(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

Ubuntu. They've managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It's the old-and-busted distro that I'm routinely told is "the only Linux we support".

Ubuntu / snaps

I'm about to piss off a lot of people.

It's Arch and Arch-derivatives. And I'm saying it as an Arch user, btw, and I actually love it.

Between the Big Three (Fedora, Debian, Arch), it is the least likely to have an official package for somewhat niche applications. If something is not available as a flatpak or appimage, I have to compile it from source or an AUR PKGBUILD, but we all know the dangers of doing that. Some software will just assume that it's running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.

That being said, it would take a lot to make me switch to a stable point-release distribution. Arch's advantages more than make up for the sub-par software support.

(actually, I lied. Fuck Canonical and *Ubuntu. And IBM.)

Ubuntu because they've the ability to great things and end up just delivering a buggy and mangled version of Debian with proprietary crap, spyware, snaps wtv. After all we're talking about the distro that had ISOs on their download page with a broken installer multiple times.

Manjaro. Its just Arch but worse

Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.

My least favourites are probably ubuntu and manjaro, not so much because of the distros themselves but the organizations behind them being a bit dodge.

I know it's probably an odd choice, but ChromeOS. It has the potential to be not just a good starting point for new Linux users but also a distro that could allow Linux to be a lot more accessible to people who aren't as technologically capable. The main problem is that, similar to android, Google prevents ChromeOS from being used as a proper Linux distro. Right now, it might be a good alternative to Windows and MacOS but as a Linux distro, it's just not worth using. Especially considering that Linux already has some options available for running android apps, such as Waydroid, that work pretty well.

Ubuntu: For shilling all kinds of profrietary garbage by default. If I wanted that I'd be on Windows.

Also the changes they make to GNOME make it worse, they take away what makes it good, the flow.

NIXOS. It has a very steep learning curve without acceptable documentation and once I climbed the learning curve, I realized that it was very different from the Linux that I love.

I'm going to mention two:

Manjaro. I've attempted to use Manjaro a few different times, and outside of a VM it just didn't work properly; on my laptop it would boot loop for reasons I don't understand, it had poor hardware support and optimization on a Raspberry Pi, and it didn't last long on my desktop. It's had its chances, I'm done trying.

I really did not hitch horses with Pop!_OS, and it's almost entirely because Pop!_OS started at Gnome and kept fucking going. Just thinking about the two miserable weeks I spent trying to get Gnome to do anything is making me physically angry. Words like disobedient and belligerent come to mind when I think of what it's like to use Pop!_OS. Linux Mint is designed to feel familiar to anyone coming from Windows. Pop!_OS feels like it's designed to be the opposite of that, it deliberately doesn't work the way you think it does. YOU have to conform to IT. And I FUCKING hate it. It is never welcome on my hardware ever again.

Ubuntu: It's not a lack of features that pushed me away; it's more about the way things are going. I am not a fan of snap packages. I have run into odd issues trying to use them. I used Ubuntu server for my Dell Poweredge and I shut it down until I can find a suitable replacement. I struggled with it respecting my DNS settings which in turn killed my reverse proxy setup.

Manjaro: While I love Arch and some of its derivatives, I can't stand by Manjaro. I thought it would have been a good OS to use since I was familiar with Arch, but it had enough dependency issues where updates broke them. Funny enough, never have I had a dependency issue with just plain old Arch.

I use Arch btw. But besides the meme on it, I legitimately eo use arch and couldn't be happier.

For me personally: Something like Arch. I want to spend as little time as possible on installation and configuration, and I don't want to have to read update notes or break my system. But I get that it's great for some people, and their wiki is just next level!

In general: Ubuntu. It feels like I read something about Canonical causing trouble every other week, and don't even get me started on snaps!

Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they've had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don't agree that it's "cheating" to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what's essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.

TL;DR: Ubuntu. Because I want choices.

Ubuntu. And I've felt that way for a long time, so it's not something recentish like snaps.

I don't want my distro to decide what DE and software I'm using for me. They used to have a minimal iso which gave you, as the name suggests, a very minimal install. But now their minimal image is meant for containerized stuff and if memory serves comes with some extra cruft for that purpose.

I got annoyed and I left. And every distro I've tried since, even if I didn't stick with it, I liked better.

To add some constructiveness, as that's just complaining. That can be a good thing, just depends on the user. If they want the crafted experience Ubuntu provides, then it's a good pick. It's just not for me.

Not a whole lot of experience distro-hopping here (went from Ubuntu to Endeavour and haven't really changed since) but from what I know it seems like most distros have their place. Arch is highly customisable and all rolling release distros are good for gamers and those who need the latest software. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and other LTS distros are good for servers and newcomers (fewer big updates and therefore fewer potential crises)

For the sake of answering the question, I'd say Ubuntu is my least favourite. Its pretty bloated, and then there's the whole snap fiasco

Ubuntu when it introduced snaps, anything red hat, anything immutable

Unpopular opinion :

• Arch, i installed it long ago so i can't remember anything except that i spent lot hours for its installation.
• Reason : spend a lot time reading the wiki without an easy installer...even Ubuntu was better but i wanted a challenge and a better uderstanding on linux.
• Some AUR package didn't work.
• Why Arch ? To get the lastest os and package as i had a recent gaming laptop.

