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.
Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.
You can’t install a proxy daemon as a flatpak, but you can install it through Nix
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.
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 spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That’s the Linux community I love, good job people <3No one gets left behind
Akuna Matata or some shit
Redhat. Wouldn’t touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.
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.
No longer using Ubuntu at all because they force snaps down your throat. While I do like snaps on the server environment, (I think a lot of the haters out there don’t see how nice they are on servers), I prefer to use Debian and then to just install snapd on my terms.
You’re going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
I thought that’s gentoo.
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.
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…
Out of all the distros that I’ve tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don’t like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it’s not too bad.
However what really pisses me off,among their numerous other controversies, was when they replaced perfectly functional open source apps with proprietary ones…twice. Though the former has since been reversed.
My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
You can make an OS in Scratch? I didnt know that
Linux From Scratch is a series of (online) books that walk you through building up your own linux system from the ground up, from compiling the kernel to all the individual systems that turn the kernel into a functional OS.
It’s meant to be an educational tool to help people learn about what goes into making a Linux distribution and give you better knowledge of how to build software from source. Some people turn these systems into their own distributions or personal (I guess gentoo-like?) Linux installs
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.
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.
