1mo ago

Can I get your opinion?

129 comments

Part of me wants to main Gentoo just to neutralise any arch smug I come across.
But then I remember I don't really want a 2nd job
- I imagine telling an Arch user you use Gentoo is like telling a Texan that if you cut Alaska into two halves Texas would be the third largest US state.
- It's only a second job if you ever want to add a new app
  
  Actually, only if you want to tune stuff, like selecting from hundreds of USE flags and some may cause trouble, but who can resist.
- This thread once again proving that complaints about arch elitism are 1000x more common than actual arch elitism
  
  This would have been the perfect comment if you were from a slightly different instance
  Edit: wait there is (was?) an "I use arch btw" instance right? I'm not imagining it?
  
  ~~This guy uses arch btw.~~
  No seriously, there's plenty of arch elitism in this thread alone, And other distros too. You really don't need to be preemptively defensive about it though.
- I'm literally in the process of switching my main from Arch to Gentoo now. (Yes it's taking a while.) And I intend to be even more smug. Bwahahaha!
- Gentoo is not that bad. Its just arch with a longer install. You still got to read the wiki when installing something and still have to follow the news.
  
  IMO Arch's defaults (especially w.r.t. audio and fonts) are a little nicer than Gentoo's, but that's a pretty minor inconvenience all things considered.
- Gentoo, that's fun. Brings back a lot of memories from Kindergarten. Let me know when you're ready to build LFS with the big dogs.
  
  I'm surprised LFS is still around. I used that on my main computer back when Linux kernel versions started with 2.4. it was my third distribution after red hat and Debian
- Just main NixOS.
  
  I just need to learn Diet Haskell first...
- I don't get that 'Gentoo takes forever' argument. With todays hardware it's really a non-issue. Just let the updates compile in the background while you do other stuff. My Arch install broke several times, not so my Gentoo. Also, the Gentoo community is really kind and don't treat you like an idiot for not knowing something.
  
  On the other hand, what's the benefit of running Gentoo on modern hardware?

- Sacrilege! Burn the person bringing a reasonable perspective to the flame war!
- What? Sacrilege. Of course my mum's PC runs arch so does my server I would install arch on a hospital Server and have it auto update if they'd let me ... /s
- Ngl, I was expecting something spicier than your utterly reasonable comment.

The best way to trigger an Arch user is to use Ubuntu and love it.
- Heh, I have two laptops: one with Arch and one with Ubuntu. I like both systems. I guess i like triggering myself.
  
  why did that last sentence sound so sexual 😭😭
  
  You
- I use Mint, by the way.
  
  Same. After Unbuntu and trying Arch and couldn't figure it out.

I would really like to thank the Arch community for maintaining such a wonderful wiki; it's great that your nuts-and-bolts approach naturally generates the best documentation. That said, Debian will always be my distro of choice.
- Mint for me, but the Arch wiki is just the best.
- I'm officially off of arch now and back on debian, my first and true linux love. I used to love arch for the AUR, but I had a couple of AUR packages that took so long to upgrade, they were basically un-upgradeable. I switched from i3 on X to sway on Wayland at the same time, so I can't say how much of my issues were that, but various small issues are no longer issues, like better Playstation controller support. And I don't have to restart every time I update repositories because I'm not constantly upgrading the Linux kernel. And there are so many .deb packages! But sincerely, thank you arch community. I still use the arch wiki.
- Debian my beloved
- I really like Debian, it's what I use at work and for servers at home. At least until a few weeks ago when I decided to try NixOS. I'm really liking it so far and am thinking of switching over my other home servers.
- i run arch on my workstation because the flexibility of being able to install any given recent software is just too great. Compared to something like debian which i run on my server, it's great, you just don't things that are up to date very often. But it's incredibly stable.
  I truly am living the best of both worlds right now.

controversial opinion: distro/software wars are good, because they make people discuss about their software, which motivates the developers. you don't see windows software wars, because they can't choose their de
- Pretty sure that for most things it's simply that there's one software that's way above the rest or you simply have no interest in the fields where people debate what is best and on Linux you often are stuck with the one software that does the trick because there's not enough demand for real competition that pushes devs to come up with something as good as what you'll find on Windows.
  
