I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.
Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days
I don’t like anything Debian based. The package manager always sits at the core of the experience, and it’s just a horrible experience. With a bit of manual intervention, you can upgrade an Arch install from 10 years ago. I’ve never managed to update any Debian based distribution from the previous release. That aside, a lot of what I do relies on newest packages, and having something that’s 5 years out of date just isn’t for me
I have literally never had any upgrade issues on debian that wasn’t something mentioned in release notes(been using it since debian 7). I am guessing you did a lot of things they tell you specifically not to do on this page:
Honestly, given the ways shit broke, you’d think that. One of the cases was on a practically fresh install with a few flatpaks, and it was updated exactly as the distro specified it
I’ve had the opposite experience. Updating my apt sources.list and running dist-upgrade always worked for me on Debian (though most of the time I just run unstable which is rolling) but on Arch it seems like if I don’t upgrade regularly sometimes I’ll get hit with signature key errors because the key database is outdated and then have to go run some other command to update the keys before a pacman -Syu will work. I love both distros, but there’s no better way to make your users not give a shit about security than making said security interrupt their workflow. Most of the time I just disable the key check in pacman.conf so that the damn thing will upgrade successfully.
Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck’s up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.
ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren’t present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn’t get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
For the uninitiated, as someone who’s looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what’s not to like about this?
Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
For context:
Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it’s a complex problem and while they’ve made some improvements, it’s slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
Performance and functionality.
When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I’d click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
I’m talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a “regular” app.
The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get “normal” versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I’ve been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don’t like what the platform has been becoming.
Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
One word: snapd
If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
Zorin is my fav.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
Lol, how does booting quicker prevent you from doing work?
If booting quicker means to have less/older software or a bloated system once running…
And also, I have work to do… I don’t like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.
I thought that’s gentoo.
Ubuntu. I never liked how it becomes a total mess when it goes EOL.
9 month for normal and 5 years for LTS. It’s not that difficult
I’ve had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There’s always some random crash that I don’t know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you’re installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I’m the user and I’m root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I’ll go to Windows.
RebeccaBlackOS
Because I can only use it on Friday Friday!
The only one that really pissed me off was a distro called biglinux. It’s arch based and very popular in Brazil. It’s actually very stable. Everything works great. It’s got some nice features.
Butttt, it uses latte dock or panel (kde). They have built in presets for how to arrange the panels and what not. It’s nice, however, I was trying to move some panels around from the base options and broke kde. I wasn’t doing anything more than changing GUI settings and the whole desktop broke. I seriously don’t understand.
Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
Every time I have used manjaro on x86 it has been broken within a few months. Their Raspberry Pi 4 port is pretty stable though for some reason.
I don’t like Ubuntu because of Snaps and because I never successfully upgraded from one release to the next without having to reinstall. Also, having a bar at the side AND the top is dumb.
I don’t like Mint because it’s just Ubuntu with even more stuff added.
I don’t like OpenSuse because when you install and administer it, you can feel it was made by Germans.
I don’t like Manjaro because it’s unstable by design due to the dev’s lazyness.
I don’t like Slackware because it installs 12 different programs for the same purpose but not the ones everyone wants, and throws rocks at you when you try to make it do something it wasn’t designed for by its Benevolent Dictator Who Knows Best (like boot from UEFI). Also, all of its users are currently sitting together in an abandoned attic praying to him, with cobwebs hanging from their beards.Everything made sense but OpenSuse, what up with German made stuff?
maybe it has fax support by default
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great system, but it’s overengineered like a German car.
What bugs me the most is that many of the YaST tools duplicate KDE’s own so you have several GUI tools installed that roughly change the same settings.Some people don’t like things that are well made and organized in a sensible manner?
Like sudo requiring you to use the root password?
Isn’t one of the principal reasons sudo exists is so you DONT need to know or use the root password to perform root-level tasks?
It’s an idiotic choice on OpenSUSE’s part IMO.
You can modify the settings to get passwordless sudo.
Of course you can. My point is, it’s a ridiculous decision on OpenSUSE’s part to ship it this way in the first place.
As far as I remember, sudo ask for the user password, not the root one.
It is “su -c [some_command]” that ask for the root password.
what do you use?
Arch and Debian.
If Arch had a stable release model like Debian and a GUI installer that drops you into a GNOME desktop with no other software installed, that would be my perfect system.
I don’t like OpenSuse because when you install and administer it, you can feel it was made by Germans.
What does that mean?
It’s overengineered.
Ok, could you give an example? I never used OpenSUSE, just curious.
Yast. I love zypper and opi but yast is super weird. Like if you want to do things that you can do with yast, you probably know how to do it on terminal.
It uses KDE, which comes with a boatload of graphical tools to manage your system settings.
Then it adds YaST, which is another boatload of graphical tools to manage basically everything. (It’s in the name, “yet another system tool”)
So with OpenSUSE, you have 3 different GUI tools to add a printer.
It’s probably the one distro I’d recommend to someone who never wants to touch the command line, because for everything you might want to do with your OS they built a graphical tool.
Package management also offers a lot of options, like automatically updating a package from multiple repos while checking in the background which version is the most recent that doesn’t break your system.
Or “switching” a package to a different repo without reinstalling it. You can install user-provided packages (similar to Arch’s AUR) from the GUI. It discerns between Updates and Patches. And so on.
So in my opinion, Arch is like a kit car and OpenSUSE is like a Benz with ALL OF THE OPTIONS and a plastic cover over the engine bay.
I don’t like Mint because it’s just Ubuntu with even more stuff added.
Mint removes snaps and card games and replaces some GNOME utility apps like image viewer, video player, store etc. with its own apps. Mint also comes with additional apps like Hypnotix, Transmission, Hexchat, Timeshift but worst case they need additional disk space. Like 500 MiB maximum in a 10+ GiB install. I wouldn’t consider these apps “bloat”.
OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I’m not a huge fan of that tool either)
Also, Manjaro
My only real gripe is their default sudoers config.
Redhat. Wouldn’t touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