So I changed and prefered manjaro with its ui for linux os, graphic card...but some thing were broken...than i settled Pop-Os for 3 years and distrohopped again for immutable os : Vanilla OS and Fedora Kinoite. :)

Another distro :

• Ubuntu
• reason : snap and various decisions.

I use Fedora as my primary desktop distro. It's a sturdy base with relatively up-to-date packages from the repos. It doesn't really push technology I consider undesirable, like Snaps. Even though I have to rely on RPMFusion for a number of proprietary parts, due to Fedora's free software stance, I don't have any particular qualms about that. I also increasingly use Flatpaks anyway.

When I used to use Reddit the /r/fedora community was helpful and welcoming.

One downside is because the kernel changes frequently, and I (sadly) own a Nvidia GPU, akmods runs very often. Another downside is sometimes that frequently changing kernel can cause issues. I think in the past year or two I've had two distinct occasions where a kernel upgrade caused my mounted shares to not mount correctly. Reporting an issue to upstream also takes quite some involvement, as I discovered when I had to create some Red Hat account to report an issue about the packaging of some software in a beta release of Fedora.

So all-in-all I would say Fedora is a strong distro. It is probably not the most beginner-friendly one, though, given how you have to dip your toes into RPMFusion and related challenges. It used to be worse, since DejaVu used to be the default font system-wide and you had to install a fonts package from COPR to make the system actually look pleasant. Since then they switched to Noto, which makes the font situation MUCH better.

On servers and VMs I use Debian because I do not have the patience to maintain a faster moving Fedora multiple times over. This is exacerbated by the awful defaults of Gnome, which I have to bend into shape with extensions. When Fedora 40 releases later this year I fully intend to reinstall from scratch since KDE Plasma 6 will be available.

edit: i misread the prompt and just talked about my favorite distro that i actively use. whoops.

My least favorite distro could be Manjaro if I actually used it, but it is Ubuntu because of how close it is to being a great distro. Snaps really soured me to that deal. Snapd and Snaps make it difficult to use in VMs, too, because now you have to over-commit resources for something that could and should be smaller and simpler. Debian stays winning, as usual.

I don't think I've ever used Ubuntu for more than a month. I just don't like the way it looks, how locked down everything is, and how hard it is to customize.

I never figured out why, but I couldn't get any version of suse to work properly on my computers. I've been with Debian (sid) for about a decade now, so not the most up to date criticism here.

I really hate to say this, but Lubuntu.

I enjoyed it for a solid few months (it's a lightweight XFCE LXQt version of Ubuntu, so it worked great on my very underpowered MacBook Pro from ages ago) so it was heartbreaking when one day, randomly, I couldn't get past the login screen and my TimeShift backups didn't work.

If it wasn't for this out-of-nowhere critical failure, I would say I loved it.

RHEL and other extremly long term support distros that have a significant user base because they hold back a lot of software features, network protocol features and moves to new dependencies that are required to work on the oldest and the newest supported distro for any given upstream software project.

Also, any time I have to learn something about a quirk in a version of software in use there it is basically wasted life time because the knowledge is already outdated by the time I obtain it.

Hannah Montana Linux. Do I have to explain?

My least favorite is Linux Lite. It's supposed to be a lighter, simpler version of Ubuntu but I don't think it accomplishes this at all. It's very slow for something that's supposed to be lightweight, and still includes Snaps, which are also very much not lightweight. Plus its software center is just bad, which is not great for something that's marketed at Linux noobs. Linux Mint XFCE or SpiralLinux are better options for a Linux noob who needs a lighter distro, IMO.

An improvement I'd suggest: obviously, ditch Snaps. Another would be to take a look at what Bodhi Linux does and have the "software center" run in the browser. I don't know how good this is security-wise, but it definitely speeds things up from the UX side of things.

I'd agree with Manjaro, It was my first I kinda know Linux distro after brown Ubuntu and Mint at the time it really worked well, but then package desyncing started affecting my installation followed by the first of many controversial behaviours from the team. It's one of many Linux distros that hasn't progressed much in the last few years, like elementary, and the idea it is easy to arch is false when you end up having to babysit updates because testing isn't as up to par as something like Fedora or Mint.

Garuda is a distro that has swung from a do not install to prob the best "Welcome to arch" distro for me. Their focus on tooling is getting up there with Mint & Suse BTRFS manager being a shining program of the project. More so, shows how utterly pointless Manjaro has become and badly managed the project is.

Any DE that looks remotely like Windows. My journey to Linux began with a seething hatred of the way Microsoft does pretty much anything. Including the Win10 UI. So when I jumped ship I wanted something completely different. I tried Gnome on a couple distros but ultimately landed on Pop!_OS and really like it!

The distro I came here to mention has been hated on already. My dislike goes to the distros that start off fine, and somehow screw it up.

