distro based on it.

Yeah I've gotten into Nix recently and it's slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I'm on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I've got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It's very up to date, yet it's somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven't had any problems finding software, yet it's not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.

I've been using Opensuse since it was called SuSE. Tumbleweed is great.

Can it still be a favourite if I haven't touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.

Same! I'm on Ubuntu and Pop these days but I fondly remember my old distcc build cluster...

Portage is still far and away my favorite package manager.

Hahaha same on the distcc cluster. It was a rare proud moment for me many years ago. I rememeber when I got the cross compiling working it felt like magic. Good times.

OpenSUSe. Tumbleweed as a rolling bistro is amazingly stable, yast is nice, and it all just works great. Leap for the servers, and things are solid.

Same. Tumbleweed here. All the benefits of the rpm ecosystem but with less hassle and more updates

OpenSUSE for me too.

I also switched family & friends to Thimbleweed (since a bit too snappy Ubuntu) & it's been great.

I should think so too. A Thimbleweed sounds an excellent plant for an Evil_Shrubbery.

My evil plans have been discovered!!

Regardless the evil plant army must grow. Rolling thimbleweeds are usually our scouts and assassins (rarely kamikaze when on fire, looks cool tho).

What I'm saying is that you better be on the lookout, maybe hide if you see a thimbleweed with a gun or knife.

I'm enjoying what Nix does. That said, the learning curve is very steep, and the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.

The repositories for both nixpkgs and nixos are absolutely colossal, which is a huge plus, but their configurations are not listed on the same page, and it can lead to a lot of confusion. Unlike Arch's PKGBUILD, which practically tell the build system exactly what to do, you'll have to learn the structure of current configuration files, or the more recent flake system, to setup things how you like.

Maybe I'll wait until things aren't a mess

Its actually not that bad. A few google searches on how to setup config files and going to https://search.nixos.org/packages to show you what info to fill in in the NixOS configuration is all you do.

And, even more importantly, https://search.nixos.org/options to figure out which options to set. Always search for options first. "Installing" something by just adding the package to systemPackages etc. is usually the correct thing to do for end-user applications but not for "system things" such as services.

Do you mean http://search.nixos.org/packages Because that has config info on the page of the listed package. Unless I am misunderstanding what you meant by their configurations?

That's technically correct. The "NixOS configuration" tab is sufficient to just install something, however out of ever package I've personally used, none of them have listed the available options there. For example: this theme, and what the extra options are

the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.

So many excellent projects are crippled by having little but reference docs and scant, over abstracted descriptions.

Damn Small Linux was a favorite a long time ago.

PopOS! Is it for me these days.

I've started to dip my toes into NixOS. I really love their design concepts.

Alpine.

I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.

So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.

I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!

It will bite you after a while. I remember using alpine in a docker image many years ago and running a python program that needed some modules installed, where one of them required compiling c code. Naturally that didnt work on alpine since its using its own c library. So couldn't run the python app at all on alpine.

I remember having all of these libseat and elogind errors when I tried to use anything wayland-related: Sway, Hyprland, even KDE. Since then I switched back to Arch because I felt like everything Just Worked™️ there

Gentoo. It's amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.

There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.

+1 for Gentoo - Portage can be fun in a weird way. I'm more of a "just work" type of person though, so I've stuck to Arch, but the time I had with Gentoo was pretty great and the new binary package format might bring me back. I do have a 7950X nowadays so I wonder if that'd fly through Gentoo on bare metal.

I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.

Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.

I use the bin kernel. I don't change anything that is kernel level, so the default is fine. It cuts down on updates and install by a lot, but more important is that it's stable. I personally love gentoo, it's my favorite and I've tried basically everything.

dist-kernel for gentoo is even better. Kernel from source but the distribution give a config that works for most. Then if you still want to change something you can patch it. It is wonderful.

If we allow derivatives, I'd say SteamOS despite being Arch. It's putting Linux in non-technical people's literal hands and it's not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It's almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.

Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It's been a really long time since we've last seen a fundamentally different distro that's got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they're still very package oriented. We've been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It's incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they're atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.

I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.

Read in an New Zealand accent this is classic Sales.

I'm enjoying OpenSuse Tumbleweed loving rolling release and stability

PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.

