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Distros i've used:
(lemmy.zip)
I've never seen an infographic for "I use arch, btw." until now.
oh come on. I don't ever say it outside of meme contexts. I just personally enjoy rolling releases and don't really like the corporate feeling of Fedora, so i'm left with only really Arch as a good option.
Just lighthearted poking, I don't have anything bad to say about anyone's choices. I didn't mean any offense. Sorry if that was its tone.
No, no don't worry, no offense taken 😅 I should have expected it lol
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OpenSUSE got me onto Linux and was such a great option for a first distro. I still think about changing back sometimes. I'm surprised it doesn't get recommended more often.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is my daily driver. I recommend it to most people. It's a nice balance of leading edge and stability. Plus, snapper makes it easy to rollback if an update borks something.
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SUSE has always kind of been of an also ran in the eyes of a lot of users. I have tried the stable versions before Tumbleweed and I have even used Tumbleweed for a while. It's a solid choice and the user base is awesome.
I really, really, wanted to love SUSE, but there is just something about it that I just don't vibe with. It's a good distro and offers a lot. But it's just a bit uncomfortable like a suit jacket that doesn't quite fit right through the shoulders.
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Debian is where greybeards go to retire things just work once you configured them and you don't need the helping hand of the AUR as you can just build your own packages with aptbuild.
Hey! My beard isn’t that… oh, fuck, I guess it is. Where does the time go?
I hear you brother 1998 was just yesterday right?
I sure am excited for gaming this year. I saw some adverts in a magazine for Half-Life, Ocarina of Time, and Resident Evil 2 and I can't decide.
Shit. I've been on Debian for decades now. Maybe I'm just an old soul... Or I'm just lazy. I don't even configure my DE anymore. The OS install of today will be wiped in no time, so it's not worth being too attached.
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As a youngblood I have heard of the iron stability of Debian, but simply find it difficult to adopt for gaming-related reasons (both hosting and as a game client).
I do wish to one day study the greybeards' work for a future project box, however. That knowledge needs to be part of my generation as well, for at least a few of us.
The thing about Debian is that it's really not meant for the bleeding edge, not unless you shim a completely different runtime platform onto it, like Docker or Flatpak (or Proxmox). It shines as a very stable very basic host OS that's limited to just the base functions of the machine and lets the other platform deal with the latest and shiniest releases.
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I'm not a greybeard ^(yet)^ but xbps-src would like to have a word.
Also, Debian is bad for cognitive abilities since if you use it long enough you forget how to configure things. /j
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I think I may have a favorite.
wow... and what DE do you use with Slackware? I assume you just use pure CLI though
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NGL, I really wanna try either free or open bsd
I worked at a company filled with BSD zealots. Their burning hatred for Linux was all-consuming, bad really put me off of the lot.
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I've messed around with Dragonfly BSD a bit... it mostly felt familiar to me, and I can potentially see myself using a BSD in the future if I ever needed to jump ship. The multiprocessing and the HAMMER2 filesystem on that one in particular seemed neat. Though obviously I didn't have good GPU support on that particular BSD since I have an nvidia card XD
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I think that most Arch users that want to move to something stable are considering NixOS or GNU Guix rather than Debian.
Well, maybe i'm not your average Arch user then.. Don't see the appeal in Nix, honestly, and i'm too lazy to learn. What is GNU Guix? Never heard of it.
I'm kinda tinkering with Debian Sid atm.
Guix (pronounced "geeks") is like Nix (declarative, functional, atomic) but more Emacs (niche, lispy, Free)
It's strange to see someone move from Ubuntu to Arch, like it, and have aspirations of Debian. Ubuntu to Debian is fairly straightforward, didn't you have to do a bunch of shit to get on and learn arch?
Do you wanna hear the whole backstory?
I'm in Ur thread, reading Ur posts.
Yes I want free entertainment.
Well, you asked for it.
I started my Journey on Mint. The Install broke, but I wasn't gonna give up that easily. So I used AI to troubleshoot it (not my best times, but I was desperate). I customized mint, I cherished it and loved my escape from the grasps of Microsoft.
Eventually, I noticed you couldn't do rounded corners on Cinnamon (I didn't understand DEs at the time, thinking you could only use the DE that came with the Distro).
It pissed me off so much that I went and tried something with Plasma. I went with OpenSUSE, in part cuz I liked the Chameleon, in part because I did like the concept. Bluetooth and wifi didn't work ootb and for me as a beginner that sealed the deal, I wasn't able to fix it.
