What Linux distro surprised you the most?

Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.

Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don't want or don't know how to compile stuff from source.

Puppy linux seems like its still one of the more unique Linuxes around. Its my go-to when I need to do a recovery for family/friends and seems to almost work with any system. If it can, it will load its entire system into the RAM and go to town. If it cant. then it will act like a live disk...but you can "save" the OS multiple different places. Its a fun little OS.

Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.

Alpine It just gives me the system and go "do whatever" It's snappy, decluttered, doesn't get in the way It doesn't have a bazillion systemd components, it's as barebones as it can be

OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I'd used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.

Endeavour OS

I've tried all the usual distros many times over the years but never an arch based distro until last year. I gave arch a go first and it was great but then tried endeavouros and it came with the fixes I needed and was more instantly good from the first boot. The AUR and arch wiki stuff just makes the whole experience most (sry to use this term) Windows like in terms of fixes and support.

The entire Ublue project is freaking amazing. But Bazzite finished off my distrohopping. I work by day and game by night. Bazzite has eliminated all maintenance tasks for me. It just works. It makes things so damn easy. Also, the Ublue CI/CD builds is crazy cool. It allows them to focus on the important stuff, while all the chores are done automatically. Truly amazing stuff. I also heard lots of praise about the dev oriented spin: Bluefin.

openSUSE Tumbleweed, it's jusr a solid distro altogether

Void. Boots in 2 seconds to Xfce if not for udev. Maybe i'll try mdev.

Manjaro, its a clean and simple way to install Arch with lots of good GUI for all the tasks a user needs to do on their system... Then it crash and bricked the install... 3 times.

Anyways I'm on Mint now.

Any distro with KDE, when I was on Windows I thought Linux always looked like Gnome.

I installed Pop in a VM (I use Debian usually) and was surprised how usable it was sans-graphical acceleration. Ubuntu is pretty much unusable these days in a VM - it can literally sometimes take 30 seconds for a button press to register where it works instantly in VM Pop or Fedora.

Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.

I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn't found this distro.

Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn't been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW'ed me...

So many distributions impressed me, but I think gentoo, nixos, Guix and Alpine impressed me most. Maybe Zorin with its beautiful design for newcomers.

If I had to pick one, it may be Alpine. The idea of having a fully usable OS with so little is really impressive. It even has a fully functional build system similar to Arch's ABS (on which the AUR is based)

Gentoo, nixos and Guix are really impressive and make computing a pleasant activity.

voidlinux: gave me much better battery life - I assume because it starts as a minimal system and one adds only the essentials to do the job - compared to the soup-to-nuts distros that pile everything in so that newbies are acccomodated. Of course, the voidlinux approach needs more linux skills - but it's not that hard and the doco is great.

Also, I love the back to basics runit init system and runsv service runner (I'm old so I like that stuff) and the ultra fast xbps packaging system.

Bending the question a little but my second "first impression" of Arch's "simplicity" surprised me the most.

I was running Gentoo for a while before deciding to move back, and I was surprised that somehow I had

• saved space
• gotten faster at doing new things (...)
• didn't lose any boot speed or anything like that

Granted, I had jumped on Gentoo because of misconceptions (speed, ricing, the idea that I needed USE flags), but going back, I saw things more clearly:

• the AUR being basically a shell script download + 300 MB of base-devel was simpler and more space-efficient than /var/db/repos (IIRC -- since the portage and guru ebuilds were all held locally anyway after syncing, an on-demand AUR saved space).
  • the simple automatic build file audits on Arch felt more clean to me. I like checking my build files; had to make a script for the guru ebuild equivalent (but maybe there's a portage arg i missed somewhere -- wouldn't be the first time)
• Arch repos separating parts of packages in case you don't need some part (like splitting some font into its languages, or splitting a package into x and x-doc and x-perl) was almost a simple USE flag-ish thing already
• /etc/makepkg.conf was Gentoo's make.conf. And its build flags looked similar to the CFLAGS I manually set up anyway.
• My boot time (btrfs inside LUKS with encrypted /boot) was the same with systemd vs. openrc
• I realized I liked systemd (because of the completeness of my systemctl muscle memory, like with systemctl status and journalctl, or managing systemd-logind instead of using seatd and friends).

Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it's when I realized why Arch was "simple." Even me sorely missing /etc/portage/patches was quelled by paru -S <pkg> --fm vim --savechanges.

And Arch traveling at the speed of simplicity even quantifiably helped: Had to download aur/teams the other day with nine-minute warning.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Steam OS 3 from Steam Deck. It's based on Archlinux, but system is write protected by default. And the Gaming mode is surprisingly good. And that the Desktop mode is just Arch+KDE.