Yep, for me the most exciting moment in 2024 will be Cosmic being released and partly also the release of KDE 6, even though that probably won't be a big deal. Just nice to use qt 6 I guess. It doesn't have any new features really.

DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.

I was soo surprised when I first tried DietPi, it's so god damn easy and smooth to use. Big kudos to the devs for that project!

Custom North Korean linux. Preinstalled missile tracking software.

NSA would like to know your location. Enable?

You would think Pyongyang but really chilling on a rocking chair in McMullen, Alabama. Population: 10.

Bazzite. It's based on Fedora uBlue so it's technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don't use dnf or yum to install stuff, you'd use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it's effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you'd get in a typical rolling release.

NixOS is not based on any other distro because it has its own package manager which is better than all the other distros'

Yes, that package manager will surely be the best one and not just be another one in the zoo.

The whole system is built using it, so every time your system will be the same when building from the same configuration. Even if you such to another computer, you will download locked versions of all packages and get the exact same system

In Ubuntu installing and removing a package doesn't even guarantee it's cleaned up

QubesOS. When you need security and don't need to play games, this is objectively the best distro.

I thought you meant using any distro other than Qubes was "playing games." Then I remembered actual computer games exist.

I really enjoyed Solus Linux but the last I checked, it didn't support something I need for my job. So, I do use Arch, but was completely smitten and impressed with their impressive boot speed. From pushing POST screen to desktop, it was something like 5 seconds. With Arch, after POST, maybe 10-15 seconds.

With their recent drama, it's been a bit hard to see them struggle. They just did release a fresh build I read online, so they are still alive. :)

https://getsol.us/

Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed

Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it's one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that's for a good reason. It's installer isn't that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora's installer any day. ( I haven't tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )

Artix is well... arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.

OpenSUSE Leap, has been a solid 7 year run, with flawless updates. And no graphics issues because nVidia hosts their own repo for the gpu drivers.

OpenSUSE, it's what I'd be using if Fedora didn't exist.

Very intrigued by OpenSUSE as an alternative to Fedora. How do you think the two stack up against each other? Is it a noticeable leap switching between them?

I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .

The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that's very intense, let's say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials

Gentoo for the documentation, but for a modern comp with bad bootloader implementation, Fedora's anaconda system for the secure boot shim is irreplaceable and my daily. I won't consider any distro without a shim and clear guide for UEFI secure boot keys. In that vain, Gentoo is the only doc source I know of that walks the user through booting into UEFI directly with Keytool.

I really enjoy ZorinOS! I've been using ZorinOS 16.3 and am awaiting the upgrade to 17 through their tool. It's been great for a PC that has an Nvidia GTX1060 that I have hooked up to my TV as a twitch/YouTube/Netflix box. I chose Zorin because they claimed to get the Nvidia drivers installed correctly "out of the box", and they delivered!

Glad it worked well for you. Didn't work well for me with my 2070 super. Was immediately broken and refused to acknowledge my second monitor. Linux Mint worked perfectly, so I just want to throw that out there for anyone with the same gpu

Man that sucks that it didn't work for you out of the box. I had tried Solus and Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 and I couldn't get the screen to resize past the default 800x600 or something like that and the refresh rate was stuck at a low number. Zorin did it all straight away. I hope more distros start getting the whole picture right soon. Glad you found something that worked for you too!

I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).

I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it's not there.

Alpine was the most interesting for me. It goes against the tendency of complicating the systems. I have to use Arch because everything can work on that distro.

On the laptop I got less than a week ago for college, I've been having fun using Mx with KDE. It's been pretty good so far on my galaxy book.

MX Linux only because I have it on some very old 32 bit laptops and it supports 32 bit. I don't really know why I keep those laptops around but they are functional.

I'm currently using Arch (btw), but I have been hearing the distant call of NixOS lately...

I miss slackware.

It still kinda exists, but really has become a ghost of its former self.

Why do you say that? Everyone always talks about how old-school it is and how it doesn't really change.

Nobara, as a gamer first it's the perfect distro for me

i wish i had an amd gpu... until then i'm stuck with mint. loved nobara, but it's a mess with nvidia.

Works perfectly with my 2080ti.

