Which Distros Are Doing Best Currently?
Original question by @atmorous@lemmy.world
What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
Debian is still the best at being Debian. I rate it the least likely to give me any unpleasant surprises.
I've always liked Fedora or its various derivatives like Bazzite. They seem to have defaults that make sense, and fairly up to date software.
I also find dnf on Fedora to be a bit nicer and more streamlined compared to apt, and I've heard it's significantly easier to package software for dnf as well.
Bazzite or an immutable if you do gaming and don't need a lot of special functionality (e.g. network scanning doesn't work, document signing doesn't work and will never work, managing gpg keys, embedded firmware development, Belgian EID, etc...)
Mint if you don't have a brand new system and just want an easy experience.
Arch if you want all niche software to simply be available through the package manager and never have to find rpm/deb packages.
Debian for a server (or maybe opensuse MicroOS nowadays)
Opensuse if you really want an EU OS or something very integrated with a snapshot system.
And of course, Hannah Montana Linux if you are enlightened.
All those things don't work on immutable systems? I'm on nixos and I haven't needed signing, but I didn't know it was just not possible
Maybe people have gotten Saned for network scanning working on other things than bazzite, but I can't figure it out and the discord is never helpful.
But document signing is a technical limitation caused by flatpak. You can technically do it by installing your entire office and authentication suite on a rooted distrobox, but then that is defeating a fair amount of the point of ease of use and sandboxing. I haven't tested that though so even that might have some bugs or not work.
There are but trackers on different upstream flatpak software for it like Firefox, but it has been completely dead for 5 years with no plans on looking at it.
I can only speak to my own personal experience: Fedora and Suse are doing the best, especially with immutable distributions.
My only problem with Fedora (Workstation) is that it really likes upgrade though restart. And upgrades are daily. It can't can be turned off (to not require restart) on KDE variant, but I didn't find an option on Gnome one.
Debian exists. Ubuntu wants to go Pro. Mint is squished in the middle. Fedora is doing mad science, and OpenSuSE is in full "We have Fedora at home" mode. Arch arches, and Bazzite is in an existential crisis over the coming x86 32-bit apocalypse. Also Nix is nixing, I guess. All the inbetweeners are trying desperately to be relevant and up to date.
You forgot the one that is still compiling...
Gentoo and LFS exist as concepts. The users are compiling their project car linuxes from scratch themselves.
We're simultaneously in a place where there are more options than ever, and yet it's become increasingly clear there are really only 4-5 options.
I would have loved to see elementaryOS as a viable option, but the whole "reformat to install new release" hurdle is a mega huge downside.
Thankfully Fedora retracted the 32 bit proposal.
Still like Linux Mint.
RHEL because it's the stable distro, Arch for being best desktop distro, Fedora for building seamless experience and being arch-lite for people that don't need arch.
RHEL because it’s the stable distro,
Debian Stable would like a word.
Debian for multiple reasons doesn't even come close.
Arch seems so interesting because you install the system component by component in the command line but I've heard it has poor long term stability. Is there a distro that's like Arch for installation but more stable?
Big thing that people don't understand about Arch is that AUR is not part of distribution itself and package recipes there will break and mainteiners will go missing and arch won't care about them breaking.
Arch is extremely stable if you can read (this is not a joke). As in before doing system upgrade visit news and check if there is a need for manual steps during upgrade, you'llneed ro do something once or twice a year. And you actually need to read wiki and manual pages before doing things you aren't sure about.
As for manual step-by-step install, you can do it with almost any distro. For example you can partition disk, mount everything and install core packages using dnf --installroot=... from fedora live, same idea with debian based distros.
What do you mean by poor long term stability? It's a rolling release. I run the same installation for basically forever, while fixed releases' life-time is measured in just a few years before you lose support and need to do a full distro upgrade... which rarely seems to work without problems.
PS: I just looked it up. The first date in my pacman log in from 2014...
I'll mirror what others have said. Arch is the most stable distro I've ever used over the long term. Even with heavy AUR use, I've been rocking the same installation for over a decade on one of my computers.
I’ve heard it has poor long term stability.
Relatively speaking, sure. But I'd argue this is by design. Basically, every 'modern' distro is trying to solve the problem that come with updates on an 'open'/'free' operating system. The solution they come up with essentially dictates a huge part of the identity of the distro. As I've noted elsewhere, these include the following:
And, of course, we shouldn't forget to mention Arch's approach; lay the responsibility on the user 😅. So, Arch 'breaking'/'borking' after an update is a user error. Which other distro can tout such an impressive entry in their documentation for system maintenance?
To be fair, this makes total sense. The user can basically build their system from scratch. So..., why wouldn't they be capable to come up with their solution to the above problem? Besides, the ArchWiki continues to be a guiding light whatever solution they'd like to adopt: be it 'freezing' the kernel, or using better tested software, perhaps setting up Snapper for rollbacks etc...
Is there a distro that’s like Arch for installation but more stable?
Gentoo
5 years ago I would default to Mint because of how pain free the installation and setup process was. It would magically fix all the sound/sleep/firmware etc. issues other distros had.
Now Debian has caught up to it IMHO. Yes, you still have to add some non-free repos or firmware packages but it's really easy and after that it's mostly smooth sailing. The stability and simplicity of Debian is hard to beat. I've spent years on testing version and never had a single issue with an upgrade. It's rock solid.
Still using a mix of Debian and Ubuntu.
I tried openSUSE but didn't like it compared to Ubuntu desktop.
Doing the best for which use-case? The answers will be fundamentally different depending on the situation
It's an open ended question, just speak from your perspective/use case/problems and solutions
If someone I know has a machine with Nvidia GPU and wants to game, I always suggest Pop!_OS.
Opensuse tumbleweed for me. the most up to date packages, a btrfs file system so rollbacks are extremely simple, and great tools like yast that make management easy. Favorite distro so far.
At this point Void feels like Slackware for the 21st century. It's comprehensive and less full of "modern linux" hairballs than some others, but they seem pretty good on package updates. I like it being non-systemd as a first class thing rather than trying to backport it on an uncooperative parent distro.
Void linux is great. But their packages are actually lacking behind. They also don't want to include many new packages. And there is a huge backlog of PRs on the package repository.
Out of the box?
Fedora Workstation for my VM desktops. For servers usually Ubuntu just because it just works, but for running containers on systems with limited resources? Alphine.
In my experience Ubuntu LTS seems to do the best at checking whatever bullshit checkboxes the know-nothing corporate cybersecurity auditmonkeys care about.
I wanna give a shoutout to Manjaro, an arch based distro with a cascading testing cycle for better stability. That being said, I am using Arch and Manjaro for about a decade now and never really had any stability issues (in contrast to my tries with Ubuntu). The arch wiki stays one of the absolute best resources for Linux users on the internet, the rolling release ensures cutting edge Software, the AUR makes it very easy to provide community built packages. And then there’s Debian. Definitely my choice for servers.