2y ago

Share Your Favorite Linux Distros and Why You Love Them

So we can clearly see the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them, please follow this format:

Write the name of the Linux distro as a first-level comment.
Reply to that comment with each reason you like the distro as a separate answer.

For example:

Distro (first-level comment)
- Reason (one answer)
- Other reason (a different answer)

Please avoid duplicating options. This will help us better understand the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them.

396 comments

Arch, BTW
- Great wiki
- The AUR
- I was distrohopping for like a year or two when I first got into Linux desktop. As soon as I installed Arch for the first time that stopped. Now the thought of a distro pre-installing packages gives me the heebie jeebies. You don't get to tell me how I sync with NTP servers!
- I do real work. Dont have time to waste
  
  Maybe don't fiddle with your install non-stop then.
- PKGBUILDs
- pacman goes brrrr

Debian
- Community run distro
- Very stable, and can run the bleeding edge through Snap/Flatpack/Appimages, Distrobox, or VMs/Containers
- I love debian because it's always there for you.
- Compatible with more devices than many distros
- Low resource footprint — smaller than EndeavourOS on my laptop. Stability is fantastic. Bookworm practically just came out, so the packages are all much newer than they were in Bullseye, making it a viable option for someone who wants an uneventful Linux distro that fades into the background and lets you get stuff done.
- The new release bookworm solves most hardware/software problems
- Extremely customizable
- Lightweight.
- Definitely my choice for running on server, not so much for desktop but for server Debian has fantastic stability and good enough support by 3rd parties

EndeavourOS
- Easy to set up, very helpful community. If you liked Manjaro or think Manjaro is sketchy but like the idea of a slightly pre-configured arch, check it out.
- It's arch. It just happened to be the composition i had my previous arch setup as. Yay for AUR stuff, KDE Plasma for DE. Includes a couple of useful tools and makes for a very solid OS.
  Anyone who has been in the Ubuntu sphere of things with Linux, should take a moment to try arch. EndeavourOS is perfect for these people.
- This, basically Arch but quick to install with all the most important things installed and ready without being bloated.
- Same. I’ve done the vanilla Arch thing and it’s alright, but the quality of life enhancements that come with EndeavourOS make it a great daily driver.
  It’s the only distro I could get DaVinci Resolve Studio, Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k, and my Radeon RX 6750 XT working with, consistently.

openSUSE Tumbleweed
- The big advantage IMHO, is the out of the box BTRFS set up that lets you simply roll back to a non-broken state, right from the grub menu, should an update break your system. I haven't had to use it yet, but it is a huge source of comfort knowing it is there.
  Also, many people coming to opensuse remark how much snappier it is than other distros.
  
  Garuda uses this feature on an Arch base, it's saved me a couple of times. Props to openSUSE for developing the way to make that happen!
  
  BTRFS has saved my life a bunch, I'm the kind that enjoys experimenting and changing stuff just to see what happens
- I had to scroll waaaaay down to find this. Mindboggling how underrated this distro is!
  
  It's getting 3/4's of the votes of Debian. I think their profile has increase a lot in the last year or so.
- YaST
- It is up to date so you can often get newer hardware working due to newer kernels.
- It's rolling and reliable
- It's incredibly well put together
- Security by default. Firewall is set up blocking ports for UDP etc. so you are protected out of the box.
- Everything just works

Fedora
- Stable
- Only FOSS software and repositories unless otherwise enabled
- Cutting edge application releases so I get the newest toys after they’ve been decently tested
- Uses the latest tech in linux e.g wayland and pipewire.
- Applies patches for better programs work under Wayland (SDDM with git patches before long awaited 0.20.0 release).

Pop!_OS
- I agree, it's great!
  image with baked in nvidia drivers which work out of the box without too much fuss
  if you encounter problems, you can refer to the system76 website or use a solution provided by the community, since it's based on Ubuntu
  installation with full disk encryption enabled by default
  right now it uses a slightly customized version of GNOME as DE (with "normal"/traditional windows and optionally a tiling wm), but system76 is working on a Rust-based DE, named Cosmic DE
- I’ve been using Pop for about 2 years. I have yet to run into an issue that I couldn’t fix. It’s the first distro that made ditching windows easy.
  
  I feel the same coming from Mac. Things seem to just work. I'm not a Linux wiz so minimal headaches while learning to tinker make it perfect for me.

