For me it’s PeppermintOS.
I started my Linux adventure a few years ago, and haven’t owned a Windows PC since.
I currently use Arch on my main rig, and I wanted to install Linux on two old laptops that I found laying around in my house
I then remembered the first distro I ever used, which is PeppermintOS, and I was amazed at the latest updates they released.
They even have a mini ISO now to do a net-install with no bloat, with a Debian or Devuan base.
Sadly, I believe the founder passed away a few years ago, which is why I was really happy to see the continuation of this amazing project.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Like Peppermint this is a fantastic distro for anyone wanting to use Debian without the pain of self installing. Plus you always have the latest cinnamon.
It’s also good for anyone wanting to get away from Ubuntu all together.
I’d also like to get away from the stigma that mint is only a newbie distro. It’s not. It’s full fat Linux so pros can use it too, and should. It’s very reliable, fast and use friendly.
Above all, it’s true FOSS and LMDE is 100% community 💪
I’m the boring old type that think the best distros are generally the most promoted ones.
Except Ubuntu. They have a special place in my heart. I had to fight their Snap system exactly like I had to fight the telemetry in Windows7, and eventually I got worn out and moved on.
The WebApp system that PeppermintOS uses is fantastic though and deserves more both recognition and use!
The nature of FOSS suggests (make that extra italic) that the most popular distros should be those that actually work the best. Totally agree that Ubuntu is an outlier, and even that is because of choices Canonical made – and corporate decisions really aren’t typically a part of FOSS.
That said, I truly enjoy smaller distros for hobbyism. I don’t necessarily see a use case where they should be chosen over a larger one, except for the really annoying fact that distros with corporate backing will always also tend to get quicker adoption.
Puppy. Tiny, quick, hard to break, runs on everything.
Puppy got me through a rough year after a nasty virus corrupted my windows boot sector and I couldn’t afford a replacement at the time.
Technically, I had the money a month later but I was enjoying Puppy & just stuck with it.
Void Linux for the arch and gentoo crowd. It’s a system that can be assembled more cohesively.
Nix and Guix - the ideas they bring to the table are revolutionary. I prefer Guix due to its use of Scheme (guile). But Nix is more mature and has more packages.
I’ve used Debian for years but tried Void on a really low spec netbook and it’s pretty nice. The install is pretty painless and not having systemd is an interesting change for me.
I’m considering replacing my router with a software router and have been comparing a few options.
I was having a lot of difficulty getting 10Gbps through opnsense. Even after tuning a bunch of tunables, I was only getting 3Gbps or so, with no fancy features like IPS/IDS enabled. It was just a basic out-of-the-box config with my current home network as the “WAN” and a small lab network as a LAN. Something (NAT maybe?) seems to be single-threaded as it was hitting 100% of one core on a six-core i5-9500 (which should be more than powerful enough for this).
While researching I learnt that OpenWrt has an x86-64 build you can run on a computer. I thought it was only for regular routers.
Flashed OpenWrt to a USB stick and tried it instead of opnsense. Out of the box I got full 10Gbps speed, using less CPU power than 3Gbps used in opnsense (~15% per core across all cores). The base system is fast and light, only using 15MB of disk space and less than 100MB RAM. That makes sense given it’s designed to run on routers, but in an era where a lot of software is very bloated, it’s nice to see lightweight software that does its job with barely any overhead.
I don’t think Arch needs more recognition; it seems to be doing just fine. It’s been my daily driver on desktop and laptop for years, and on my cloud servers for a little longer than that.
Chimera Linux is doing some novel stuff, rather than the same old reflavoring of other distros; it’s one I’m keeping my eye on.
I’m running Artix on a laptop; that’s a good one for people wanting to escape the Poettering hive-mind. I’m running EndeavourOS on my desktop, and love it. TBH I should have done it three other way round; Artix is too fussy for a dynamic environment like a laptop.
Chimera is the bees-knees. I’ve got my son’s computer configured with it and have had zero complaints, it just plays games and makes working roms/emulation so easy.
You might be talking about ChimeraOS, while the other person is talking about Chimera Linux, a different project.
Plain ol Debian
I’ve been using it on servers for over 20 years. It’s a great distro.
It’s a community project. Every member of the Debian project has equal rights and vote on major decisions. It’s not owned by a large company so it’s mostly avoided any controversy due to bad decisions (for comparison, see the controversy around CentOS Stream).