Honestly, I remember using Manjaro ages ago. It had an official Openbox spin (not a community thing). I had already used Arch but I didn't even check to see what it was based on when I tried. I thought, "green is nice" and it was. It very quickly became less nice. I didn't use it after that, but I've heard plenty of hate since then.

I'm going to put another one out there just for fun.

Distrowatch's n°1... MX Linux

Nothing wrong with it, but the fact that it is number 1 (I know their ranking is just for fun and based on page hits) and doesn't deserve it is the issue. It works great, when I used it I didn't like how there was a second application for installating certain software. I think I used the Xfce setup. Again, it's fine, but if a first-time Linux desktop user sat down and installed that, it might not be the best initiation.

Popular and highly ranked distros give Desktop Linux a bad name sometimes is what I'm saying.

I don't like Ubuntu because of their forcing method to use Snap package manager.

I don't like Manjaro because of its poor dependency management. Many dependencies are not declared, so that if you update a package, it won't update the undeclared dependency and it won't work any longer. You have to update everything or nothing, and when disk space becomes low, updating everything at once is impossible.

After spending a ton of time migrating CentOS machines I have to say anything red hat related.

(Mod) Ubuntu shit breaks more than half the things i want to use.

Pull out your pitchforks, debian.

Don't get me wrong, it's good in a VM or a server, but it's the worst Linux desktop experience I've ever had.

• Apt sucks, it's the worst package manager imo (and I use Gentoo). Slow, bad a dependency resolution and apt-autoremove nuked my system both times I tried to use debian.

• It's old. LTS is only good for servers, you cannot change my mind and I don't see a reason to use sid or unstable, when I can use literally why other distro with a better prepare manager.

And it just does some bizarre things, like not setting up sudo with the graphical installer...

I'm going to say Gentoo Linux. It's a good learning tool and I suppose maybe a tiny bit faster if you actually custom-compile everything for your hardware from source, but that's a crazy waste of time.

I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

Anyways, I'm sure I'm crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can't even get games to benchmark higher.

I agree with you.

I don't hate Manjaro's developers, but they simply do not know what they are doing. They over promise and under deliver.

I don't get the hate for Manjaro, TBH. I never had any problem with it, and I used it as my main OS for a few years now.

OpenSUSE, awfull default software selection on desktop, and pushing users hard to use an "everything configuration tool".

Manjaro always broke on me. I can't even trust them to keep their SSL certs up to date.

Sorry Manjaro devs, no hate, I just got burned way too many times by this arch-not-arch frankendistro.

Probably PoP_OS!. There isn't anything wrong with the os itelf, my problem is rather that its often sugested as a beginer friendly distro which in my experience it absolutely isn't. The amount of issues I encountered while trying to use it almost drove me away from Linux as a whole. (It was the first distro i tried) The time I spent trying to make everything work was comparable to Arch.

I realy like the idea and the DE they ship by default is one of the best ones I've seen (it's like GNOME but in my opinion much better) but the bugs make it a terrible suggestion for new users.

Evil Linux Suprise™

idk why people even use it. too scary for me.

Manjaro, because we're here on arch to use the AUR, and that breaks Manjaro basically every time.

VanillaOS looked really promising but it was terribly buggy when I used it.

Debian.

Everything is so manual, not even system upgrades or enabling automatic updates. Like, this can be easily scripted using sed, why dont they do that?

It gets outdated very quickly and people complain that their apps are outdated, while Debian is simply shipping an extremely outdated package.

I respect what they do, and maybe for a Server it is a good OS (even though I would trust Fedora with SELinux and quick updates more).

Fedora. It doesn't really add anything and is just more stuff for people to get distracted by.

Also, red hat is responsible for shilling a lot of bullshit.

My worst experience was on Linux Void.

The iso has an encryption key problem. I tried the distro one year after, the same problem 😆 . Its the only distro that has that kind of problem. Once the problem is solved thanks to the forum, the shell didn't switch the language properly, the "-" prints a wierd character, most keys on the that row was wrong. Maybe all the praise for that distro comes from non-french speaking people, so they didn't saw the problem.

I know, the DE versions of the iso should works nice, but Void is advertised as minimalist, I want my WM. If this is that hard to switch the installation to french language, why Alpine is able to provide a correct installation experience (not easy, but correct) ?

Ubuntu because of the forced snaps. And it is ubuntu over any flavour because i don't like gnome

I don't really have a least favorite distribution. I mean, I guess between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, Manjaro, and Gentoo, the least appealing choices to me are Manjaro and Gentoo. Manjaro is just Arch but worse, because the packages are old and likely to cause incompatibilities with AUR packages that need really up-to-date system packages, and I...don't trust the maintainers to have configured everything better than I could have myself. Just based on history.

Debian has ancient packages. That's the only reason. I'd just end up using Flatpak packages or compiling from source.

Any other distribution I could use, including Gentoo, but Arch is the sweet spot for me.

@gianni Perhaps Fedora and parent. Just because...

RHEL - for obvious reasons