  For desktop environments gnome and kde are excellent and force each other to improve
  I don't think Libre Office has a good competitor aside from Microsoft Office which hardly matters in the open source world but Libre Office works in windows too
  There are several file explorers, many terminal emulators

arch, debian and mint all belong in 1st place
- Debian
  As long as you're not using the distro's 5 year old version of 3D printer slicing software with ancient printer models in it and go for the newest appimage/flatpak instead (just dealt with this last night).
  
  Yep. When it has the package I need, flatpak elevates Debian to the last distro I will ever need.
  And when flatpak doesn't have the package I need, there's always Fedora.
  (I know - I'm a meme for hating snaps that much. Lol.)
- It's amazing how much the combination of those 3 excell at covering almost any use case.
  
  NixOS disagrees

My top five Linux distros:
Debian: It may not be exciting but its rock stability is what makes it good for the vast majority of people (aka what I would genuenly reccomend to people)
Alpine: Not the easiest or most stable but very lightweight
OpenSuse: Stable yet up to date, very good defaults and themeing is amazing (especially on Sway)
Arch: Ignoring the community or documentation you get a distro with up to date packages and not much else to seperate it
NixOS: Way too advanced for me but I love the way it works, seems amazing for a select type of people
Of course my opinion is objectively correct and if you disagree im going to burn your house down with combustible lemons (made by my team of scientists ofc) /s
- Debian: It may not be exciting but its rock stability is what makes it good for the vast majority of people (aka what I would genuenly reccomend to people)
  debian is what windows wishes it could be.
  
  Yeah Windows is not stable at all :3
- based, alpine is really fun for running on obsolete hardware
- antiX is a pretty user friendly and light distro. Plus it's Debian based.
  
  Honestly when it comes to Debian derivatives Devuan is the only one I would reccomend (still doesnt get in my top 5)

The desktop environment and package manager has a greater effect on your user experience than the distro
I used to use Ubuntu and Mint now I use SteamOS.
- How does SteamOS hold up as a daily driver compared to Mint? I always imagined its like a souped up version of steams big picture mode. Is it a good desktop enviroment that comes with ways to manage files and make web app shortcuts?
  
  It ships with KDE so yeah. Pretty good.
  
  It runs KDE Plasma 5. I personally prefer MATE but KDE works too.
- Distro and package manager are tightly coupled.
- you can choose your de, and with some distros (like arch) your packages don't come preconfigured. which also makes a lot of difference.
- Agree. KDE neon is my daily right now. Very good out of the box. I just had to nuke snaps on it. Plays very nicely on laptops in terms of battery life, noise and temperature. Sleep and hibernate also works very well.

Arrays start at 0, which leaves plenty of room for SCO Linux powered by UnitedLinux
Wait, I think there was an underflow error...
- Is this a scaldera joke?
  
  It's ancient, but I couldn't think of a worse distro

"Linux heals the heart, no matter the distro"
Someone.

Bog standard Fedora
- You're not wrong.
  As my hatred for snaps has removed Ubuntu from my install set, I'm finding myself quietly installing Fedora anywhere that Debian won't do.
  My preferences change with the wind, but Fedora is a fantastic default choice.
  
  It's always been Debian on servers for me, any time I've strayed from that I've regretted it. And Fedora has become my home on the desktop, it's just so hard to break. I like fixing things and learning, but it's annoying to always have to do it on your main system.
- All I need is a community repo, and a cfg edit to parallel download. That's it, perfection.