NixOS. Not in a good way. I love the idea of configuring your entire system with a configuration file. However, on my laptop I couldn't get the KDE live boot image to boot into the GUI. So, I tried the gnome live image, successfully, and used it to install KDE. I thought that I was in the clear but then sddm wasn't working. I had to disable it to get nixos to boot into KDE.

I mean, I fixed it. But, with an intel APU from 2014, I haven't had any problems with this laptop running Arch, Debian, Linux mint, or Fedora.

Gentoo's USE flags. <3

Many have surprised me for different reasons.

The most recent that did is Alpine. I decided for some reason to install it for regular desktop use on an RPI400.

First surprise, the ISO was so small. Second surprise, everything installed so fast when I used the install scripts. Third surprise was the up-to-date repos. The final surprise was the community: it handled noob questions and complicated questions so well, walked users through click by click and one command at a time. Awesome and totally an acceptable option for a desktop which is why I immediately installed it on my main laptop and used it for a number of months.

Guix System. The way that this distro keeps track of changes of the distro itself. The concept of having a store where everything you build is stored there with write protection. The fact that you can configure not only the system but every home environment to every detail but without having to deal with various configuration files that you keep track of it.

The fact that all builds are bit by bit reproducible. The extensibility you have in your system.

It's the first distro I feel that nothing in your own OS instance is tied to any distro decisions.

The fact that you can have multiple versions of the same library without breaking the system.

It has a lot of things that I never thought it could be possible with a distro without going crazy about creating a very messy configuration.

Void.

It all started by curiosity: "let's try this no-where distros for the lulz"

Then it ended up to be the distro I am using everywhere.

It's stable and quite on the "bleeding edge" in term of software versions...

And damn it's fast son!

Arch Linux, they have the aur and it has every softwares I ever wanted for my computing needs that isn't easily obtainable on other distros, on Arch Linux I don't have to rely on flatpaks, Ubuntu store or appimages

LFS: Not being so complicated actually. Arch: That a fully fletched OS install can be done in less than 10 minutes.

Slackware. Turns out dependency resolution isn't really an issue at all.
The package manager doesn't need to do it cause it's done by the distro's maintainer.
Also, how easy it was to add FlatPak support.

Arch Linux. Many people said it is unstable and hard to setup. It turns out very stable as long as I update it frequently and AUR makes installing software easier. Even easier than ppa-based ubuntu as it will destroy your dependency if you are not careful. Lol.

Void Linux, very clean and fast on old hardware.

I was surprised, in a bad way, at how difficult it is to get any VNC running. I tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and base Debian, but couldn't get any VNC working. The closest I got was with Debian, but it gave me a different desktop than what was coming out the video port to my monitor. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had better luck with anything.

Spiral Linux. It's like Endeavor, but it sets up Debian with sane defaults for people who want a GUI installer experience.

I liked that it basically felt like any other distro, but it was surprisingly fast to boot and shutdown.

Just switched over to EndeavourOS & it’s been great

This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.

before 2010 when a suse disk was put into a laptop and installed and the network card and everything worked just fine no tweaking.

I tried Pop!_OS alpha1 with Cosmic Desktop and I even if the general software quality is still what you might expect from the first alpha release, I was impressed on the high-level design decisions they made with Cosmic. As a sway user who would like a bit more structure and hand-holding in my desktop, I think I'm gonna like Cosmic in a year's time.

Manjaro and Ubuntu surprised me how bad they are

Kubuntu.

The prevailing wisdom used to be that if somebody is tired of Windows and wants to switch you would send them to Ubuntu. Having used Ubuntu and Debian and Mint and Pop! OS and CentOS and Red Hat and Fedora and Kubuntu, Kubuntu with the new KDE plasma desktop seems to be the most Windows like while still retaining the Linux flavor OS that I have used so far.

Ubuntu by comparison is slow and convoluted and those are huge turn offs for neophyte Linux users who want to get away from Windows.

Manjaro is the only distro I've tried whose live image worked flawlessly, out of the box, and did everything I could think of, first try.

Granted this was 5 years ago when I set down to find an alternative to Ubuntu. Maybe today there are more distros that can do that.

At the time I tried all the usual suspects that are supposed to provide a user-friendly, gamer-friendly desktop experience and they all came short — except one.

That sold me. And it was surprising because I didn't really expect to find such a distro, I was just thinking I will make a list of what doesn't work out of the box on each, and pick the one with the least stuff. I didn't expect a distro to have no list.

Tails is easily the distro which surprised me the most. This is because, even tough I would rate myself a well aware privacy advocate, I didn't expect to see a full suite of privacy tools. I somehow just expected, that it would be just the Tor Browser and nothing more. I don't know what I thought tough. I need to mention, that Tails was one of my first distros I've used so I was kind of mindblown that all these tools could fit onto a USB Thumb drive.

NixOS is surprisingly easy to use

Gentoo.

I had a friend SSH into my computer once I got it to the bare minimum for that by his instructions and he helped me install it. After that he did some kind of wizardry to have both Gentoo and SUSE both running at the same time without a VM!

I installed Void Linux on my Raspberry Pi without looking at the details, and I was surprised that it had no systemd! It was the first non-systemd distro that I had encountered and also pretty fast.

Arch Linux. All the software at their latest version (which is usually the best one), within a couple of commands, either from the huge official repos or the AUR.

Fedora Atomic/Kinoite, just so relieved when one day I fucked the bootloader, and it didn't boot anymore, and I only needed to rollback in grub to a perfectly working system

Second impression of Garuda (Arch based). My first impression was the dragonized version, which is KDE with lots of mods to make it Mac like, but with extra window animations.

I like things simple, so when I tried Garuda again, I installed the Gnome version. Other than some weirdness getting my Nvidia card working with Wayland, it has run better than anything else on my laptop.

Tuxedo OS, as preinstalled on my Tuxedo machine. It is just a heavily tweaked Ubuntu flavor with Plasma as a default desktop and sane defaults (firefox not as a snap, but as a .deb file). Everything worked so well out of the box that I did not see the point in installing Arch. I also love the fact that Plasma is kept very much up to date. In comparison, Kubuntu 24.04 still has Plasma 5., whereas I currently run 6.1.4.

Fedora. I was always with Mint and Cinnamon. I tried Pop!Os, Manjaro and Debian, whenever I could with Cinnamon. Fedora was recommended to me, which I had never entered in the distros to try. I installed it and I've been using it for 2 years with its respective updates. No problems at all. I had not tried Gnome. I don't like it the most but I'm fine with it.

The old Pardus, YALI was, and still is, the most awesome installer i've ever meet. Also Kaptan was amazing

Arch Wiki

Pop OS has worked out well for me even better than Ubuntu & Fedora.

Kurumin Linux, which was a Brazilian distro based on Knoppix. This was back in 2006 or so, and that was my first hands-on experience with Linux.

I don't fully remember whether everything worked out of the box, I think it connected to the internet no problem (cable), but what amazed me was:

1 - It ran off the CD drive without needing to install anything 2 - It had loads of preinstalled utility software 3 - Less than 700MB

Fossapup 9.5 how fast yet compitent it is at what it can use. Loading into ram with just 300mb or so HDD space being used, it's blazing fast the newer the machine it runs on. It's downside is it's smaller community driven development being in need of consistant conversion of regular apps to it's own puppy .sfs format which is needed to install them, if they had people churning new .sfs apps out all day every day of the year then eventually it would over-shadow many mainstream OS's it's just nitro level speeds and very stable to boot. It needs more love from the dev community to go that extra mile.

Chimera Linux. You'd think that a distro using its own bsd-like userspace and dinit instead of systemd is janky and unusable, but it's been one of the most painless experiences I've had.

Genuinely recommend trying it if you don't have an Nvidia GPU.

Sabayon. It worked perfectly till I tried to update some stuff 💣

This was one the most stable and at the same time the most unstable distribution I ever tried.

Recently, uBlue. It’s more a family of fedora atomic images but it has taken the pain out of immutability for me. I was using Fedora silver blue and later Sericea a while back, but installing codecs from RPMfusion on it never worked properly and my hw acceleration was always broken. I was on NixOS for a while but had sporadic problems that come with NixOS not using an FHS structure. But uBlue just works. Hardware acceleration works out of the box, and I can easily create custom images with BlueBuild. It’s a very nice ecosystem to create a stable, secure, complete base system. And I run nix on top of it for user packages and home-manager to get all the benefits of both worlds

Nixos

I was surprised by how well Garuda KDE just... Works. Many users warned me to stay away from the smaller distros like Garuda but I've had zero issues after 6+ months of everyday use on 2 devices.

Ironically arch, the only issues I have when using it are usually just sound issues, which simply occur before a pipewire update, during one, or right after one. A reboot or two fixes things for me :p I get to enjoy a lightweight system without efforts I'm not willing to put:) (the features I guess are that it breaks a lot less than I expected, and that arch + i3 legit use around 450mb on idle for me ☠️)

Antergos (rip). It just worked. None of the weird problems I've had with Ubuntu/Debian