What Linux distro surprised you the most?

Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.
Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don't want or don't know how to compile stuff from source.
- Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.
  
  Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.
- I heard all the stability concerns when I first started using it. That was in 2008. It's been my main distro ever since. Apart from 2 or 3 major changes over the years (eg, the infamous /usr/lib migration) it's been rock solid and very up to date
- I second this - for some reasons, my (almost) first distro was arch (first was a fedora for 3-4 days). Arch is great if you know what you are doing, you can have a lean mean compute machine
- Yeah I feel like even if arch is a little easier to break than other distributions, it's also way way easier to fix which basically cancels it out.

Puppy linux seems like its still one of the more unique Linuxes around. Its my go-to when I need to do a recovery for family/friends and seems to almost work with any system. If it can, it will load its entire system into the RAM and go to town. If it cant. then it will act like a live disk...but you can "save" the OS multiple different places. Its a fun little OS.
- If you like Puppy, also have a look at Easyos. Created by Puppy's orginal creator.
  
  Ha. Was about to say the same. Running EasyOS on one ofy extra partitions for testing, and I end up using it as semi-daily driver often due to how light it is. Great on a USB key, too.
  It is also somewhat unique, on top of other Puppy distros.
- I ran Puppy as a daily driver for about a year before I finally got a new hard drive for that computer. It's surprisingly robust for such a tiny footprint.

Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.
- Yeah, I tried a variety of Debian based distros to start my Linux journey and but eventually just settled on Debian stable and haven't looked back.

Alpine It just gives me the system and go "do whatever" It's snappy, decluttered, doesn't get in the way It doesn't have a bazillion systemd components, it's as barebones as it can be
- @AkatsukiLevi @Sunny Alpine's installer is simplest indeed, and it just works. very similar to OpenBSD
  
  And due to just being a bunch of scripts, if shit goes wrong you just know why it went wrong

OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I'd used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.
- Yeah, I'd agree with that. Also zypper has fun arguments, like zypper up
- Tumbleweed surprised me with how it receives constant, up-to-the-minute updates yet somehow doesn't ever seem to break.
  It also surprised me with how much I like KDE. I had used it way back in the day when it was a bit complicated looking and ugly. These days Plasma makes the whole experience nice.
- My weapon of choice

The entire Ublue project is freaking amazing. But Bazzite finished off my distrohopping. I work by day and game by night. Bazzite has eliminated all maintenance tasks for me. It just works. It makes things so damn easy. Also, the Ublue CI/CD builds is crazy cool. It allows them to focus on the important stuff, while all the chores are done automatically. Truly amazing stuff. I also heard lots of praise about the dev oriented spin: Bluefin.
- I started on Bazzite as my first real Linux desktop. After a while I rebased to Aurora (Bluefin but KDE instead of Gnome) and I really liked it. I ended up rebasing back to Bazzite for a while.
  My only issue is around a very specific piece of software that has issues with Wayland. That's why all the rebasing.
  Being able to rebase so easily like that is so freaking cool.
  
  Which software ?
- seconded for bazzite. I just came from cachyos (arch based) because it was missing a wayland component to make vr work. I had bazzite on my steam deck already so I figured I'd give it a shot on my pc. everything I wanna do works with minimal to no tinkering required, and I'm glad to know if I break something I can easily roll back in grub.
- I've tried bluefin and it felt like when you turn on someone's old computer they forgot to erase before giving to you, there was just so much useless junk installed. Are the other Ublue distributions a little more normal?
  
  Ublue are based off of Kinoite. If you want something less "bloated", try that. You can even rebase from Bluefin to that, I believe.
  Keep in mind there are two versions of Bluefin/Aurora. Regular, and "-dx" which is more developer focused with more developer tools.