Next, I went to Kubuntu, thinking it'll be stable and have Plasma. And it was. It was all i'd ever hoped for. Stable, many features, super customizable. I even messed around with config files etc (mind you, this was like 3 weeks into my journey). I loved it. Even disabled snaps eventually.
But eventually I got bored. I started trying out other Distros, not hopping but just trying out their live installs. I no longer liked the corporate backend of Canonical. I wanted something new.
I also watched a lot of Linux content at the time, and I was confused and annoyed that I wasn't getting the newest updates to stuff. That's when I really started learning about DEs, Rolling releases etc.
I didn't even really think of Debian as an option at the time, I kept hearing it was old and outdated, which I didn't want.
That's when I fell down the Arch rabbit hole. Cool logo, cool concept, hacker mode.
I wanted that, So, I tried Cachy and Endeavor. No. It wasn't enough. I wanted that Arch logo natively in fastfetch. I wanted to say "I use arch btw". First, I messed around in VMs. from 3pm to 3am, all I did was try and install arch in VMs. Manually, of course. I decided it was the only way to get the experience needed.
I was able to do it eventually. The Step to bare metal was... not as smooth as expected. what the hell is NVMEp02?? And stuff like that. It look a long time until I was done. And it was buggy, I had messed up. Shit didn't work. I decided, well, it works except for weird stuff, strange issues I didn't care to troubleshoot. So I used Archinstall, and no I don't feel guilty, I can still do it manually if I wanted to I was just lazy.
Aaaand here we are. Arch is amazing and fantastic. But Debian Testing is almost as fast in terms of releases and I like the extra stability. Using Cosmic on Arch, actually. I love the tiling functionality. We shall see what the future brings
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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I've been a Debian guy for many years and it's unlikely I'll move away in the foreseeable future.
Nix is a package manager and nix-os is an OS built around that package management system.
You can install nix the package manager in debian. I don't use it for installing desktop apps like a browser or office suite, I prefer AppImages for those. However, it's absolutely fantastic for CLI stuff, especially the things you might want as a once off. You can just nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool> and it's just magically there in a new temporary shell, and then cleaned up once you quit that shell. No more adding weird repos to apt, or downloading from github and building, or piping scripts to bash.
There's also home-manager which allows you to define packages and their configurations, and just roll out that state on any machine.
These fancy package management tools (flatpak, AppImage, and nix) have dramatically changed the Debian experience. I used to be forever struggling with the trade off between stability and old versions of things. That's really not the case any more because you don't have to interfere with Debian's conservative methodical ideology around stability in order to install and use all the shiny new things.
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favorite: chimera linux <3 currently using: gentoo least favorite: ubuntu
ever since i tried to apt install firefox and was instead given the snap version without even being asked permission i gave up on ubuntu then and there
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Favorite: Debian Stable (For my uses, it was the least trouble)
First: Slackware (1995, installed from floppy disks, also a short stretch in 2009)
Current: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) (Using because I need to support users on stock Mint)
Distro you liked the least: Novell SuSE (Used in a corporate setting)
Distro you want to use in the future: Unknown
Distro you used for the longest time: Debian Stable (15 years)
Distro everyone likes but I don’t: Ubuntu
Honorable mention: DietPi (RaspberryPi and SBC focused OS)
Over time, I've used quite a lot of different distros: Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise, Scientific, CENTOS, Fedora, Mandrake, Damn Small, Puppy, CrashBang, Raspbian, Bazzite, to name just the ones I can remember off the top of my head now.
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Ubuntu seems universally hated. Why?
Desktop design decisions. A lot of folks hated Unity. I know I did - they turned something familiar into something Apple like and I couldn't stand it. I'm genuinely not a fan of the unified menus and such. It didn't help that users were basically forced out of Gnome 2 into it when Unity became the default.
Within Unity they Integrated Amazon results into the Desktop Search. That was likened to spyware since your queries were being shared with Amazon, much like MS integrating web results into their own search. Ubuntu fucked up harder because, absent any filtering, their search occasionally produced adult products in the results - ie sex toys and such. Imagine telling your kid Fluffy needs a new knotted rope chew toy. They start searching "dog knot toy" just to have the results filled with BadDragon knockoffs.
They've leaned heavier into enterprise over the years and that has alienated a lot of the Desktop audience which helped bring attention to OS in the first place. They went from "Linux for Human Beings," making desktop computing more accessible throughout the world, to becoming essentially the Microsoft of the Linux world.
Their snap backend is proprietary. You can't just host your own snap repository. Even if you host your own local snap cache, it ultimately must point to and retrieve from their repository to populate that cache.
I'm sure there's other stuff worth pointing out that I've forgotten.