3060ti here, and two critical issues. #1: parts of the UI like taskbar, title bars of random windows and entire windows behind those become unresponsive or black after about 1 hour of use, needs a reboot. #2: suspend pc -> monitor (oled tv) goes to sleep -> no signal when i resume. needs forced reboot. same thing if it automatically suspends. happens on both, official and kde versions, and no amount of googling has helped. i suspect something may be wrong with my card, because even windows had intermittent issues when resuming from sleep, and tons of crashes on nearly all games. curiously though, mint has none of these issues?!

Tiny Core OS, because I want a super light distro to run from memory when trying to access computers where the data is still there but something went sour with the OS

not sure if it really counts but I like Universal Blue, specifically using their silverblue-framework image because it already has all the drivers and stuff set up for my Framework laptop

Guix since 2 years now. I use it to provision all my systems and having a unified configuration in Guile is just a joy

I am using void at the moment, pretty stable even tho it is rolling release

I'm really happy with Manjaro. I thought it would be a detour from Debian on my laptop, but I've been running it for like 2 years now.

Kubuntu

See, and raise KDE Neon.

Ubuntu LTS base, but with up-to-date upstream KDE releases rather than the (typically) relatively ancient releases that Kubuntu has.

Really is the best of both worlds.

:Nervously raised hand: SteamOS 3.5...?

MX Linux. It's exactly how I'd set up Debian if I wasn't too lazy. Although, I've gone back to Debian after Bookwarm was released. I love it but miss MX

Favorite? No. Most acceptable: NixOS.

The worst documentation of a linux distro I have ever encountered, but the declarative model has convinced me I don't want something else. Now I'm just waiting for other distros to pop up that are declarative as well. (Guix? No thanks, I'm not a fan of endless parentheses)

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LMDE, MX, Ubuntu etc are based on Debian. Mint is based on Ubuntu, so Debian. Chimera/Endeavour are based on Arch, etc.

In the linux world, you have a linux kernel, systemd or init, a bunch of gnu utils, a window system like X or Wayland, whatever DE you want (Xfce, gnome, kde, name it) and a packaging system (apt, yum, pacman), but for me, it's all the same.

If you want something different, try a BSD distro then? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GhostBSD, etc

Void - https://voidlinux.org/

Was scrolling through to see if anyone had mentioned void. I use Fedora these days but Void is great because of how easy it is to contribute to with its GitHub-based package management workflow - anyone can update a package or introduce a new one, it just needs to be approved. It doesn't get any easier than that

Solus as the Almighty Todd says "it just works" And that comes from someone which always has at least one problem, that problem being gaming.

It aint solved mind you but it works marginable better on it.

Example, anno 1404, no matter what distro or silly protondb config, or if I use a new steam profile or fresh distro , works.1 out of 10 times.

But Solus, it just works, no hoop jumping needed

I've become a fan of KDE Neon. It's based on Ubuntu LTS but with the the most up-to-date KDE release.

I love using Alpine Linux on my server. Super light and quick to start up.

CrunchBang++, BunsenLabs, Bodhi, Antix and Peppermint.

Been using Xubuntu 23.10 recently, but I'm kind of a distro hopper. I need ROCm and some other special (proprietary, ehh) tools that require RHEL, SLE, or some Ubuntu flavor. I also like having a working out-of-the-box configuration. I've used openSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux before, might try it again but it's a little bit complicated to me.

Ublue although it's kinda still fedora, otherwise alpine even though I don't really use it.

Kali Linux! Just too useful, though there can still be some fixing around.

Guix is imho beyond normal distros, and I'm never going back to Manjaro or any of the normal distros.

I've been enjoying Mint personally for my laptop. I've tried Ubuntu but I've had issues with the speakers :/

1 more...

Manjaro KDE for me - it's not Arch per se, otherwise Ubuntu would also be eliminated for being a derivative of Debian...

Puppy Linux.

Puppy with what underlying distro though?

Puppy has their own but can be based on a lot of the main distros. I've used it to recover data from many a computer.

Its... Debian. 😆

Are there even other (good) distros that aren't based on debian, fedora, or arch?

Considering pretty much all of the best distros are based on those three, probably the best you'll get is trying BSD. I can't think of a single distro not based on one.of the three that is still maintained.

I've said this before, and I see that I have to say it again, Zorin OS.