Arch. I can't live without the AUR at this point.
- We cannot forget about the wiki, which is a great resource for not only the Arch distro, but for any Linux install.
- Seriously, the ease of installing any and all programs from the main repo's or the AUR is such an extreme advantage over all other distros!
  And it makes keeping your system and programs updated a breeze.
  
  It is nice to install much normally harder to install crap, but there are so little trusted devs on there, that i rather not install something than getting it from a untrusted source.
  It is nice to play around, but i also switched from Windows to have a more secure platform. I switched to flatpaks from official sources.
- Seriously, I realize this every time I have to install something on my server (running AlmaLinux). Now I've manually set up a personal LURE repo for some software that I use.

NixOS
- Rollbacks
- Easy and fearless updates
- declarative configuration
- Dependency Hell, begone
- Very good with containers and VMs
- Home Manager + Stylix
- Ez dev shells
- Single command to compile & install packages from many git repos
- Can turn basically any distro into nixos in minutes
- Reproducible
- You get it for the low price of loosing all fun/motivation in setting up, customizing and mintaining machines with other distros
- Overlays
- Many different and interesting community projects
- Makes me feel cool again 😎
- Easy to mix and match package versions with different dependency versions
- I have been thinking to give NixOS a spin but feel like it's above my brain capacity for me to handle. Do you also use homemanager and Flakes? Homemanager kinda makes sense (manage packages for non root users) but what does Flakes do?
  
  I am already trying it and I am still no expert. How I understand flakes is that it is a file with inputs, like nixpkgs and other flakes or repos you might depend on and some outputs that can be things like a nixshell with packages and environment variables, custom packages and configs like your NixOS configurations and home manager. When you use your flake for the first time, by entering a nix shell with nix develop, building a package with nix build, rebuild your NixOS system with nixos-rebuild --flake .#
  <hostname>
  , etc, nix will generate a flake.lock file that stores the hashes of all of your inputs and thus pinning the input versions. This means that if you ever run any of those commands again, you should get the same result because the inputs are pinned and the same version. If you want to update, you just run nix flake update and it will regenerate the flake.lock file with new hashes for the newest version. The advantage with flakes is that it is fully reproducible, even if one of your dependencies changes, because the hash is specified and centrally managed in the inputs of your flake.
  Nix flakes can be used for your NixOS system by adding the nixos configurations in the outputs of your nix flake and adding the dependencies like nixpkgs to the inputs. You can also combine it with home manager by either specifying it as a separate output or adding it as a nixos module inside the nixos configurations output. You just copy your existing nixos and home manager config to the folder with your flake and reference them inside the flake.nix. If you added home manager as a nixos module, you only need to run nixos-rebuild switch --flake
  <path-to-flake>
  .#
  <hostname>
  and it will automatically rebuild both your NixOS configuration and home manager configuration. You can then backup the folder with your flake and configurations by uploading them to GitHub for example.
  The best resource I found was this 3 hour video by Matthias Benaets: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y&feature=share7
- immutability
- As stable as you need it to be
- Easily build packages with custom compile flags
- A great selection and amount of packages and modules to build/install/enable
- Do it once, do it right. Save work be redeploying the same configuration (or submodules) on mutiple machines or the same machine multiple times.
- A cool logo, meaningful rolling release version names and stickers

Ubuntu
- A lot of proprietary software is easier to install here
- I can use the same OS on my servers
- easy enough to use for me (I'm a linux newb) and I can setup steam on it!
  edit: forgot to mention I can get hibernation working on Ubuntu when I couldn't figure out how to do that in Fedora
  
  Are you playing steam games that have Linux versions? Or is the "comparability mode" stable and fast enough that you don't really have to think about it?
- Shit just works
- I don't have time to fuck about, I use ubuntu mate because it gets out of my way and does what I expect it to do.
- Because it just works. Because it's based on free Debian and not corporate RedHat. Because mainstream Linux needs a flagship distro and that distro needs to be used and supported.
  
  but Ubuntu is corporate, no?
- I love the stability of LTS
- It's easy to use
- I love the dock
- For when I can't get stuff to work on nixos 😅

Arch Linux
- The Arch Wiki is in a language made by users for users. Meaning that its easy to understand because the wiki allows to talk about issues, alternatives and more hints about each small topic, every other wiki has some structure where important details are missing or not taken seriously.
- I always am going to run into heavy issues when using Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. On Arch, things also aren't always smooth, but the issues are mild, always solvable and transparent.
- Starting with a blank slate is so refreshing. It takes time to build everything up from scratch and I understand that you can get a great experience out of the box with other distros, but I love the simplicity of not having any bullshit I didn't install myself.
  