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GNOME (by default), Snaps forced on you OOB rather than being an optional thing during setup or in any of the GUI settings, locking newer security updates behind a subscription, and Cannonical just being a bad captain of the ship.
There's a reason why Mint is hailed as the new "casual (non-gaming) user favorite", since it's literally just Ubuntu sans GNOME and the hostile update design decisions.
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Too much corporate control and enshittification. For example, when you use apt-get to get native packages, it can instead download a snap package (which works differently, is controlled by them and might not be preferred for many other reasons), even though you clearly meant not to.
Canonical (Ubuntu's developer) is trying to push people deeper into the ecosystem they build and control.
Then, they roll out a paid Ubuntu version, Ubuntu Pro, separating paying and non-paying customers and turning Ubuntu into a subscription-based SaaS.
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I don't hate it, it's just so far the worst one i've used. It's not necessarily bad, I have friends who use it.
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Nice meme! Its interesting that you've tried more than one distro. Personally, I prefer to pick the best one right away and stick with that. I think one of Zote's precepts mentions this. I use mint btw.
/jerk
Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It's stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn't. Just a great overall balance.
My first was actually DSL: "Damn Small Linux", contained entirely on a CD to remove a TERRIBLY resistant malware from my Windows XP machine. (It was awesome for that! Had no idea what I was doing lol.)
Tried Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Studio, but they didn't like my Wi-Fi devices back in those days, so I didn't get to do much with them!
Used Mint seriously on my aging laptop and loved it. It's such an excellent on-ramp and you can hang out with it as long as you like.
Later tried Manjaro for a while but...it started having some controversial project decisions and just didn't feel like home.
Using EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop and it works great! Considering migrating though: Arch is an excellent teacher, but I've had to spend unexpected weekends fixing weird hitches after updates.
Honorable Mention: Puppy Linux! I used to be able to boot it to any laptop from my Android phone, and that was a really neat trick for public computers and stuff.
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I really think Ubuntu is the most common first distro people try. A common reoccurrence here is the inability to see what an average person, in terms of tech literacy, knows and are willing to put time and effort into. Ubuntu has been the face of Linux for a long time (obviously not based on people who know and use linux). I wish Mint took that place as it's so much better.
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Favorite distro: NixOS First distro used: Ubuntu Distro you want to use in the future: SixOS, Asahi Honorable mention: Fedora Server Distro you liked the least: Ubuntu Distro you currently use: Arch, NixOS The distro you used for the longest time: Arch
First? Redhat.
Used? Gentoo, Debian, Mepis, sidux, peppermint, mint, fedora, cachyos, puppy, damnsmall, evil entity, suse, opensuse, Slackware, arch, and who knows how many more.
Using right now: Debian, fedora, cachyos, opensuse, Slackware. Different distro depending on need and device.
Favorite? Real soft spot for mepis, it made it easy back in the day. Fedora right now: it always just works, there is nothing to do just update and move on. Also Debian. Because Debian.
Worst: Ubuntu. Such a piece of crap, always breaking since first release.
TBH I have trouble telling why so many people in this thread complain about Ubuntu breaking, it always Just Works™ for me. Did they form their opinion around 2010, or are they using the six-monthly releases? I always used Ubuntu LTS (and never the default desktop).
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I love Ubuntu currently but I'm planning on switching. I just love the feel of it.
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Favorite: still searching
First: Manjaro (actually went quite smooth...until it didn't. Still grateful to have it, might not switch if it didn't exist)
Current: Bazzite (immutable distros finally matured enough for me, works perfectly fine for non-gaming tasks as well as gaming)
Distro you liked the least: Ubuntu (was the reason I didn't get to Linux earlier and got only worse from there)
Distro you want to use in the future: Debian (needs to stop being so easily broken, it's a stability distro ffs)
Distro you used for the longest time: Fedora (generally a good experience, but doesn't play fantastically well with nvidia)
Distro everyone likes but I don't: Linux Mint. (Cinnamon is severely limited and looks dated to me, and it broke like a week into me using it. Not my choice, but apparently others have better experience)
Honorable mention: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (awesome stability and native rollbacks, but didn't fix a much highlighted update breaking nvidia drivers in two months, prompting me to reinstall; didn't ever face breaking issues with other hardware)
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First: ubuntu favorite: nixos distro I like the least: ubuntu Distro I currently use: nixos distro I used for longest time: arch honorable mention: bazzite/aurora Distro I want to use in the future: redox with nixos
i'm a recent nixos convert... I think once they improve the ux a bit it's literally the best of all worlds. fantasic idea. UX and documentation issues take a lot of patience though.. a lot.
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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