Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.
Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.
RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.
Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
But…
But why bother using gentoo then?
Because portage is GOAT. Also see this comment higher up.
GOAT
Gentleman Of All Trades
I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.
Well, I like gentoo for it’s top notch security and I see why you’d use it for extremely security sensitive applications, but people that use it as a desktop are nuts.
I’m not saying anyone is wrong for shying away from Gentoo, but using a comprehensive desktop environment, systemd, and
gentoo-kernelgives a very non-fiddly experience.Combine that with running updates overnight or honestly just running them in the background while you work, and it’s not nearly as bad as its reputation.
Still very much a commitment vs other distros, but not as bonkers as it can seem.
Damn I’m contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?
I miss /usr/ports. I could spend days just exploring its contents.
I miss an /etc structure that wasn’t a complete mess.
I miss UFS and its soft updates.
I miss the stability of fBSD 3 and 4.
I miss the ease of which you tweaked, compiled, and installed a new kernel.
And just because of the hilarious legacy that was obsolete 20 years beforw I started with it, I miss the concept of font-servers.
The main reason for my migration was the bigger userbase of linux where it was easier to find people who has resolved whatever issue I was having, plus nvidia drivers. Plus I’ve only needed to use fBSD once professionally.
From your experience I don’t see red flags for me so I’ll probably try for my next reinstall. Thanks for your honest opinion
Maybe check out Void Linux as well, the creator used to work on NetBSD before starting Void
Ubuntu. It’s violating many rules of freedom, and just isn’t good. Their DE spins aren’t good, snaps aren’t good
Hard disagree. Their GNOME implementation is great, the distro is stable and snaps are fine. It’s just not quite as libre as some people want.
And didn’t take ages to get a minor version.
The first time I tried ubuntu I did not install it because it felt like half of the screen space was used up by the sidebar, top bar and window decoration so yeah.
That little detail put me off of installing linux for like a year or so because I did not knowthat you can easily change stuff like that
I get why they do that, but I don’t like the [letter]ubuntus because it gives users the wrong idea of what entails a distro. It leads to them confusing distros with DEs. To me, distos are more about the community and release cycle with some major technical differences like package managers. Yes, having different default settings and programs play a role in this as well, so you could be justified in saying MX Linux isn’t the same as Debian Stable, but I don’t think the [letter]ubuntus deviate that much from just installing the corresponding DE on Ubuntu.
Redhat. Wouldn’t touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
Well, Ubuntu. I’ve been skeptical of it from the beginning, but I did use it on and off in the 00’s. Canonical has since gone out of their way to make sure I won’t install their shit on my computers.
Recent developments have also somewhat soured me on Fedora.
I don’t like Canonical and Red Hat, so I wouldn’t use their distros out of principle. On top of that, I don’t like Snaps, and Ubuntu’s customizations done to GNOME.
From Fedora, I don’t like Calamares. The rest is great.
Manjaro doesn’t play nice with either upstream nor downstream and has GTK apps that don’t follow GNOME’s design guidelines, this last point also applies to Endeavor OS.
Vanilla OS is unusable for me, AB Root is hard, and I can’t follow any online guides, tutorials or scripts. But their UX/UI is drool worthy. Blend OS has Waydroid out of the box but it’s immutability is hard for me.
Debian is awesome but I don’t like it for my work / gaming rig. Old kernel and packages. Best ever for servers.
All Ubuntu derivatives are old for me, so no. But I liked Zorin the best.
Deepin, I’m afraid of Chinese gov backdoors. Most probably paranoia.
I settled on Crystal Linux (arch based), has the nicest UI but they don’t provide a GUI for package management, and they have handled their repos irresponsibly. It’s more of a hobby distro, but a beautiful one.
Ubuntu. I can’t stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
I really liked unity 😞
Hannah Montana for being so bloated
Hater. Hannah Montana Linux is a masterpiece
I cannot tolerate Hannah Montana Linux slander
Is ChromeOS a distro? (obvious reasons)
I can’t really think of another one I don’t like. I had a bad time on Debian but that is because my use case conflicted with it, not because it’s bad.