  True, yeah, didn't think about the downside that you need to build it up from scratch. But people could use arch based distros I guess? Never used them.
- Arch and KDE as a DE because I'm a borderline-obsessive tinkerer.
  Although NixOS is tempting me, but I haven't moved past the virtual-machine-specimen-jar phase with that yet lol.

Manjaro. It just worked on any device I installed it on. And wifi just worked with no fiddling.
Then I installed it on surface tablet. What didn't work, I found kernel fixes I could implement.
Of all the distros, for me, it was the easiest to use, install and manipulate!!
- Manjaro is my main distro too! The package manager is great!
  
  Manjaro friends unite!
- Switched to Manjaro after running vanilla Arch for several years and haven't looked back. I appreciate the slightly less bleeding edge updates and extra added stability around it.
  Easy installs are probably less of a big deal nowadays after Arch overhauled their installation process.

Mint. Easy to setup, fast to run, and very reliable.
- Mint
  Generally works in cases where Ubuntu would and you don't have to deal with Canonical's choices.
  
  Yeah, but I rarely if ever leave those constraints, so it does not matter to me at all. Day to day, I use macOS anyway, and Mint only comes on my desktop PC.

Garuda Linux
- Bootable Snapper snapshots enabled by default
  
  This really is my favorite Garuda feature - it's saved my install more than once so that I can roll back a messy update, figure out what broke and why it broke, and then make sure the next update works
- Besides Wiki and AUR that all Arch derivatives share, they have their own wiki that documents the changes they're made to Arch and a very good forum for help
- Post install wizard for easily adding common applications
- Nvidia driver installation options that correctly set the mode setting, dkms drivers installed ootb, common apps like GreenWithEnvy ootb, great Nvidia support
- Fish shell by default with auto-complete previews as you type and lots of great aliases
  
  You can get pretty much everything Fish Shell does with a well configured Zshell pus more. Fish also smells.
- A lot of people think it's just Arch with an installer and lots of bloat and a neon theme but it's a lot more than that.

Nixos. For all its complexity and dilemmas and issues it has given me, it's the comfiest for me and gives me really cool features
- It still blows my mind that with nixos, setting up and continuously renewing an ssl cert is literally just two lines in the config file. I use nixos on my homeserver, thinking about switching my laptop to it too (currently Void linux).
  
  dew it
  
  @amanwithausername got an older laptop celeron processor running xubuntu? Any better ideas?
- Congrats for making it to the treasure! I'm like half way in and not sure if I can fight through...
  
  just keep on going. i cant be happy on any other distro, so i have to use nixos

Slackware
the most rock stable distro imo. No systemd or snap stuff. Packages are almost (if not fully) vanilla version from upstream. Simple yet efficient unix-style approach to everything like package management, slackbuilds are really good too.
- Slackware gets a lot of hate, especially from the btw bros. People are spooked about having to manage their own dependencies. But I couldn't agree with you more on simplicity and stability. I've been daily driving slackware since 99 or 00, and I don't think I've ever broken something I couldn't immediately roll back and fix.
  I tried to install Ubuntu on a sbc recently. And within an hour of installing this and that with all the different dependencies, I had a completely unusable system. And I had no idea how to fix it. It was totally my fault but reminded me what I love about slackware.
- Slack got me through undergrad on an IBM 600e ThinkPad (which was really old even then --- around the time of the early 2.6 series kernels iirc). Great distro, fond memories.

Debian
-Simple distro free of too much bloat without being too bare-bones
-Stable, but can also be changed to be a bit more updated if you want that instead-
- Now now, saying Debian is free of too much bloat is going way too far, dude, even as as Debian enjoyer I cannot allow such statements to pass.
  
  Haha fair, I guess that is a pretty objective statement. In my opinion, compared to some other distros and operating systems, it's pretty bloat free, but I guess if you're used to something else that is even more bloat free that you would probably disagree.

Arch Linux

Arch (BTW)
- And with archinstall I'd argue it's about as easy to install as most "normal" distros these days.
  
  I'd also agree... but everytime I tried to use archinstall, it always failed, felt impossible for me to install arch
- dupe
- I'm currently happy with it
  
  So many powerful tools that are not easy to find on other distros.

