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.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      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

      • nychtelios@rlyeh.icu
        2·
        1 year ago

        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?

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          1·
          1 year ago

          is it still like that?

          Yes and no – there are now non-free repos (so you can install firefox for example), and even non-free binary repos too.

    • BrokenCanoe@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      Endeavour has been my default for a long while now, using Plasma KDE. It supports the flexibility needed to customise and make my own themes for as a low-vision user, and smooths a lot of the rough edges of pure Arch. I had Arch installed previously, but again, having that additional helping hand, coupled with a truly wonderful community, really made all the difference. I left Windows after the mess that was 8, I couldn’t go back…

    • StantonVitales@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m on it right now. Got a new Thinkpad a couple weeks ago and just wasn’t in the mood to install Arch the normal way when I finally had alone time at 11pm, gave Endeavour a shot and was like oh, this is convenient 🤩

  • TableCoffee@lemmy.ca
    4·
    1 year ago

    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!

    • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
      7·
      1 year ago
      • Packages are kept up to date so it’s often the first distro to support new hardware, APIs, etc.
      • AUR provides a huge library of software that isn’t often in package manager repos.
      • Rolling release so you don’t have to deal with repository upgrades every 6 months to 2 years.
      • btw
    • festus@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      My favorite too. For me on other distros I was typically running into bugs that I’d find had already been fixed upstream months previously - and then I had to either live with the bug or do some hack to manually install the newer version. Somewhat related to this, but as Linux gamer it was also frustrating to have the older Mesa drivers all the time because it couldn’t support the older kernel version the distro shipped or something.

    • Pe4rl@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      My current isn’t vanilla arch, but Endeavour OS, because as an unexperienced user I wanted to have the least trouble while installing, … I regret it ever since, because I began with a Plasma desktop and ended up with i3, mainly because of tiling, problems with some utilities, keyboard switching, etc. In the end, I still love the system, one can get quite minimal with it.

      • jemorgan@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        I love that you talked about regretting it. Using one of the arch-based diaries that obfuscates the installation process honestly destroys a lot of the benefit of using arch. Having to vaguely understand how the system fits together makes fixing issues a million times easier.

        • Pe4rl@lemmy.fmhy.ml
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yep. And I still forgot to mention one thing. It is a 2016 Macbook Pro, which basically means just more work fixing.

    • blackbrook@mander.xyz
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • evadzs@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        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!

      • shotgun_crab@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        BTRFS has saved my life a bunch, I’m the kind that enjoys experimenting and changing stuff just to see what happens

  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    1 year ago
    • Arch
    • Debian
      • My favorite overall, they’re community-run, stable, well-maintained, have a rich history of being awesome, and they’re just top quality general-purpose distros. I tend to use Arch for more recent desktop systems and Debian for server systems or older desktops.
    • NixOS
      • What I’m dabbling with currently, the concepts here are amazing but it’s a bit of work at first to truly get value out of it. Still, seems to be a good option for my next notebook OS.
    • Fedora Silverblue (respectively the immutable variants)
      • Also cool, as is Fedora in general, although with the recent Red Hat fiasco and Fedora’s plan to introduce opt-out telemetry I’m more hesitant now. Some time ago I’d have listed Fedora at the top but now it’s slid down a bit.
    • Mint
    • Kubuntu
      • Easy recommendations for new users coming from Windows
    • VanillaOS
      • I like the idea of making it possible to install packages from all distros (they will then run in a distro-specific container). I wouldn’t use it, but it’s cool
    • Kali
    • Tails
    • Alpine
      • From the more specific distros
    • Slackware
      • Honorable mention, because it introduced me to Linux back in the day (yes, I liked starting the hard Unix way). I wouldn’t recommend it these days but it’s kind of like the granddaddy of all Linux distros, and it was awesome in its prime. I’m sure it can still be used today but it’s gotten quite niche.
    • DarthVi@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year ago

      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
    • zybir@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • los_chill@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.