Maybe so. For me it was that even Sid was too outdated for me (e.g. with native Linux games and some software development), and to try and Frankenstein it into what I wanted was effort and instability I didn’t want, especially when some Ubuntu-derivatives were much better suited for my personal-use situation.
I don’t know how much bloat Mint adds
Not enough to make me think about it, it’s not like I’m running a server or fighting for storage space. But if the thought of Flatpaks is enough to frighten, then it could be a problem.
Ubuntu.It’ went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
Serious question: what do you not like about snaps? I find the isolation and dependency desolation to be pretty great.
Snap is vendor lock in. They don’t work on many distros, tooling pushes their platform, and they control the only store.
For desktop apps Flatpak is just technically better anyway so what’s the point.
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I much prefer the AUR and native system packages to flatpak. It’s the big advantage Arch has over other distros, just how much software is natively available due to the AUR. There are a few cases where flatpak works better but generally I prefer all my apps to share one set of up to date dependencies.
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If I run
apt install firefox, I expect a deb, not a snapdeleted by creator
Any 10 or more year support distro because they increase the range of versions that stuff has to work with by 5 extra years and any knowledge I gain about those ancient versions will never be useful again. They also delay a lot of new features in protocols, file formats,… where a large majority of clients needs support before the next phase of introducing a feature can be started.
Waydroid could fix that gap tho, the same way Wine/Proton does on the desktop
Waydroid already works really well, it’s just small things like notification support that are missing
This! I used Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver for 1 1/2 years. The OS itself was anything but perfect but the real problem was definetly the app ecosystem. WayDroid(an android “emulator”) optimization is probably the way to go for linux on mobile
Yeah there’s no way a viable Linux phone could be made without the ability to run Android apps.
I think we’re probably at least a few years away from being able to daily drive Linux on modern phones with functioning things like NFC payments and a decent native app collection. It’s definitely coming but it has far less momentum than even the Linux desktop does.
That’s the case with almost all FOSS projects at the beginning
Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I’ve been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I’ve never use them myself.
Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.
Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.
Interesting that you feel Arch is opinionated. After using several distros I finally settled on Arch because I felt it was not opinionated compared to e.g. Ubuntu. I have to choose and install every part of the system myself, and I like how that gives me a clean system. I like to use the Awesome window manager, and with other distros I would always end up with a different desktop installed next to Awesome. Can you say how you feel Arch is opinionated?
I feel it is highly opinionated because they only officially support a fairly small amount of packages. They’re not particularly more up-to-date than say openSuse Tumbleweed. A Debian netinstall is equally a barebones system I can install exactly what I am looking for, and don’t need to fiddle with third party repo’s like the AUR. As far as I know, almost every distro will let you do a barebones headless install, then build up your system yourself. Arch is certainly less opinionated than Ubuntu, but that’s not a big accomplishment these days.
If I were to desire a highly specific environment where I wanted to exactly manage each program’s dependency chain myself, Gentoo seems like a much better tool for the job. For example, Arch officially requires systemD, Gentoo does not. As far as I know Gentoo makes no assumptions on how your system is setup, from preboot to Wayland session.
I could just be out of date, as I use NixOS as my workstation and server OS, using Debian for some older servers I haven’t migrated yet. I get the impression from Arch, the few times I have used it, is that its niche is appealing to a particular kind of user, rather than being a good solution to a particular kind of problem. That’s not bad, its huge reason why its popular. Other distros do the same thing as Arch, sometimes better sometimes worse, but Arch is selling an aesthetic, rather than a tool.
I never realized how small the number of official Arch packages is compared to Debian (13751 vs 171937 according to wikipedia ). And I see your point about Arch being opinionated. Thanks.
I am very conflicted about Arch. I similarly disliked it for actual use, because it’s so unstable. On the other hand, the arch docs are a goldmine.
I think it just depends on what you want to do with your system. Do you like to tinker? Arch (and similar distros) are great. Do you just want things to work mostly out of the box? Use an Ubuntu flavor or an Ubuntu derivative.
Sorry mate. I love them all! All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well. Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.