Debian

Gentoo
- Control
- Excellent package and dependency management with a wide variety of up-to-date software
- Out-of-box security configurations supported by the organization (SELinux, hardening)
- There are dozens of us! And you can join us at !gentoo@lemm.ee if you haven't yet!
  I love it because it's super configurable, lets you choose compiler optimizations (and through USE flags, features that you need in your packages - you don't have to include everything).
  My Linux knowledge has skyrocketed compared to before I used Gentoo. Which of course means it's NOT the distro for people who want something that just works, but honestly, now that it's working properly, I feel it's actually pretty hard to break, and when it does break, I know how to fix it! Versus with Linux Mint a decade ago, if I broke it, I had no idea where to get started and just reinstalled it.
  Of course, about half a year ago I decided to move from x11 and OpenRC to Wayland and systemd. And I use KDE. And have Nvidia graphics. Soooo it was a fun ride both relearning how my init system works, and also running into problems with Steam, etc.
  I also try to keep my kernel in single digit megabytes, but occasionally I find something missing and have to recompile with more "bloat". So right now I believe it's around 11 MB, but I'll see about improving it over my next vacation. Not that 11 MB takes long to load off a gen4 NVMe drive, but the ePeen needs to be stroked! Also no initial ramdisk, to save even more boot time.
  
  I just reinstalled Gentoo and switched to a Systemd setup as well. I held off for as long as I could but it's just so nice!
  I'm using the binary kernel for now, but I'll compile my own when I find the time. 11MB is nuts!
- Encourages hardware-based optimization and kernel specialization
  
  Yep, these are all true. Throw in overlays and the package availability is unbeatable.

EndeavourOS

Linuxmint.
- Rock solid.

Fedora
I want to preface this by saying that Red Hat absolutely deserve your ire in light of the recent news.
I appreciate that Fedora has relatively recent packages for a fixed release distribution. I really appreciate how they've pioneered in desktop-oriented technologies to help make Linux a more palatable experience for regular users, and I'm glad to see these gradually be adopted by others over time.
I'm happy to hear that the Fedora project still mostly operates Independently under redhat / IBM, but I'd be lying if I said the IBM acquisition didn't worry me to the point of looking into alternatives.
- Agreed. I've been using Fedora Silverblue for about a year. I love the immutable OS paradigm but IBM/Red Hat's recent actions have left me feeling uneasy and I want to find an alternative.
  
  I've also been using silverblue for about a year, it works well. Didn't know about IBM acquiring Rad Hat, sad news.
  For a similar experience there is Vanilla OS that I tried briefly and that seams to have similar immutability features and hastle free setup with a vanilla gnome desktop. It's based on Ubuntu.
  There is also NixOS which takes the immutability to another level. The entire system with all packages are configured in a config file. Which is nice if you want to have an identical setup on multiple machines but makes it a bit less user friendly imo.
  
  Silverblue is cool. I've been playing around with it on a portable NVMe drive. Planning on making the switch soon (whether that's Silverblue itself or another immutable option).

I've been trying to convert to linux since the mid-2000's. Ubuntu and derivatives, fedora, and SUSE. Gaming and my lack on knowledge always brought me back to Windows.
In 2018 I tried Manjaro and loved it. But I broke it without the knowledge to fix it multiple times. The Arch BTW memes were strong at the time so I took the plunge and studied the wiki, and documented my own installation process and really learned a lot in the process. Proton was released and suddenly gaming got WAY better. I didn't remove my windows install completely until 2022 but Arch has been my home on my main machine.
I have since put together a proxmox cluster and run many distros for various things but that's a whole other rabbit hole!

NixOS
- Reproducibility is a blessing for both software development and daily use.
- Backing up NixOS is very straight forward and easy. It's kinda the same as docker-compose in that respect.
- This is the way
  
  This is the way

Debian.
- Rock solid.
- Lightweight.

Manjaro
- I don't need to install anything manually because of how extensive the AUR is.
  
  AUR is amazing
- Rolling release model.
- more out of the box than what Arch comes with.
- Nice default configuration. Good choice of gnome extensions and themes pre installed

Arch
Minimal and I install whatever the hell I want on it
AUR

Arch Linux

Void
- Supports musl on every architecture I have. ARM, AARCH64, x86_64 - no problem.
- Stable rolling release
- xbps
- Very KISS. Runit is amazing once you get used to it.
- • Rolling release that is remarkably stable. • Supports a wide variety of architectures. • XBPS package manage • Lightweight, systemd free.

