Which Linux distribution do you prefer?

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

This needs a major update. I took the liberty of rejuvenating it.

So, which distro do you use? Arch? Mint? Other? Let us know!

Please don't select them all.. Be nice about it.

Nick H's old thread: https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1378162-which-linux-distribution-do-you-prefer/

Edit: If you want me to add anything, do ask!  

 

[xrobwx71]

Currently, I'm using Parrot on a laptop. Garuda on a Desktop, both standalone.  

[Max Norris]

Been working with EndeavourOS for a few months now. I'm a fan of Arch but not a fan of having to go through the motions of setting the thing up. It's not 100% after the install, some "side things" are still DIY, for example printing, Dolphin's thumbnailers aren't installed, stuff like that, not exactly hard though as you're still using the excellent Arch wiki. The Yay package manager is very good too, no issues with the Aur, and no breakage or held packages like you get with Manjaro. Pretty solid overall. Most of my machines are running it now minus my full-time gaming rig (Win10), but that one has Debian via WSL2.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 24/12/2023 at 11:22, Max Norris said:

Been working with EndeavourOS for a few months now. I'm a fan of Arch but not a fan of having to go through the motions of setting the thing up. It's not 100% after the install, some "side things" are still DIY, for example printing, Dolphin's thumbnailers aren't installed, stuff like that, not exactly hard though as you're still using the excellent Arch wiki. The Yay package manager is very good too, no issues with the Aur, and no breakage or held packages like you get with Manjaro. Pretty solid overall. Most of my machines are running it now minus my full-time gaming rig (Win10), but that one has Debian via WSL2.

I knew someone would choose Endeavour. As it's pretty popular. That's why I added it. Seems I was right

[Nick H. Supervisor]

In preparation for my new laptop coming at the start of next year I've gone with Kubuntu instead of Mint. I've got no problems with Mint, but Kubuntu seems to offer more customisation for the overall look. And as I pointed out here, I can be a bit fickle when it comes to how I want my desktop to look.

[+Good Bot, Bad Bot Subscriber¹]

Myself I have been going back and forth between Ubuntu and Fedora. The same with my DE between GNOME and KDE. How is Fedora not on the list but Slackware is? LOL

I prefer a more professional and well supported Linux distro these days.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

Fedora isn't on there? I swear I put that in. I'll go and edit that..

[Matthew S.]

I usually go with Ubuntu as my distro of choice but have been known to dabble in Fedora, Gentoo, and Linux From Scratch (This is really not for the faint of heart) from time to time.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 25/12/2023 at 00:10, Matthew S. said:

I usually go with Ubuntu as my distro of choice but have been known to dabble in Fedora, Gentoo, and Linux From Scratch (This is really not for the faint of heart) from time to time.

Totally, Linux From Scratch is just like Arch/Gentoo in a way. You need to install everything. No strings attached.

[inactive]

Mint ; currently 21.2-Xfce. I prefer Xfce over Mint's flagship Cinnamon (as it fixed a issue I had with GPU accelerated playback on at least 2 out of 3 computers I have). it's using 5.15 kernel which is basically from Oct/Nov 2021 (you can use newer kernels if needed, but the Mint team generally recommends sticking with the default kernel unless you need to use a newer kernel).

I am of the mindset that 'if' there is a standard in the Linux world it's probably one with a Debian/Ubuntu base and I feel Mint is one of the all-around reliable choices among those Debian/Ubuntu variations (as things tend to just work and are probably less likely to break vs other random Linux distros from what I heard). basically if your hardware is supported it's hard to go wrong with Mint as it's one of the better choices for Windows users coming into the Linux world for sure and it's supported for nearly 5 years on each major release, which each major release is released 2 years apart and each release gets three point releases (i.e. 21.0, 21.1, 21.2, 21.3 (21.3 should be released VERY soon as it's in BETA testing at the moment)) which are 6 months apart... Mint 20 (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS base) was released mid-2020 and supported until April 2025. Mint 21 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base) was released about mid-2022 and supported until April 2027. which basically means when Mint 22 (should be Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) is released, which will probably be about mid-2024, it will be supported until April 2029.

ill have been on Linux (Mint) 5 years (on my main PC etc exclusively (i5-3550 CPU/NVIDIA 1050 Ti 4GB GPU etc)) in Jan 2024. it's nice to get away from Windows junk/bloat and thankfully the limited amount of Windows software I do use (Foobar2000/ImgBurn etc) works on Linux through Wine etc (I generally set it up through PlayOnLinux). even the limited amount of games I replay all work on Mint to through Lutris etc.

for the record... my current system uptime is 124 days and counting which is my all-time record uptime ; NOTE: at the 80 day mark I had to issue 'pulseaudio -k' (from terminal) which basically restarts sound server as I was experiencing sound crackling issues on the HDMI output to TV even though my standard PC speakers connected to 3.5mm jack were still fine. but after doing that it went back to normal on the HDMI connection and so far so good. my previous record uptime was 105 days (and prior to that 99 days). ill see how far I can push it at this point as my guess is it will probably hold until a power outage. there have been eight kernel updates since I last rebooted.

p.s. Merry CHRISTmas everyone and have a happy new year

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

I've been on Arch since the beginning of the year I think. Before that, Manjaro for a long time. Arch is not as difficult to install as I expected. Their archinstall script is rather straight forward. And there are good Youtube videos explaining the process. I was on Ubuntu before, but my old laptop struggled with its 8 GB of RAM 😝.