Endeavour OS
I've tried all the usual distros many times over the years but never an arch based distro until last year. I gave arch a go first and it was great but then tried endeavouros and it came with the fixes I needed and was more instantly good from the first boot. The AUR and arch wiki stuff just makes the whole experience most (sry to use this term) Windows like in terms of fixes and support.
- EndeavourOS is the first Linux distro I tried a little over a year ago.
  I have never felt the need to even try anything else. If it ain't broke....

openSUSE Tumbleweed, it's jusr a solid distro altogether
- I've run OpenSuSE and then Tumbleweed for a while (as in years, now) on a variety of devices (including nVidia) with no real issues. It's been by far the most solid of the distributions I've used since I started using Linux in the '90s.
- Have to agree first time whenever I had to run steam it would cause a memory leak and slow the system down ,now I have reinstalled it two more times first reinstall steam games not working and can't create extra swap ,second reinstall swap worked great ,but steam games still didn't and then it was FUCKING 32 BIT PACKAGES took like 3 hours to figure that out ,but now it is my dailydriver
- I know SUSE's been around since forever, but how is package availability?

Void. Boots in 2 seconds to Xfce if not for udev. Maybe i'll try mdev.

Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system... Then it crash and bricked the install... 3 times.
Anyways I'm on Mint now.
- Endeavour os was the great manjaro replacement for mw
  
  Endeavour is Arch and Manjaro isn't. Endeavour is not a replacement for Manjaro for that reason alone.
  "I installed distro B over distro A" does not mean "distro B is a replacement for distro A". They can be wildly different and it could be very misleading for someone looking for something that's actually similar to distro A.
- How did it crash?
  Manjaro is a very opinionated distro and has a certain way of doing things. There's also a lot of bad advice online that tells you to do exactly the things that will break it. Doing things like using an experimental kernel, switching to unstable branch, using Arch repos, installing graphical drivers outside its driver tool, installing critical packages from AUR, using Arch-specific config commands and so on.
  Manjaro will work perfectly if you let it work the way it was designed, but lots of people don't. Those people would be much better off using Arch or one of the Arch derivates that stay true to the way Arch does things.
  Messing with Manjaro then complaining "it broke" is like using a toothbrush to slice bread and complaining it's not working. Well, it's the wrong tool for what you wanted, of course it won't work.
  
  For me it was installing apps from the AUR, like Intel Compute. Had dependency issues and errors every time other packages updated and when I tried to fix it, other modules would uninstall, and break my DE, or put my machine in an unrecoverable state.
  It’s not as bad as that time my btfs file system broke randomly in Fedora, since I was able to recover my data. But it always felt like an endless battle with the distro to keep it going. Which is why I moved to mint.
  I know it was a Manjaro issue since when I attempted to move to EndevorOS the issues were gone… though I dont like it as a distro (I.e. why isn’t a package manager gui installed by default)

Any distro with KDE, when I was on Windows I thought Linux always looked like Gnome.
- Gnome is a harmless though. It's so benign it's reliable.
  KDE is glossy and featureful and sometimes my CPU fan doesn't go down for whole hours because baloo is scanning my entire filesystem (including various conda installations) despite me repeatedly asking it not to.
  
  Baloo only takes up a lot of CPU if you have it set to index file contents and hidden files. Shut those off, let it index completely, and it won't happen ever again.
  You might be able to keep "hidden files" on, but indexing file contents always bogged my laptop down.
  
  I think it depends on how you use the OS, Gnome is great until you have a bunch of outdated extensions that break stuff. My impression is that KDE is better for the "advanced" use case and gnome is better for the "default". I tried gnome recently and I found it very pleasant and easy to use but I prefer KDE since it has more customization.

So many distributions impressed me, but I think gentoo, nixos, Guix and Alpine impressed me most. Maybe Zorin with its beautiful design for newcomers.
If I had to pick one, it may be Alpine. The idea of having a fully usable OS with so little is really impressive. It even has a fully functional build system similar to Arch's ABS (on which the AUR is based)
Gentoo, nixos and Guix are really impressive and make computing a pleasant activity.
- my servers run alpine! it's incredibly stable even for hobbiest use
  
  Oh wow that's awesome! With containers or on bare metal?
- I have fond memories of doing Stage 1 gentoo installs. Not that I did them often, but what a great learning process.

I installed Pop in a VM (I use Debian usually) and was surprised how usable it was sans-graphical acceleration. Ubuntu is pretty much unusable these days in a VM - it can literally sometimes take 30 seconds for a button press to register where it works instantly in VM Pop or Fedora.

Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.
I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn't found this distro.
Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn't been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW'ed me...
- I'm a bazzite user coming from silverblue, Jorge and the team have really done a great job when you think how daunting silverblue can be at first but how accessible the I ublue projects are.
  But I'll add another point to Garruda because I completely miss judged it. Initially thought yup another edgy gamerz distro but their tools are awesome particularly the btrfs manager.

voidlinux: gave me much better battery life - I assume because it starts as a minimal system and one adds only the essentials to do the job - compared to the soup-to-nuts distros that pile everything in so that newbies are acccomodated. Of course, the voidlinux approach needs more linux skills - but it's not that hard and the doco is great.
Also, I love the back to basics runit init system and runsv service runner (I'm old so I like that stuff) and the ultra fast xbps packaging system.
- Been curious to try. How is your RAM usage on it? Like that it uses runit. Like my systems to be minimalistic and with little bloat.

Bending the question a little but my second "first impression" of Arch's "simplicity" surprised me the most.
I was running Gentoo for a while before deciding to move back, and I was surprised that somehow I had
saved space
gotten faster at doing new things (...)
didn't lose any boot speed or anything like that
Granted, I had jumped on Gentoo because of misconceptions (speed, ricing, the idea that I needed USE flags), but going back, I saw things more clearly:
the AUR being basically a shell script download + 300 MB of base-devel was simpler and more space-efficient than /var/db/repos (IIRC -- since the portage and guru ebuilds were all held locally anyway after syncing, an on-demand AUR saved space).
the simple automatic build file audits on Arch felt more clean to me. I like checking my build files; had to make a script for the guru ebuild equivalent (but maybe there's a portage arg i missed somewhere -- wouldn't be the first time)
Arch repos separating parts of packages in case you don't need some part (like splitting some font into its languages, or splitting a package into x and x-doc and x-perl) was almost a simple USE flag-ish thing already
/etc/makepkg.conf was Gentoo's make.conf. And its build flags looked similar to the CFLAGS I manually set up anyway.
My boot time (btrfs inside LUKS with encrypted /boot) was the same with systemd vs. openrc
I realized I liked systemd (because of the completeness of my systemctl muscle memory, like with systemctl status and journalctl, or managing systemd-logind instead of using seatd and friends).
Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it's when I realized why Arch was "simple." Even me sorely missing /etc/portage/patches was quelled by paru -S <pkg> --fm vim --savechanges.
And Arch traveling at the speed of simplicity even quantifiably helped: Had to download aur/teams the other day with nine-minute warning.
¯(ツ)_/¯
- Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it's when I realized why Arch was "simple."
  That's funny. I switched from Slackware to Gentoo in 2003 because it was simpler.
  
  Yeah, it's pretty funny how distros just passed each other by like that. Back then it was Debian that was regarded as the hyper-poweruser distro:
  The reason I havn't used Debian is because I can't install it. "This guy is totally clueless" you might think. My only response is that I'm writing this on a Gentoo box that I have installed myself.
  And then now there are plenty of people reading this thread who liked Windows 7. As time passed, their grade on the ease-of-use of A passed the don't-get-in-my-way of B, and a load of Windows 10ers jumped ship to Linus & Friends, the last place their Windows 7 selves would have expected to go. Always a reminder that the end of history isn't now.
- I just wish more distros made their terminal prompt and updater look as good as Gentoo's, it's weirdly the one thing I miss most about messing around with it

Steam OS 3 from Steam Deck. It's based on Archlinux, but system is write protected by default. And the Gaming mode is surprisingly good. And that the Desktop mode is just Arch+KDE.

NixOS. Not in a good way. I love the idea of configuring your entire system with a configuration file. However, on my laptop I couldn't get the KDE live boot image to boot into the GUI. So, I tried the gnome live image, successfully, and used it to install KDE. I thought that I was in the clear but then sddm wasn't working. I had to disable it to get nixos to boot into KDE.
I mean, I fixed it. But, with an intel APU from 2014, I haven't had any problems with this laptop running Arch, Debian, Linux mint, or Fedora.
- I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.
  The lang is just rough for me for some reason. I use it as glorified pigs.txt atm instead of my single source of truth for my system.
  
  I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.
  Go is a simple and elegant imperative language (that does come with its downsides); Nix the DSL is a functional language which requires a different way of thinking. Systems usually are operated imperatively, so it's normal that you'd find it easier.
  It's not an easy language at all and one might ask if another one wouldn't do the job better, which is what Guix System kind of explores, but its (nix) design goals make a lot of sense.