NixOS, I have a fetish for configuration files
- I'm currently doing my second pass of Nix after diving deep into it last time and coming out unsatisfied. The same problems that I had before with it are problems I'm seeing again:
  disjointed configs pulled from random source or build repos on the internet
  unintuitive grammars with parameters that require you to download an autocompletion spec
  flakes that aren't immediately easy to grok
  Contrast that with my last Guix experience:
  Lisp form, super easy to understand grammar
  Recipes are so trivial that I've written three on my first day
  Source tree is included and you are expected to add branches to it
  The only problem with Guix that I can see is that it's not as popular
  
  Flakes are extremely simple (my whole system is a flake: https://github.com/cmargiotta/dotfiles ), but they are basically not documented.
  The grammar is really really bad, I prefere a lot the Guix one too! I am using NixOS only because the last time I tried Guix I didn't find a lot of packages for their extremist GNU policy (I agree, but I need some packages), is it still like that?
- dupe

Gentoo
- Huge range of supported architectures

Fedora
- It is has all the good and new stuff without being unstable.

LMDE
Because it's Mint & Debian

Alpine -- In praise of Alpine and apk

Debian.

Garuda

Gentoo Linux
- Being a source based distro, programs are compiled and optimized to your system configuration. Additionally you can add/remove features you dis/like using USE flags.

Fedora Silverblue

PostmarketOS

Arch linux (btw). Because it's easy to install and has the most accessible package manager of em all.
...
...before you shoot rocks at me and try to burn me alive.... download an arch iso, run it, and then type "archinstall". Thank me later.
"Oh, but its still veeeeeery hard to inst-"

MX Linux
- The MX Snapshot utility & other built-in tools make it instantly functional as a daily driver, even for people new to Linux, and the Quick System Info is such a handy baseline for troubleshooting if you run into problems and need help from the community. All the stuff that's provided out of the box just makes it a really practical distro to learn on!
- MX Linux
  Option for no systemd, great community, good overall appearance, great set of custom tools.

EndeavourOS
- An installer of Archlinux with sane default but also has all of Arch Power

Universal Blue / ublue-os
- Based on Fedora
  Fedora uses the latest technology and is quick to adapt new features such as PipeWire, BTRFS, Wayland and etc, yet remains very stable.
  
  why your comments are all over the place
- Clean separation
  The base system is separated from applications and user data
  Integration of Flatpak applications via Flathub
  Toolbox and Distrobox support, run applications from any distribution in a containerized environment
- Cloud-native approach
  Reliable, atomic updates with built in rollback
  Known-good state and fewer failures
  Significantly reduced configuration drift
  No compiling or building Nvidia drivers on the local client, they come premade on the image
- Built-in container tools for developers
  Consume packages and software from any repo without risking breakage on the client
  Easy consumption of other OCI images, if it's on the CNCF Landscape it's a first class citizen thanks to Podman!
- Nvidia support
  Multiple Nvidia driver streams (525xx, 520xx, and 470xx)
  CUDA support
  Container runtime support
  Secure boot
  Hardware-accelerated video playback
  Selinux support
  Multiple Fedora flavors and releases
  Post-install setup with just
  Multi-GPU support with supergfxctl (optional Gnome Shell extension)

Fedora Workstation

Kubuntu LTS
- Has a clean interface, easy to customize if you feel like it, but not necessary. Works great on a 10 year old desktop.

Debian

Garuda Linux

Nobara
easy to use
fast on my hardware
fedora based
KDE
- dupe
- Also, gaming works out of the box on my hardware (my gfx card wasn't fully supported by 5.x kernel)
  
  Another reason to use :)

I've been a Mint faithful for a few years now

Fedora KDE.

Nobara

KDE Neon
- Based on Ubuntu, is KDE's "flagship" OS (so I trust they know what they're doing with their own DE), and is the first to get bleeding edge KDE updates. Everything else is pretty much standard Ubuntu.
  
  I installed this on my wife's aging laptop to breathe some new life into it. She's not tech savvy but gets along with it just fine. Mission accomplished.
  Funny side note though, because Linux doesn't force you to update unlike Windows, it means she just doesn't ever update the thing. I've opened it up a couple different times to see pending security updates ready to download. 😆

zorin os
- it looks good af

We're looking to create a comprehensive list of the most popular Linux distributions and the reasons why people use them.
I'm curious, do you intend to put up the results somewhere?

396 comments