in a world where everything is dominated by convenience, eg. AI being a convenient source of information, GUI’s being a conveniet way of navigating information. I chose my distro to do the complete opposite. I wanted a distro that if an error arises it would give me a detailed message, not some vague response like “check the logs” where It doesn’t explain how to navigate there.
you may know where im going with this, I went with Cauchy OS and hyprland primarily for the speed of the kernel and the surplus amount of information and documentation with AUR. I cannot leave arch on the basis of how fast it is, for a massive update to install the latest core packages of the OS it takes about 2 min whereas fedora takes 15 and well windows (comediaclly, stereotypically popularized by space force) takes 45 minutes, we’ll leave it at that. The reason I chose hyprland is strictly on the same notion that learning skills does make the tools you use convenient, hyprland uses keybind over traditional mouse for navigating, launching apps, opening terminals, etc… and you become much faster with keybinds whereas a mouse is limited by the performance of it. using hyprland came to me as an extension when my professor taught me emacs (a TUI based text-editors). its why over the years (despite having used one initially) I just continue to despise IDE’s for writing code especially with most editors shipping proprietary AI into the mix. It’s not convenient anymore when I have to delete every code suggestion the AI makes.
“convenience” has effectively lost all of it’s meaning in technology. To me, convenience has been popularized to justify intellectual laziness, and embraced by tech orgs because they can capitalize off of it.
I use Arch, btw, but I don’t consider it the best (yes I do.) I could easily transition to Fedora, for example (I would never do that,) and be completely happy (I would rather continually hit my head with the metal stapler gun on my desk.)
Hannah Montana Linux
No further arguments needed.
The one, the only, the legend…
What made Hannah Montana Linux so good (as a joke, and as a distro), was that it was actually good. XD Good fun. Good stuff. :D
Does what I want and gets out of my way.
Bazzite just works, it runs every game I have with zero fuss, it’s easy to run Windows programs / emulators / local LLMs, AND it’s basically unbreakable.
I can’t claim it’s the best, but it’s the best for me right now.
On a gaming laptop I’m using Aurora because KDE Plasma btw (:
Bazzite has a KDE version too. I think it is more popular then the GNOME version of bazzite actually. At least according to the results of the latest steam survey
Yep I use KDE-flavored Bazzite and actually forgot GNOME was even offered! It works deliciously. Came over from Windows last winter finally and boy, the UI alone is just so much nicer.
I had avoided KDE for years due to some multi-screen resolution issues back in the day.
I’d be running gnome, and install a half dozen plugins to make it look and feel closer to Windows It was just a personal preference. Every other update some plugin I was using would be broken. I’d replace it with another plug-in or uninstall it and wait for a fix. Fight fight fight fight fight fight. Some number of years later I tried KDE again, and I realized that it did exactly what I was trying to do in Gnome but it did it out of the box.
I don’t have anything against Gnome. The same way I don’t have anything against OS X’s “window manager” or even Windows 11’s “window manager” they’re just not my preference.
Bottom left navigation, thin, stacked app indicators, bottom right tray. Fractional scaling, widgets.
I tried KDE over a decade ago before using Mint for a while. Then I saw someone’s laptop running vanilla GNOME and thought it looked nice. But a couple of years ago I realised that GNOME’s insistence on hiding settings in “tweaks”/gsettings and generally making it harder to do what I wanted was getting in the way. KDE still has the configurability that I loved when I first started using Linux and GNOME 2, without being an infinite config hellhole like the niche WMs
Mint is Ubuntu minus everything that makes Ubuntu annoying. That’s why I like it.
I considered to go back to Debian but… eh, I’m too old and impatient for that. Nowadays I mostly want things that work out of the box.
Do things not work out of the box on debian?
From what I remember*, there was always some rough corner. Such as the wi-fi, or the graphics card. Sure, Stable was rock solid, but you always needed something from Testing; and Testing in general was overall less stable than Ubuntu or Mint.