Many have surprised me for different reasons.
The most recent that did is Alpine. I decided for some reason to install it for regular desktop use on an RPI400.
First surprise, the ISO was so small. Second surprise, everything installed so fast when I used the install scripts. Third surprise was the up-to-date repos. The final surprise was the community: it handled noob questions and complicated questions so well, walked users through click by click and one command at a time. Awesome and totally an acceptable option for a desktop which is why I immediately installed it on my main laptop and used it for a number of months.
- +1 for Alpine. I had my reservations due to their mistrust for glibc which rattled my GNU sensibilities, but musl is rock steady and all my apps feel stable and hackable.

Gentoo's USE flags. <3

Void.
It all started by curiosity: "let's try this no-where distros for the lulz"
Then it ended up to be the distro I am using everywhere.
It's stable and quite on the "bleeding edge" in term of software versions...
And damn it's fast son!

Guix System. The way that this distro keeps track of changes of the distro itself. The concept of having a store where everything you build is stored there with write protection. The fact that you can configure not only the system but every home environment to every detail but without having to deal with various configuration files that you keep track of it.
The fact that all builds are bit by bit reproducible. The extensibility you have in your system.
It's the first distro I feel that nothing in your own OS instance is tied to any distro decisions.
The fact that you can have multiple versions of the same library without breaking the system.
It has a lot of things that I never thought it could be possible with a distro without going crazy about creating a very messy configuration.
- I love it, but the configuration is messy. Many packages are out of date, but the Scheme syntax makes it easy to update them and build them on your system.
  Problem is, getting these updates merged with the upstream never happens generally speaking (I have several open patches), so you end up having two working trees in your local Guix repo, and heaven forbid you run guix pull on the wrong branch.
  
  I come from Debian stable so...
  I'm currently ending the Guix manual. I want to add freetube and N64recompiled packages. Didn't know it's difficult to get patches or packages update to mainstream.
  It's a bit funny that the records that Guix uses are not the baseline records of the Guile api but modified ones. And the documentation in some low-level regards is scarce.
  But using Guix opens up endless options and more importantly it helps you manage and learn how to setup operating systems.

Arch Linux, they have the aur and it has every softwares I ever wanted for my computing needs that isn't easily obtainable on other distros, on Arch Linux I don't have to rely on flatpaks, Ubuntu store or appimages

LFS: Not being so complicated actually. Arch: That a fully fletched OS install can be done in less than 10 minutes.
- Isn't maintaining LFS a pain for the long run?
  
  It is. Especially when you need the night to compile FF and it constantly fails. But I learned a lot.
- LFS isn't a distro.
  
  Then let's call my install 30p87OS, that was made from scratch. Now it's a distro.

Slackware. Turns out dependency resolution isn't really an issue at all.
The package manager doesn't need to do it cause it's done by the distro's maintainer.
Also, how easy it was to add FlatPak support.

Arch Linux. Many people said it is unstable and hard to setup. It turns out very stable as long as I update it frequently and AUR makes installing software easier. Even easier than ppa-based ubuntu as it will destroy your dependency if you are not careful. Lol.
- Isn't installing from the AUR equivalent to installing from a PPA, in terms of security and trust?
  
  Almost. But with one key difference. PPAs are precompiled binaries where you cannot inspect the source - you have to trust the maintainer of the PPA. AUR is a repository of source packages which you can download and inspect yourself (or hope others have done this). This makes AUR more community focused than PPAs I feel. AUR is also a central repo managed by people that dont own the vast majority of the packages hosted on it and where packages can be taken down if found malicious. PPAs are lots of separate repositories all managed by different people that generally maintain all the packages for their PPA.
  Though in both cases anyone can upload anything to them, so they are not 100% trustworthy. But I do think the way AUR works puts them ahead of PPAs.
  
  There no security and trust when taking about 3rd-party repos.. There can be anything in there. Neither the AUR nor PPAs come with any guarantees.

Void Linux, very clean and fast on old hardware.

I was surprised, in a bad way, at how difficult it is to get any VNC running. I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and base Debian, but couldn't get any VNC working. The closest I got was with Debian, but it gave me a different desktop than what was coming out the video port to my monitor. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had better luck with anything.
- x11vnc works a dream once you have a systemd service running it on boot, but that rules Wayland out.
  You may be able to get similar results by explicitly instructing the others to share display :0, otherwise they default to starting new sessions.
  