I needed to quickly get something up and running on a laptop so that I could take it in the field. I thought about reinstalling arch for a minute but decided to go with Ubuntu. And you know what? It was good enough. The install was easy peasy, and everything just worked right out of the box. If I was setting up a long term machine I'd probably go with arch, but just to get some shit done on a timeline? Yeah, turned out Ubuntu was good enough.
- too many possible things can go wrong with installers, with arch I know I'll get it working faster if even the slightest issue occurs which would otherwise derail installer distros 🤷‍♂️
  
  In roughly 7 years of Linux, I think I've only run into issues with automated installers in partitioning if you choose to just go automatic everything and you have a wacky existing partition layout.

Well, the Tuxies said it was NixOS...

College-aged me would have loved Arch. Maybe retirement me will have to play with it for fun in the vaults.
Present-day me however, in middle age with a growing family and a full time job already working on Linux-based software all day, is a total slut for Linux Mint.
It installs and gets running easier and faster than Windows, and is based on widely used and tested stuff from Ubuntu and Debian. It’s not the “learn how operating systems work” distro for sure, but there is a lot of practical use in the world for the “plug the installer drive into your busted old Windows 10 machine and in 15 minutes have a responsive useful Linux PC where your parents can find the Internet browser” distro!
I am very interested to see if SteamOS makes a big push into desktops, though. A whole lot more of the desktop Linux world could become Arch based.
- Linux mint is the Toyota Camry of Linux distros.
  
  I like to call it the Sweet Brown distro cause "Ain't nobody got time for that"
- There’s always Bazzite, if you have gamers you want to get into Linux. It would be nice if SteamOS got bigger than it already is, but I don’t know if that’s the direction Valve wants to take it anymore. It seems more to me like they gave up on desktops, and are focusing on the mobile market with the Steam Deck, since that’s someplace where they quickly distinguished themselves.

Why is everybody so shy about liking Fedora? You don't have to name lesser distro's first to make them feel good, you can just outright say Fedora is the best....
Joking. Whatever floats your boat is fine.
- It isn't so much that fedora is the best distro, just that all the other distros are worse.
  Using it is just common sense, not something anybody would feel proud about.
  
  This is basically my view as a Fedora user.

-1. WSL.
- Because everything to do with WSL is negative
- If 3 is worse than 1, -1 is better. So I don't agree with you. WSL is at +∞
  Any distribution is better

Recently started using openSUSE Tumbleweed after 15 years of on and off Linux experimentation. I think I’ve finally found the distro to make me stay. :)
- I've recently switched from Debian to openSUSE Tumbleweed (edit: with KDE) and am extremely impressed, it's just so polished. German engineering at its finest.

arch, rhel, opensuse/fedora

@wzl my top distros are arch & gentoo, i use arch for desktop and gentoo for my server
i've a gentoo install for a raspberry when raspbian (now raspberry os) didn't have support for aarch64 binaries in their repos, but beside that it is fun to customize your install using portage

I’ve used Arch for years now but I recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed to a friend recently
I have a computer using Windows because it needed a windows store app and the drm on those thwarted my attempts on Linux

For a purist like me, arch IS the best distro.
However, best for me doesn't mean best for thee.

first place is tied with arch and debian, second might include RHEL.
everything else is non deterministic.

They had to invent a package manager for repackaged debs and GitHub repos. Very elite
- ngl, typing paru/yay [description of repo] is faster than downloading and installing the repo. even if you install it with git, you still need to know the git link.
  yes. arch is some effort to configure and get working properly, but once it works it's so nice
  (well, it was for me. I respect you if you have your own opinion and distro preferences)

Shirt colours are, or need to be, swapped. Blue guy's shirt is more like the Arch logo's colour and green guy is signalling Mint or maybe SUSE.
I guess this means this is the perfect time to say: I use LMDE, btw.

I've got a feeling that I leave arch, just to come back to it... Almost a year without Arch.
- I presume you know that your account is marked as automated, as a bot

Honestly it's usually the Arch Cultists that don't want opinions

129 comments