Arch
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Being 64-bit doesn't make you special, my Nintendo 64 is 27 yrs old and it's 64-bit
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Being bleeding edge doesn't make you special, all I have to do is sit on a nail and now I'm bleeding edge too
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Rolling releases don't make you special, anyone can have those if they take a shit on a steep slope
/s (was hoping we'd be able to leave this behind on reddit, but alas, people's sense of humor...)
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Gonna go with Manjaro. I can't, for the life of me, understand why it gets the support it does. It's not fantastic to begin with, with an apparently incompetent management team. Add in that all the theming is flat and lifeless, and I'm just confused.
I mean, any Arch derived distro with an "easy installer" kinda confuses me. Archinstall is fairly easy to use (although a bit ugly), and most other Arch based distros seem to miss what I see as the main point of Arch: getting to know and personalize your system. So things like Endeavor, