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

  • bonegakrejg@lemmy.ml
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    2 hours ago

    I’m currently using Pop!_OS, which is a great desktop distro.

    I was using MX Linux a lot which is amazing for both times when you need a portable distro with lots of features and when you need something that will still run well on older machines.

  • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    NixOS is amazing, but it’s also got a crazy learning curve. Once you grok it though, it really changes the way you configure your computer.

    Fedora is always my favorite big name distro, they’re constantly pushing the envelope and adopting new features that need some stability and exposure to mature.

  • obsoleteacct@lemmy.zip
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    10 hours ago

    I daily drive Fedora and I think it has the best Gnome desktop.

    But in terms of “best at what they do” I’m blown away by Mint as an apporoachable easy to use “just works” OS. It instantly became my recommendation to new linux converts. Everything is easy to set up. It’s remarkably user friendlly. Good software store, flatpack support out of the box. Brilliant hardware support. I like the aesthetics as well.

    I have an old Core 2 machine and I tried to get every potato grade distro running on it. I tried Puppy, and Linux Lite, and AntiX and all the “this will run on your toaster” type distros and had problems with every one of them. Mint XFCE installed no problem. It ran beautifully. I pressed my luck and installed a Quadro K620 and an old firewire card (trying to back up old Mini-DV videos). It handled ancient hardware perfectly. Butter smooth 1440p desktop computing and light video editing on an 18 year old machine.

    • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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      14 hours ago

      Whats the purpose of gentoo over arch and when do you draw the line of diminishing returns? It sounds like gentoo is a lot harder for not much more reward.

      • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Hard to say without having used Arch. I just really like Portage. It does some really neat things.

  • edel@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    We don’t know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know… Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.

    Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.

    OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years… I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.

    Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won’t be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today

    The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting… but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross… partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don’t see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.

    Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won’t be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public… maybe KDE’s new bet?!

    • Valencia@sh.itjust.works
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      18 hours ago

      Can I get a summary of what’s going on in Chinese Linux land? That seems pretty interesting; I always wonder what programs the East uses vs the West

      • edel@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        I haven’t play much with them but this is my take:

        Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets… for better or for worse, but I like their take.

        Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven’t tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu’s or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.

        OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch…). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.

        There are others but for niches.

        China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.

  • mrcleanup@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Garuda absolutely nails it with their helper app that sets you up with a choice of popular software, handles updates, and gives you easy access to common settings.

    It makes it very approachable for people new to Linux.

  • iopq@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    NixOS by far has the most momentum right now.

    Just check the non-unique package counts:

    https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique

    More than 80K packages that exist in other distros, more than all of packages in AUR combined with 90%+ being the newest version in unstable

    And you can run unstable without an issue since you can downgrade individual packages whenever

  • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I don’t know about the best but Debian has been going strong for 32 years and the backbone of many distros. Its MVP in my book.

  • Ardens@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I do like Mint very much, but I think that they are neglecting to update their apps. A lot of apps are not up to date, and that’s just sad…

  • Peasley@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Fedora has gotten much more stable and reliable in the past decade. 15+ years ago it was generally regarded as nice but unstable. I’d say nowadays for a moderately technical user it offers a better experience overall than Ubuntu or Mint. There are still unfortunately some pitfalls for new users (media codecs come to mind). In fact, the only issues i’ve had in most of those 10 years have been related to GNOME plugins or the Plasma 6 transition, problems that also occured on Ubuntu.

    I have 2 computers: one running Ubuntu, one Fedora. This has been my setup for over a decade. I have lately been finding Ubuntu more and more cumbersome to use, with less of the “just works” experience i remember having in the past. Perhaps the focus on cloud computing has caused the desktop to languish a bit.

    I would like to try Pop!_OS, but i haven’t had a free evening for a while to do a backup and reinstall on one of my computers. It’s also been a while since i used Mint, so my impression could be out of date.

    The nice thing about Linux overall (compared to macOS and Windows) is that each update generally improves on the experience. On commercial platforms the experience gets worse as often as it gets better, usually both at the same time. GNOME and Plasma are both overall much better than they were a decade ago (despite a few regressions) while macOS and Windows are both worse in general.

    • CairhienBookworm@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu, then switched to Linux Mint for a while and dabbled with Manjaro for a hot minute, and ultimately found my home on Fedora Workstation for the past several years. Once set up with rpmfusion and 3rd party codecs it’s a very solid and reliable distribution. The new atomic projects (and derivatives) look very interesting too.

  • Thrickles@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Bazzite has been working so well that even the wife has converted over. It cured my distro hopping so I haven’t played much attention to how other distros have been doing.

  • relic4322@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Ton of comments, and I havent read them all, but I wanted to ask if you really meant popular or if you wanted something for a specific reason. Easy for new ppl to linux, good for desktops, etc etc.

    I dont really use GUIs on linux, except for when I want to have a fancy pants riced network monitor type situation. I am a big fan of NixOS except for python Dev stuff. Big fan of being able to clone a machine or recover a machine with a single conf file.