What's your current favorite distro that isn't Arch, Debian or Fedora?

NixOS for me. It's a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there's also an entire distro based on it.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It's very up to date, yet it's somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven't had any problems finding software, yet it's not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed

Permanently Deleted

Opensuse TW

I've been using Opensuse since it was called SuSE. Tumbleweed is great.

Can it still be a favourite if I haven't touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.

OpenSUSe. Tumbleweed as a rolling bistro is amazingly stable, yast is nice, and it all just works great. Leap for the servers, and things are solid.

I'm enjoying what Nix does. That said, the learning curve is very steep, and the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.

The repositories for both nixpkgs and nixos are absolutely colossal, which is a huge plus, but their configurations are not listed on the same page, and it can lead to a lot of confusion. Unlike Arch's PKGBUILD, which practically tell the build system exactly what to do, you'll have to learn the structure of current configuration files, or the more recent flake system, to setup things how you like.

OpenSuse tumbleweed

Damn Small Linux was a favorite a long time ago.

PopOS! Is it for me these days.

I've started to dip my toes into NixOS. I really love their design concepts.

Gentoo. It's amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.

There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.

Alpine.

I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.

So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.

I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!

Another vote for openSUSE Tumbleweed

I discovered this on Lemmy, clearly there is no going back

https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.

Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.

I'm enjoying OpenSuse Tumbleweed loving rolling release and stability

If we allow derivatives, I'd say SteamOS despite being Arch. It's putting Linux in non-technical people's literal hands and it's not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It's almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.

Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It's been a really long time since we've last seen a fundamentally different distro that's got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they're still very package oriented. We've been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It's incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they're atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.

PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed without a doubt!

DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.

Nix

Custom North Korean linux. Preinstalled missile tracking software.

NixOS is not based on any other distro because it has its own package manager which is better than all the other distros'

Guix

Can't believe no-one mentioned voidlinux yet. It's very tasty.

Bazzite. It's based on Fedora uBlue so it's technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don't use dnf or yum to install stuff, you'd use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it's effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you'd get in a typical rolling release.

Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed

Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it's one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that's for a good reason. It's installer isn't that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora's installer any day. ( I haven't tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )

Artix is well... arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.

Permanently Deleted

QubesOS. When you need security and don't need to play games, this is objectively the best distro.

I really enjoyed Solus Linux but the last I checked, it didn't support something I need for my job. So, I do use Arch, but was completely smitten and impressed with their impressive boot speed. From pushing POST screen to desktop, it was something like 5 seconds. With Arch, after POST, maybe 10-15 seconds.

With their recent drama, it's been a bit hard to see them struggle. They just did release a fresh build I read online, so they are still alive. :)

https://getsol.us/

OpenSUSE Leap, has been a solid 7 year run, with flawless updates. And no graphics issues because nVidia hosts their own repo for the gpu drivers.

Loving Alpine

OpenSUSE, it's what I'd be using if Fedora didn't exist.

I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).

I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it's not there.

https://vanillaos.org/

Gentoo!

I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .

The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that's very intense, let's say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials

Alpine

Linux Mint

Mint.

MX Linux only because I have it on some very old 32 bit laptops and it supports 32 bit. I don't really know why I keep those laptops around but they are functional.

Gentoo for the documentation, but for a modern comp with bad bootloader implementation, Fedora's anaconda system for the secure boot shim is irreplaceable and my daily. I won't consider any distro without a shim and clear guide for UEFI secure boot keys. In that vain, Gentoo is the only doc source I know of that walks the user through booting into UEFI directly with Keytool.

I really enjoy ZorinOS! I've been using ZorinOS 16.3 and am awaiting the upgrade to 17 through their tool. It's been great for a PC that has an Nvidia GTX1060 that I have hooked up to my TV as a twitch/YouTube/Netflix box. I chose Zorin because they claimed to get the Nvidia drivers installed correctly "out of the box", and they delivered!

NixOS, would like to try Guix

I miss slackware.

It still kinda exists, but really has become a ghost of its former self.

Alpine was the most interesting for me. It goes against the tendency of complicating the systems. I have to use Arch because everything can work on that distro.