  I can't remember if I have Wayland on my Debian installation with XFCE. I installed it several months ago, so I will check.
  
  X11vnc works like a dream on X11, couldnt agree more.
  There is wayvnc for Wayland supposedly to solve the same problem, but I havent tried it myself yet
- Use Remmina on the client and then install anything that opens and listens to VNC ports. For example TightVNC or RealVNC.
  Just even a small sys admin tip for Android phones
  For VNC - AVNC
  For SSH - ConnectBot

Spiral Linux. It's like Endeavor, but it sets up Debian with sane defaults for people who want a GUI installer experience.
I liked that it basically felt like any other distro, but it was surprisingly fast to boot and shutdown.

Tails is easily the distro which surprised me the most. This is because, even tough I would rate myself a well aware privacy advocate, I didn't expect to see a full suite of privacy tools. I somehow just expected, that it would be just the Tor Browser and nothing more. I don't know what I thought tough. I need to mention, that Tails was one of my first distros I've used so I was kind of mindblown that all these tools could fit onto a USB Thumb drive.

Just switched over to EndeavourOS & it’s been great

Kubuntu.
The prevailing wisdom used to be that if somebody is tired of Windows and wants to switch you would send them to Ubuntu. Having used Ubuntu and Debian and Mint and Pop! OS and CentOS and Red Hat and Fedora and Kubuntu, Kubuntu with the new KDE plasma desktop seems to be the most Windows like while still retaining the Linux flavor OS that I have used so far.
Ubuntu by comparison is slow and convoluted and those are huge turn offs for neophyte Linux users who want to get away from Windows.
- I think KDE is doing the heavy lifting of being like Windows. As a long time Windows user who would every now and then try Ubuntu and hate it, it was Gnome that really turned me off. KDE is so much nicer, IMO.
  
  I agree. It's not that I expect Linux to be like windows. It's not and that's a good thing. I'm just thinking for when I encounter people and they ask me, "Hey, I was thinking about trying a Linux. What should I do? Which one should I pick?"
  I'm going to recommend Kubuntu.
  
  I'd argue it's the other way around. Windows is doing the heavy lifting of being like KDE and when they try to do something themselves everybody hates it.

before 2010 when a suse disk was put into a laptop and installed and the network card and everything worked just fine no tweaking.

Manjaro and Ubuntu surprised me how bad they are

Manjaro is the only distro I've tried whose live image worked flawlessly, out of the box, and did everything I could think of, first try.
Granted this was 5 years ago when I set down to find an alternative to Ubuntu. Maybe today there are more distros that can do that.
At the time I tried all the usual suspects that are supposed to provide a user-friendly, gamer-friendly desktop experience and they all came short — except one.
That sold me. And it was surprising because I didn't really expect to find such a distro, I was just thinking I will make a list of what doesn't work out of the box on each, and pick the one with the least stuff. I didn't expect a distro to have no list.

I tried Pop!_OS alpha1 with Cosmic Desktop and I even if the general software quality is still what you might expect from the first alpha release, I was impressed on the high-level design decisions they made with Cosmic. As a sway user who would like a bit more structure and hand-holding in my desktop, I think I'm gonna like Cosmic in a year's time.

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.
Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.
Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.
A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.
- Ubuntu was very good, changed a lot of people's perception of Linux, and made the user experience much nicer. It still is very good, but many have caught up, or are surpassing Ubuntu in user experience. The issue with Ubuntu is the progressive enshittification.
  Mint is, so far, the un-enshittified Ubuntu alternative. Plus it's main DEs. Cinnamon and MATE provide a fairly Windows like experience for those landing from the Windows world.
  
  I remember mint being billed as essentially just that like a full ten years ago. I'm actually surprised to hear mint hasn't been enshittified itself at this point, I just assumed that would have happened by now.
  
  Knoppix got Ubuntu halfway there.

I installed Void Linux on my Raspberry Pi without looking at the details, and I was surprised that it had no systemd! It was the first non-systemd distro that I had encountered and also pretty fast.
- Void is by far the fastest booting distro I've ever used. I like how it allows you to load the boot USB into RAM and I wish every distro did that.