*This was years ago, so it might be inaccurate as of 2025.
Linux Mint has a Debian Edition (LMDE) if you ever wanted a Debian that Just Works.
I did use the first LMDE for some time, and I loved it, it’s a great distro. I don’t recall why I went for the Ubuntu-based Mint later on, I think it was the PPAs?
All the good parts of Ubuntu have long since been integrated upstream. And Debian’s release cycle has increased a lot so you’re not stuck with old versions anymore.
NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.
maniacally laughs while trying to avoid eye contact with 19k lines of nix config
Out of all the ways that I have tried in the past, to reproduce not just the initial state, but also the ongoing changes of a disto (ansible, saltstack, chef, bunch of Shell scripts) — nix is by far the shortest. With all of these technologies I would never have dreamed to do this for a single Maschine. But now it’s not only possible, but actually gasp enjoyable!
Mind you, if that is not the problem you want to solve, maybe install just the nix package manager in addition to your distribution, and learn to enjoy it without having to run your whole distribution this way.
You misunderstand! It has also turned into basically a hobby (and recently, a job, lol) to manage nix configs.
Those 19k lines are clean, well-structured and DRY, and do describe every little thing about ca. 30 machines.
Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement
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I use Arch since approximately 2006 or so. I like its stability (yes!), performance, rapid updates and technical simplicity. It never stands in my way and it’s fairly simple to understand, administer and modify. It’s probably the most convenient OS I’ve ever used - sure it takes time/effort to set it up but once you’re past that it’s smooth sailing. It also doesn’t change dramatically over the years (it doesn’t need to) so it’s easy to keep up with its development. Plus, I have a custom setup script for it that installs and sets up all of the basics, so if I ever need to reinstall, I’m not starting from zero.
I am eyeing NixOS as “the next step” but didn’t yet experiment with it too much. Arch is just too comfy to use and the advantages that NixOS brings aren’t yet significant enough for me to make any kind of switch to it, but I consider NIxOS (as well as its related technologies like the Nix package manager) to be the most interesting and most advanced things in the Linux world currently.
If you’re reading this as a newbie Linux user: probably don’t use any of the two mentioned above (yet). They’re not considered entry-level stuff, unless you’re interested in learning low-level (as in: highly technical) Linux stuff from the start already. NixOS/Nix in particular is fairly complex and can be a challenge even for veteran Linux admins/users to fully understand and utilize well. Start your journey with more common desktop distros like Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu.
I’ve been using a debian based system for a dozen years. Then I decided to buy a NAS and turn it into a NixOS driven media server.
JFC I thought I knew linux and I was so wrong.
For a long time I considered Gentoo the best, because I know my things around there. A month ago I said goodbye to my last Gentoo installation in favour for Debian trixie (the next stable release). Gentoo was too time consuming despite the binary repo.
If it would be my job to maintain a Gentoo system I would gladly accept, but there should be a need for it by the users. Otherwise I would just recommend Debian stable or Fedora.
My favourite is Debian over Fedora, because I often don’t need the latest versions of a software. And there is flatpak.
Tried CalculateLinux or any of the other Gentoo respins?
Toorox was the best Gentoo respin. Nothing more than a pure straight gentoo respin. Sabayon was superb before they started to try too hard. Redcore started to try too hard too. Calculate did a little bit of try-hard, but managed to retain enough modest sanity to remain good (at least, still true of the last few times I saw it). Even Funtoo started to go a little wonky.
But if you ever start to think Gentoo’s too easy and not taking up enough of your time, you can always go the other way, and jump ship to Exherbo.
I have seen at least one person moving from Gentoo to Exherbo. Would I leave Debian behind for it? No, not currently, but maybe there is time for an experiment in the future.
I’ve tried Sabayon briefly, but not seriously. At the time, it was interesting to have more pre-built binaries. Looking back now, the Gentoo binrepos are the better solution, I think.
