I suppose it would be a bit weird if I didn't contribute.


OpenSuse Tumbleweed (it's thier rolling "testing" version, pretty up-to-date)

What I like:
-YAST. Outside of the Windows control panel, I've never seen anything like it. Sure, every DE has a control panel, but those mostly cover things the DE manages. This is a control panel for a more system level. Manage snapshots, NFS drives, boot options, etc. Sure, 90% of it I'll never use once you've set up your system, but I think the idea is really neat.
-Snapper. BTRFS is the file system it uses and that supports snapshots. They are bootable and GRUB can load them. So if something works, it's almost effortless to fix.
- Overall, the whole thing feels very polished and integrated, even for something that is more "bleeding edge" realm. I've had a few breakages, which is too be expected. The default KDE theme is pretty simple, which I like.

What I don't like:
-Zypper. It's the package manager. It's love/hate to be honest. The CLI interface is really pretty. It's clear, color coded, well laid out. It's easy to understand what it is telling you. The commands are sensical. Clearly a lot of thought went into it. What I don't like is that it doesn't give a lot of output as to what it's doing or why. Also, I cannot for the life of me figure out an equivalent to apt's autoremove. Coupled with that it defaults to --install recommends, led me to some frustration.

-Breakage. Compared to debian testing, it breaks more, especially on kernel updates. Almost always is a problem with the new kernel and a driver. I've made it a habit to wait about a week till a point release comes out for every major version. I don't know if it's because it releases faster or if it's a design thing.

I will say, this is my first distro from the rpm family after 10+ years in the deb family, so some of my complaints may be from some ignorance on my part of the differences.

Overall, I think it's a very nice distro. I'd recommend it, with the catch that it might not be for someone totally new to Linux.

For the longest of times, I was a Fedorian.

At heart, I still am.

But today, my desktop runs OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

This is mostly because while I love Fedora, and will continue to use RHEL on our servers, I just don't have the time to do upgrades anymore.

These days, I pretty much work on my business from the minute I wake up until the minute I go to bed with no breaks between.

This means pausing to upgrade a system or reinstalling etc becomes annoying fast.

Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro and so far as been more stable than Fedora although I always wondered how it was working anyway, since I used to help out with their QA 😂😂 that time we tested multi monitor and holy crap it works, parties all around. 😂😂 (pre-self employeed)

Arch is nice and I've used it in the past, but sadly it just can't offer the same level of stability (in my experience).

I also wanted to try out a new DE, so I researched which distros best had KDE "out the box", SUSE pretty much topped this list (If I'm going to try a DE for the first time in many years, I want to see it at it's best so I can make a fair decision as to whether I like it.)

And, I have since fallen for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It works beautifully and is sooo stable it's actually kinda boringly stable, but just works.

It gets out the way, works and can be updated quickly without needing reinstalling (not as quick as dnf imo).

I like how the snapshots are integrated, so after a zipper dupper I can just reboot knowing if it's busted I can just go into the other snap. No reinstalling or complicated recoveries.

So I actually really enjoy using it,

But it's not Fedora 😅😞 But I have RHEL in my life daily so I "sort of" get my Fedora fix.

I might try to break it at some point just to get that old Fedora feeling back.

But overall I'm now happy with OpenSUSE. 👍

Quoting: denyasisI know the stats from Valve, the internet, etc,etc about what out there is more popular. But I also know that doesn't tell the whole story.



So what distro do you use?
AND.....
What do you like about it? What don't you like about it?





Side note: I wanted to make a bit of a joke and call the thread "Distro Wars!!! Fight!!", but figured people would just show up here already angry. Also:
1) It's against the rules. I can't find them right now... But I do remember them. No distro wars at all.
2) If the stereotype has any truth, we'd probably all hurt ourselves trying to fight anyway, being nerds and all. Except for that one person who works out 10 times a day, has 15 black belts and runs LFS (obviously, lol).
3) Remember those rules? Your talking about you're distro. No crapping on other people's choices. This is your chance to talk up your distro, not down to others.

I use Manjaro usually. Right now I have switched back to Linux Mint though. There is a bug that makes Manjaro boot really slow when full disk encryption is used. My Pinephone boots faster than Manjaro on an NVME right now. I got tired of it and no idea when it will be fixed. Manjaro says it is up to Calamares to fix so who knows. Overall I love Manjaro because they have a great selection of editions with different DE's preinstalled. It has a lot of GUI menus for things that other distros require the terminal for. For instance they have Pacmac preinstalled as well as having a GUI kernel manager for easy installation and uninstallation of kernels. Manjaro has a very easy to use graphical installer, which many other distros have, but it has some options that others lack such as offering file system options such as BTRFS where many just have one option unless you want to manually partition things yourself. Manjaro has offered me a very stable experience. I have had as few of issues using it for the past few years as I had on various other distros. One trade off for the stability is that they hold back packages longer than most rolling release distros so you have to wait longer for new versions but they are still far more up to date than any point release distro I have tried.

Linux Mint is also a great distro albeit with older kernels and Mesa.