I'm currently using Arch (btw), but I have been hearing the distant call of NixOS lately...

Kubuntu

On the laptop I got less than a week ago for college, I've been having fun using Mx with KDE. It's been pretty good so far on my galaxy book.

Guix since 2 years now. I use it to provision all my systems and having a unified configuration in Guile is just a joy

Permanently Deleted

Endeavour OS?

Tiny Core OS, because I want a super light distro to run from memory when trying to access computers where the data is still there but something went sour with the OS

Another NixOS user.

elementary!

not sure if it really counts but I like Universal Blue, specifically using their silverblue-framework image because it already has all the drivers and stuff set up for my Framework laptop

Nobara, as a gamer first it's the perfect distro for me

postmarketOS and UbuntuTouch

Tiny Core runs on my 25 year old Pentium 2.

Parabola GNU/Linux-libre.

LMDE cuz sometimes i just need dead simple.

Permanently Deleted

I'm really happy with Manjaro. I thought it would be a detour from Debian on my laptop, but I've been running it for like 2 years now.

mx linux

:Nervously raised hand: SteamOS 3.5...?

Kubuntu

I am using void at the moment, pretty stable even tho it is rolling release

MX Linux. It's exactly how I'd set up Debian if I wasn't too lazy. Although, I've gone back to Debian after Bookwarm was released. I love it but miss MX

LMDE, MX, Ubuntu etc are based on Debian. Mint is based on Ubuntu, so Debian. Chimera/Endeavour are based on Arch, etc.

In the linux world, you have a linux kernel, systemd or init, a bunch of gnu utils, a window system like X or Wayland, whatever DE you want (Xfce, gnome, kde, name it) and a packaging system (apt, yum, pacman), but for me, it's all the same.

If you want something different, try a BSD distro then? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GhostBSD, etc

How do people feel about Garuda? I put it on a laptop to try it out. I'm still undecided.

Artix.

Solus as the Almighty Todd says "it just works" And that comes from someone which always has at least one problem, that problem being gaming.

It aint solved mind you but it works marginable better on it.

Example, anno 1404, no matter what distro or silly protondb config, or if I use a new steam profile or fresh distro , works.1 out of 10 times.

But Solus, it just works, no hoop jumping needed

I love using Alpine Linux on my server. Super light and quick to start up.

Annie Linux, but sadly it doesn't exist yet.

I've become a fan of KDE Neon. It's based on Ubuntu LTS but with the the most up-to-date KDE release.

Favorite? No. Most acceptable: NixOS.

The worst documentation of a linux distro I have ever encountered, but the declarative model has convinced me I don't want something else. Now I'm just waiting for other distros to pop up that are declarative as well. (Guix? No thanks, I'm not a fan of endless parentheses)

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

CrunchBang++, BunsenLabs, Bodhi, Antix and Peppermint.

EndeavourOS

Void - https://voidlinux.org/

Puppy Linux.

Bodhi Linux. Lightweight and beautiful

I like Poky. But for other use case than Arch, Debian and Fedora.

Guix is imho beyond normal distros, and I'm never going back to Manjaro or any of the normal distros.

Toaster Linux or Nobara.

I've been enjoying Mint personally for my laptop. I've tried Ubuntu but I've had issues with the speakers :/

Ublue although it's kinda still fedora, otherwise alpine even though I don't really use it.

Kali Linux! Just too useful, though there can still be some fixing around.

Manjaro KDE for me - it's not Arch per se, otherwise Ubuntu would also be eliminated for being a derivative of Debian...

Rocky

Been using Xubuntu 23.10 recently, but I'm kind of a distro hopper. I need ROCm and some other special (proprietary, ehh) tools that require RHEL, SLE, or some Ubuntu flavor. I also like having a working out-of-the-box configuration. I've used openSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux before, might try it again but it's a little bit complicated to me.

Ubuntu is so easy to use!!

Its... Debian. 😆

Is Manjaro KDE spin off topic? :)

It's not Arch specificaly just arch derived, with all the pain and scut work taken out.

And if you stick to running updates with the bundled 'pamac' tool rather than yay or pacman I've found it to be incredibly stable.

Gentoo

I've said this before, and I see that I have to say it again, Zorin OS.