Gentoo.
I had a friend SSH into my computer once I got it to the bare minimum for that by his instructions and he helped me install it. After that he did some kind of wizardry to have both Gentoo and SUSE both running at the same time without a VM!
- Probably possible if you use Gentoo as the base but keep portage off your $PATH. Ultimately a setup like this will end up being dominated by one of the distros since mixing them properly will cause collisions and headaches.
  
  Yeah I have no idea what magic he cast.

NixOS is surprisingly easy to use

Tuxedo OS, as preinstalled on my Tuxedo machine. It is just a heavily tweaked Ubuntu flavor with Plasma as a default desktop and sane defaults (firefox not as a snap, but as a .deb file). Everything worked so well out of the box that I did not see the point in installing Arch. I also love the fact that Plasma is kept very much up to date. In comparison, Kubuntu 24.04 still has Plasma 5., whereas I currently run 6.1.4.

Fedora Atomic/Kinoite, just so relieved when one day I fucked the bootloader, and it didn't boot anymore, and I only needed to rollback in grub to a perfectly working system
- You were able to get to the bootloader with a fucked up bootloader?
  
  Maybe i "fucked the bootloader config" should be better, and with fedora unified kernel support, you can rollback using the UEFI entry so even a fucked bootloader wouldn't stop you

Second impression of Garuda (Arch based). My first impression was the dragonized version, which is KDE with lots of mods to make it Mac like, but with extra window animations.
I like things simple, so when I tried Garuda again, I installed the Gnome version. Other than some weirdness getting my Nvidia card working with Wayland, it has run better than anything else on my laptop.

Fedora. I was always with Mint and Cinnamon. I tried Pop!Os, Manjaro and Debian, whenever I could with Cinnamon. Fedora was recommended to me, which I had never entered in the distros to try. I installed it and I've been using it for 2 years with its respective updates. No problems at all. I had not tried Gnome. I don't like it the most but I'm fine with it.

The old Pardus, YALI was, and still is, the most awesome installer i've ever meet. Also Kaptan was amazing

Arch Linux. All the software at their latest version (which is usually the best one), within a couple of commands, either from the huge official repos or the AUR.

Arch Wiki

Pop OS has worked out well for me even better than Ubuntu & Fedora.

Chimera Linux. You'd think that a distro using its own bsd-like userspace and dinit instead of systemd is janky and unusable, but it's been one of the most painless experiences I've had.
Genuinely recommend trying it if you don't have an Nvidia GPU.

Kurumin Linux, which was a Brazilian distro based on Knoppix. This was back in 2006 or so, and that was my first hands-on experience with Linux.
I don't fully remember whether everything worked out of the box, I think it connected to the internet no problem (cable), but what amazed me was:
1 - It ran off the CD drive without needing to install anything 2 - It had loads of preinstalled utility software 3 - Less than 700MB

Fossapup 9.5 how fast yet compitent it is at what it can use. Loading into ram with just 300mb or so HDD space being used, it's blazing fast the newer the machine it runs on. It's downside is it's smaller community driven development being in need of consistant conversion of regular apps to it's own puppy .sfs format which is needed to install them, if they had people churning new .sfs apps out all day every day of the year then eventually it would over-shadow many mainstream OS's it's just nitro level speeds and very stable to boot. It needs more love from the dev community to go that extra mile.

Recently, uBlue. It’s more a family of fedora atomic images but it has taken the pain out of immutability for me. I was using Fedora silver blue and later Sericea a while back, but installing codecs from RPMfusion on it never worked properly and my hw acceleration was always broken. I was on NixOS for a while but had sporadic problems that come with NixOS not using an FHS structure. But uBlue just works. Hardware acceleration works out of the box, and I can easily create custom images with BlueBuild. It’s a very nice ecosystem to create a stable, secure, complete base system. And I run nix on top of it for user packages and home-manager to get all the benefits of both worlds

Nixos

Sabayon. It worked perfectly till I tried to update some stuff 💣
This was one the most stable and at the same time the most unstable distribution I ever tried.

I was surprised by how well Garuda KDE just... Works. Many users warned me to stay away from the smaller distros like Garuda but I've had zero issues after 6+ months of everyday use on 2 devices.