I’m very curious of which distro users loves the most that they have it on their daily hardware?
Gentoo, it just works
Fedora. Any kind.
I use Bunsenlabs and like it a lot
I just installed Bazzite about a month ago and love it! Used Ubuntu in the past and it was ok, but eventually went back to Windows. I definitely don’t feel that way about Bazzite though, I think I might stick with it as my primary OS!
I use Gentoo and I love it. The installation process is a bit more complex than Arch but it doesn’t have to be if you choose the precompiled kernel.
The package management is extremely flexible and the community are great. I have a morning routine where I log onto my gentoo desktop before work and update everything; would compare it to raking one of those miniature buddhist sand gardens. Very theraputic!
Have got Debian on an old thinkpad too because it is too under resourced to compile everything. I think Debian is amazing for a solid, reliable distro if you have weak hardware.
Nobody has mentioned immutables yet?!
I finally dipped my toes into trying a new distro over the summer and have been really impressed with Project Bluefin. All the familiarity of Gnome for existing Ubuntu or Debian users but with a completely hands off rolling update experience.
The main drawbacks are the slight complexity of how the fuck to install stuff on an immutable system. In theory you use Homebrew for CLI apps and flatpak for GUI apps but I’m really not a fan of installing from sources other than the original dev.
Bazzite is immutable, it worked generally okay for me but I swapped back to mint because I had to use a smart card reader and getting it to work on an immutable was a royal pain
You can also run a distrobox and install stuff normally from whatever distro’s repos, then export the applications so they’re available like native. Works really seamlessly in my experience
Fedora Atomic, especially Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora.
Nearly unbreakable, very reliable and stable in everyday use, needs no maintenance (updates itself, etc.) and more!
Debian Stable. Predictable, low-maintenance, and well-supported. From time to time, I think about switching over to Alpine or even BSD, but the software selection and abundance of Q&A posts for Debian and its derivatives keeps me coming back. Having been a holdout on older Windows versions in the past, I’m quite used to waiting for new features and still amazed at how much easier life is with a proper package manager.
MX Linux is the best, obviously. Otherwise it wouldn’t be #1 on DistroWatch, right? /j
There isn’t a best distro, tho I stick to the root of a distro tree, meaning arch / debian.
Why are fedora and suse often not mentioned considering theyre not forks of anything? (as far as im aware)
Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam’s chart -in which ProtonDB’s data is used- does indicate to this as well.
Just my 2 cents.
Kinda crazy considering fedoras perks and accessibility tbh. Dont know much ab suse tho as i have very little experience with it
I don’t know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).
A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.
Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.
For Fedora specifically, people couldn’t regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.
Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it’s not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don’t think it has even peaked yet.
steamos? its going to have its own release detached from the deck? thatd be so cool
Yup; at least to some extent.
I didn’t mention them, because I simply haven’t used them yet.
Endeavouraos, arch but also easy
If there were a universal answer to this, there wouldn’t be any others.
I myself currently use Debian (testing), have for some years now, but I have used other distros in the past too.
I use fedora-based atomic distros for the reliability and security. Nothing else really runs SELinux out of the box and I care about security so that’s a necessary baseline. I roll my own distro though using BlueBuild, and base it off the SecureBlue image of Silverblue. Just using SecureBlue gets you nearly to what I use though
GNU Guix
The best for my user cases atm
For work bluefin For general stations mint For gaming cachyos or bazzite
