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.
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.
Arch, BTW
PKGBUILDs
The AUR
Great wiki
NixOS
Easy and fearless updates
declarative configuration
Rollbacks
Dependency Hell, begone
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
Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. It does sound complicated haha. I should probably follow along the YT video. Thanks again!
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.
NixOS. Reproducible, Wide Package selection, Hard to fuck up + Not yet another Arch based distro
Fedora
Cutting edge application releases so I get the newest toys after they’ve been decently tested
Only FOSS software and repositories unless otherwise enabled
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.
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.
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!
Gentoo
Manjaro
• Supports a wide variety of hardware, including ARM devices such as the Pinebook Pro.
• Up-to-date rolling release.
• Multiple DE’s available with customized, clean interfaces.
Arch Linux
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.
- 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
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.
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.
Yep. And I still forgot to mention one thing. It is a 2016 Macbook Pro, which basically means just more work fixing.
Arch (BTW)
I’m currently happy with it
So many powerful tools that are not easy to find on other distros.
Basically, have fine tuned my setup so much that it’s almost impossible to think of another distro.