I’ve tried Exherbo more times than I can count, but never managed to make it my daily driver. It really needs that kind of commitment to make the best of it. With Exherbo, you’ve really got to go from 0 to >9000, with nothing between, becoming a developer of it straight away.
And yeah, +1 Gentoo+binhost. Though I do miss the USE=“-*” approach to gentoo (like I did in 2011(ish)), adding things only as needed, per package. Great education. And keeps the system very tight to just meet needs, and no more.
Oh, and also…
Would I leave Debian behind for it?
No need to leave. There’s BedrockLinux, or just distrobox.
~ for the latter of which I was shown this article (titled “I stopped distro-hopping because this tool lets me run everything at once”) earlier today on libera.chat from someone who know’s Bedrock’s been my daily driver for over a decade, with Bedrock being how I ended my distro-hopping, and DistroBox being another way to end distro-hopping. ~ We’re now ((at least) two ways) past the days of having to pick just one distro. ;D
I should generally make more use of things lile podman and systemd-nspawn. Thx!
I guess running Bedrock Linux inside podman wouldn’t work, I guess. Not sure how well nesting works with containers.
Hrmm. While I’ve never bothered with containers, I don’t see why bedrock wouldn’t work in a container. Could be easy to test… set up a container with whichever distro, and try run the BedrockLinux hijack installer script on it… Don’t blame me if somehow it escapes the containment and eats your whole system … (~ I don’t see why/how it would ~ should be safe ~ but like I say, I don’t have experience with containers.)
Can’t say it’s the best, but I love Alpine. It’s light, fast, versatile and easy to use, runs on anything, and despite it being used mostly in containers and VMs, it makes for a great desktop distro aswell. :)
No one talks about how Alpine has been doing immutable and atomic installations since way before it was trendy.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Immutable_root_with_atomic_upgrades
Because it was my first distro that got me away from Windows. And yes, it’s Mint.
I started with Mandrake back in 2000 and used Red Hat at school. In 2004 Ubuntu was released and I adopted it for life. I switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu to Ubuntu MATE to Kubuntu up to this day. It’s the best because of all the quality of life additions, the stability of the LTS releases, the amount of widespread documenation, and general size of the community of users. This makes it a lot more easier to use and get help to troubleshoot any problems. So far it’s been mostly a problem free and easy experience.
Until recently…
I just discovered Zorin OS and started messing around with it in a VM. I gotta say it’s of of the best, most polished Gnome desktop experiences I’ve had so far with their free core version. While I love KDE for it’s desktop experience being the closest to Windows there is, I usually find it has WAY too many customizations to a fault. Some people like this, but I find that the more you mess with configs, the more prone to problems it gets. I also find Gnome to be more well put together and well integrated. The fact the customization options are limited means I spend more time doing what I need to do than messing around with getting my desktop just right. I just hate the default Gnome destop and whatever paradigm they tried to make. That’s why I’ve stuck with Kubuntu for a while. But with Zorin, I think they found the sweet spot. This might be my next install and I might recommend it to anyone who wants to get into Linux over Mint.
openSUSE Slowroll and Secureblue are my favorites ATM. Slowroll for gaming, Secureblue for mobile device. Both are hardened for security because that matters to me.
I recently installed Slowroll in Steam Deck’s Distrobox. First day and yt-dlp was already too outdated.😅
Adding OBS repos got weirdly broken since the last time I did it. Some packages cannot be forked into one’s home repo because they are on openSUSE’s git and
zypper ardoes not add the repo type to the offline file, sozypper refcomplains about an unknown repo.In the end I found some other repo containing a recent version of yt-dlp that I could fork into my home repo and edit the file in
/etc/zypp/repos.dby hand. I assume this is transition pain during the move from OBS to git. I hope they’ll get this done soon.
I’ve been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.
It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband’s laptop.
It’s allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I’ve switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).