They mostly don’t change things if they work fine as-is. The network configuration in
/etc/network/interfacesis essentially the same format as it was 20 years ago. (for comparison, see Ubuntu deciding to change how it does things every few years). Probably the biggest recent change was switching to systemd in 2015, but even today they have a compatibility layer to convert packages with sysvinit-style services to systemd, and you can still switch back to sysvinit and completely get rid of systemd.You can upgrade to the next version in-place - just edit the apt repository config to point to the next version,
apt update,apt full-upgrade, and reboot into new kernel version. Most upgrades are seamless (but it’s still best to read the release notes).Most packages include a
README.Debianfile in /usr/share/docs somewhere that usually includes very brief instructions on how to get started with the program.It supports practically every system architecture. They still make an i686 build that works with processors as old as the Pentium 4. They also had an i386 build that worked on systems as old as the original Pentium, and only dropped it this year with Debian 12. Supporting an architecture doesn’t just mean the base OS - it also includes most of the packages too.
What I love about Debian is there are always instructions regardless of whatever random package I want to use or Linux thing I’m trying to do.
@dan what is the name of the distro.please tell me I am switching to Linux from windows and I don’t want to use Ubuntu.
I’m talking about Debian :)
Using it over years and discovered the expert installer a few months ago. Really good stuff, especially since they decide to build an extra repo for non-free-firmware, because a lot of people ditch Debian when their shitty WiFi doesn’t get recognized immediately after install because it needs a non-free-firmware.
been thinking about moving on from Pop_OS and doing the usual looking around – was going to be a toss up between NixOS, Void, Alpine, and Debian Sid – but recently caught Veronica Explains talking about Debian and realizing enough with all the noise – simple, stable, boring, ubiquitous sounds REALLY appealing …
Hannah Montana Linux
Qubes
I would never go back from qubes. VirtualGL seems promising for the hardware accelerated apps and GPU passthrough for a gaming VM is insane
VanillaOS. Perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but in a sea of distros where the only difference is a slightly different default config, VanillaOS is doing something distinct and different.
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What are the areas that it still needs work?
Pop_os!
Like why is ubuntu still the newbie friendly distro to recommend? I feel like pop_os is a no brainer, and yet i never see it mentioned 😂
Edit: just look at this post, im the only mention 😂
Maybe it’s because of gnome based. Maybe people might change their minds when cosmos get released.
NixOS
I was a Arch Linux fan for at least 5 years. Tried all the main ones except gentoo. Kept coming back to Arch. But now I’m one week into using NixOS. I don’t think I’m ever going back. It has completely blown my mind, and fixes every minor thing I didn’t like about arch. Mainly how package dependencies work. I’m sure there will be a downside somewhere, but so far the only issue I’ve had is just trying to learn how to config everything.
TLDR: NixOS. I don’t know how I didn’t know about it till recently. Seems like it would be a lot more popular than it is.
Back when I was on NixOS, my main bugbear was that the Nix package language is pretty esoteric. I have some experience in packaging on Linux, so I thought I would be able to be able to put together at least a minimal package. No such luck. You how Haskell has a reputation for being difficult and full of burritos? It was like that, but the burritos were packages.
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Guess I should try this in a wm or something. :)
And the best part is: When you’re done trying it out and like your setup in the vm, you can simply copy your configuration.nix over to the real machine ;)
Bazzite, a gaming-oriented immutable distro with up to date Fedora packages and kernel, a lot of the kernel patches you’d want for gaming, automatic daily updates in the background, the option of installing the Nix package manager and Distrobox out of the box. They even have a Steam Deck version that works just like stock UI/UX wise but with all the added goodies.
Plus, on rpm-ostree/ublue-os as a whole, it just amazes me to no end you can basically look at deploying a distro as if it’s a git repo these days. Wanna try Gnome? Rebase to the corresponding image and reboot, your data is still there. Don’t like it? Quickly rollback or just pick the previous entry on GRUB. Incredible stuff, I’m sticking with those if I can help it for the foreseeable future.
+1 here. I wanted to write the same. Silverblue/ uBlue in particular has a huge potential.
It already is extremely user friendly, but if someone could develop an even more “noob”-friendly version with a great welcome-starter that shows you how to install stuff, a good looking KDE rice, and sells it as extra-distro with it’s own website and iso, then it could easily replace Mint as the #1 best beginner distro!
Heck, Bazzite is most of the way there. With how quickly it’s been improving, wouldn’t surprise me if it had all that pretty soon.
Artix btw.