[Matthew S.]

On 25/12/2023 at 01:18, Mindovermaster said:

Totally, Linux From Scratch is just like Arch/Gentoo in a way. You need to install everything. No strings attached.

Not sure about Mint, but LFS you're compiling from RAW packages, grabbing the sources yourself, no package manager lol.  

Haven't used Gentoo in a long time but I remember they at least used to have it where you compile it specifically for your system, think they called them stages and it determined how difficult it was to get a system up and running.

[C:Amie]

Debian for servers, PopOS currently for client. I had a lot of problems with Ubuntu that I just do not have with PopOS - not all of which were Wayland related. It remains to be seen if I stay with them now that they are drifting away from Gnome in favour of rolling their own shell, but it will be interesting to see what they come out with in Rust and whether it catches on.

I've tried Mint recently, but have never been able to get on with KDE - and still couldn't a couple of months ago, so on Gnome I stay.

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

I use Linux more on servers / single purpose devices.

Servers - Ubuntu Server. The documentation out there is good, which is handy as I've been able to achieve my desired result for some personal projects and learn more about Linux in the process. Any problems I've run in to someone else has already had, so its usually possible to resolve them easily enough.

HTPC - LibreELEC. A fantastic distro for HTPC's. Boots very quickly directly in to Kodi, complete with mappings for popular remote controls, allowing the remote to wake / sleep the HTPC out the box. In addition Tvheadend is available as an additional package which made the transition from Windows Media Center very straightforward. 

NAS - Unraid. A NAS distro aimed at the enthusiast / home user. Add your drives and it will pool them together, allowing up to two drives to be used for parity, to recover any of your failed data drives. I also run various Docker containers on this which run services on my home network, such as Pi-Hole.  Some reasons I chose Unraid over TrueNAS is the ability easily add drives as you go and only spin up the drive which actually has the data on been accessed. An important consideration with energy costs these days.

(TrueNAS is clearly better for the enterprise for anyone wondering why I didn't use that, however its really of no benefit to me for 8 drives to be spun up all at once to access some media, the read / write speeds of a single drive are fine for my home network.)

Laptop - PopOS. I see this as a more refined Ubuntu, I really like how full disk encryption is enabled by default with no messing about. As PopOS is based on Ubuntu theirs a lot a good relevant documentation and tutorials out there. I also like the way the GNOME desktop environment works compared to KDE, so seemed a great choice to keep my old Macbook Air going which is no longer supported, however still perfectly fine for my needs.

[devHead]

I have distro-hopped quite a bit, but I keep coming back to Fedora Workstation. Currently running Fedora 39 and it's super stable and good.

[1for-matik]

I have tested many distribution too. My preference are Fedora (for an updated fixed release) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for a very stable rolling release. For an easy immutable distro, I prefer Fedora Silverblue over MicroOS.

[pearlharbor49]

Mint Xfce is my 2021 HPAIO AMD Ryzen 5 desktop first choice thanks to its speed, dependability, and sound support. Currently, I use the 21.3 beta -- stable as 21.2 -- and it is far faster to boot, load apps, and shut down compared to Windows 11 23H2V2. I also use MX 23 AHS and LMDE 6 on the same desktop for the same reasons.

I recently installed Lubuntu 23.1 on one of my laptops, a 2019 ASUS Zenbook 13. Finding elementaryOS 7.1 too buggy and GhostBSD not supporting sound "out of the box," Lubuntu was a pleasant surprise. Like the desktop above, I dual boot it and Windows 11 23H2.

[FateTrap]

Although I have certain preferences I use all different systems depending on the hardware and hardware use-case. Usually it is one of the following systems.

Easy difficulty
PCLinuxOS -- https://pclosusers.com/communityiso/LXQt/community-pclinuxos64-lxqt-2023.11.iso
ROSA Fresh Desktop -- https://mirror.rosalinux.ru/rosa/rosa2021.1/iso/ROSA.FRESH.12/lxqt/ROSA.FRESH.LXQT.12.4.x86_64.uefi.iso
mageia -- https://www.mageia.org/fr/downloads/
OpenMandriva -- https://www.openmandriva.org
GhostBSD -- https://www.ghostbsd.org
Clear Linux -- https://www.clearlinux.org/downloads.html
Mint -- https://linuxmint.com/download.php
EndeavourOS -- https://endeavouros.com
ALT Linux -- http://nightly.altlinux.org/sisyphus/tested/regular-lxqt-latest-x86_64.iso
nobara -- https://nobaraproject.org

Intermediate difficulty
openSUSE -- https://www.opensuse.org
Void Linux -- https://repo-default.voidlinux.org/live/current/void-live-x86_64-20230628-xfce.iso
Alpine Linux -- https://www.alpinelinux.org/
OpenBSD -- https://www.openbsd.org
Artix Linux -- https://artixlinux.org/download.php
Devuan -- https://devuan.org

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 29/12/2023 at 05:59, FateTrap said:

Although I have certain preferences I use all different systems depending on the hardware and hardware use-case. Usually it is one of the following systems.