When I found Arch, I was looking for a syatem which I would configure, uses less than 500 MiB RAM on idle so I could use Chromium and a Win10 VM at the same time on my old PC with only 4 GB ram and boots fast. When I saw the ArchWiki, I knew I was at the right place. I installed Arch “the classical way” and learned the basics. I installed Enlightenment and I had successfully gone below 300 MiB on idle.

Now all of these are irrelevant because I have more than enough RAM (the VM no longer exists btw) and a NVMe so boot time is low. (firmware init is 7 secs which is almost half of the boot time) In fact I want to move away from Arch because I want to use a distro I can recommend to anyone. Tumbleweed, Pop, Garuda are all OK for me because they provide latest drivers and kernel OOTB. The only thing that holds me back is Roblox, it needs a custom tkg build of wine, on Arch (based) you end up with a package of wine but on others wine is manually installed.

Quoting: denyasisSnapper. BTRFS is the file system it uses and that supports snapshots. They are bootable and GRUB can load them. So if something works, it's almost effortless to fix.

I saw BTRFS for the first time on openSUSE and I just loved it. The fun thing with Arch is that you can grab whatever from any distro, apply to Arch and enjoy the best of all worlds It’s just you have to do it manually and you learn more about it during the process.

Quoting: GuestI always wanted to try Arch, but TW is running so smooth that I never found a reason to do so As BlackBloodRum wrote - it's almost boring how updates etc. just work

I liked TW when I tried it but the only problem for me were updates I updated it once-twice a month and I had multi GB large updates, during package extraction either Firefox or Konsole (it just disappeared) or the entire desktop crashed (and I am back to the login screen) with zypper also crashing in the latter two cases. That's not because zypper hit an error but probably because zypper ate all the resources (disk I/O? RAM?). But, weirdly I could just continue the update process as if nothing had happened.

Quoting: mr-victoryThe only thing that holds me back is Roblox, it needs a custom tkg build of wine, on Arch (based) you end up with a package of wine but on others wine is manually installed.

I'm not sure if this helps much, Lutris lets you run various wine versions and installs them itself. I know it's kind of an end around the package manager, but it might help you with your migration.

------


So I had an HDD die on my laptop yesterday. I installed an SSD and some new RAM. I decided to try Manjaro on it. The live environment was surprisingly snappy for running off USB2 so I installed it to try it out. It's very responsive even on an 9 year old laptop. I haven't installed anything other than the base system and tweaked a few settings (btrfs snapshots, pamac settings, a few applet settings). XFCE is my favorite DE, so it was very familiar.

I'll be adding SSH keys tomorrow, installing a Nextcloud client to restore some home folders from my server and adding some NFS mounts.


So far it seems really nice 👍.

Last edited by denyasis on 15 January 2022 at 2:22 pm UTC

Raspberry Pi 4 | 8GB - Twister OS

This is my current main rig and it's been a blast. Gaming wise, I'm just playing retro games on it. Work/Family/Socializing usages it does everything I need it to do without issue.

I love how polished and catered TwisterOS feels. It's a very get up and go distro. Very little for me to do outside of configure it to my liking.

Taking the Raspberry Pi 4 off of SD card to SSD, makes everything lightning fast.

System76 Gazelle Pro - POP OS

This is my main gaming/work laptop. It's been sweet also. I'm still playing mostly retro games on it but I do play the following games on it - "Paranautical Activity" via itch.io, "Super Bomberman R Online" via Stadia and "Basingstoke" via itch.io.

POP OS does everything right for me. Again very catered distro that leaves me with more time to play and explore vs tinker.

I'm considering selling my laptop once I end Basingstoke and continue my computing life on SBCs. With so many retro games supported now with online MP, I just don't see a reason for me to have a powerful machines like this anymore.

Last edited by Mezron on 15 January 2022 at 11:17 pm UTC

Arch Linux

What I like about it:

- Rolling Release: Always the newest packages & security updates

- Easy packaging system: You can very easily adapt package source files and also create your own

- Easier bug reporting etc.: In comparison to other distros

- Community Distro: So no business non-sense, at least not with the distro itself

- Many more interesting packages available in the AUR


What I dislike about it:

- The motto of Arch Linux can sometimes be very real: do it yourself distro...
So major changes in packages are not really announced, and regarding configuration you depend on the wiki being up-to-date, otherwise you have to figure out things on your own

- Installation can be complicated, but third-party GUI installers are available

- No native GUI package manager, but third-party software (pamac from Manjaro) is available

All in All

I like Arch very much, but I would wish for an Arch+ distro that solves many or even all of the mentioned downsides.
I clearly don't understand why no one is making it, but I guess the focus for many is different.

For example I always read about how things have to get easier (e.g. for KDE, Gnome, a lot if distros and programs etc.), which seems to mean: less configuration options; and that is not really my idea of a customizable distro.

Last edited by dr_jekyll on 15 January 2022 at 9:09 pm UTC

That’s where EndeavourOS and Garuda jumps in! EOS and Garuda give you a GUI installer and Garuda also automatically does the manual interventions along with the update process.