Easy difficulty
PCLinuxOS -- https://pclosusers.com/communityiso/LXQt/community-pclinuxos64-lxqt-2023.11.iso
ROSA Fresh Desktop -- https://mirror.rosalinux.ru/rosa/rosa2021.1/iso/ROSA.FRESH.12/lxqt/ROSA.FRESH.LXQT.12.4.x86_64.uefi.iso
mageia -- https://www.mageia.org/fr/downloads/
OpenMandriva -- https://www.openmandriva.org
GhostBSD -- https://www.ghostbsd.org
Clear Linux -- https://www.clearlinux.org/downloads.html
Mint -- https://linuxmint.com/download.php
EndeavourOS -- https://endeavouros.com
ALT Linux -- http://nightly.altlinux.org/sisyphus/tested/regular-lxqt-latest-x86_64.iso
nobara -- https://nobaraproject.org

Intermediate difficulty
openSUSE -- https://www.opensuse.org
Void Linux -- https://repo-default.voidlinux.org/live/current/void-live-x86_64-20230628-xfce.iso
Alpine Linux -- https://www.alpinelinux.org/
OpenBSD -- https://www.openbsd.org
Artix Linux -- https://artixlinux.org/download.php
Devuan -- https://devuan.org

You can't be using 16 different distros.. Unless you have that many PCs.

[MuffinMullet09]

Currently using Ubuntu on my gaming laptop, runs sweet as and I prefer to use KDE Desktop. Runs pretty well.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 11/05/2024 at 09:32, Mullet2990 said:

Currently using Ubuntu on my gaming laptop, runs sweet as and I prefer to use KDE Desktop. Runs pretty well.

That Kubuntu then? And what version?

[Nick H. Supervisor]

On 11/05/2024 at 15:32, Mullet2990 said:

Currently using Ubuntu on my gaming laptop, runs sweet as and I prefer to use KDE Desktop. Runs pretty well.

 

On 11/05/2024 at 16:45, Mindovermaster said:

That Kubuntu then? And what version?

It might just be Ubuntu, but he installed KDE after installing. Although in that case I would think it makes more sense to go with Kubuntu.

My new laptop (Framework 16) came in last month and I've installed Kubuntu. Still on 23.10 at the moment. The only issue I'm having with it is VLC. I'm not quite sure what causes it, but occasionally when trying to go to the next video it'll freeze up and crash. I've changed the video output to force X11 and I'm not sure that it has happened since, but it's a bit weird.  Newer hardware, I guess...

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 11/05/2024 at 10:55, Nick H. said:

 

It might just be Ubuntu, but he installed KDE after installing. Although in that case I would think it makes more sense to go with Kubuntu.

My new laptop (Framework 16) came in last month and I've installed Kubuntu. Still on 23.10 at the moment. The only issue I'm having with it is VLC. I'm not quite sure what causes it, but occasionally when trying to go to the next video it'll freeze up and crash. I've changed the video output to force X11 and I'm not sure that it has happened since, but it's a bit weird.  Newer hardware, I guess...

Yeah, I had problems like you said with VLC. I use SMPlayer now, and had no trouble. Shrug.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

On 11/05/2024 at 17:36, Mindovermaster said:

Yeah, I had problems like you said with VLC. I use SMPlayer now, and had no trouble. Shrug.

Hmm... I'm getting old and stuck in my ways. The idea of switching to a different player is tough.

[Max Norris]

On 11/05/2024 at 11:55, Nick H. said:

It might just be Ubuntu, but he installed KDE after installing. Although in that case I would think it makes more sense to go with Kubuntu.

Got a laptop running Kubuntu 24.04 specifically because it's running Plasma 5 and not 6. 6, at least for me, is still quirky (some buttons I have to click multiple times before it "sees" it for example), some extensions and such that I regularly use aren't available yet, etc. Pretty much the only option if you want to stay with Plasma 5 for a while. It's been very stable and reliable, except on my one PC. Install and update, bam black screen on boot. For whatever reason Plymouth hard-locks on boot, need to disable the "splash" kernel option. Other systems, no problem. Been brilliantly solid otherwise. I usually go for a bleeding edge rolling release, but because of my fondness for Plasma 5, I think I'll stick around with Kubuntu for a while. 

 

On 11/05/2024 at 12:50, Nick H. said:

Hmm... I'm getting old and stuck in my ways. The idea of switching to a different player is tough.

Got a little emotional when I saw that Amarok finally released a new version after what, 6 years? Like finding a long lost relative.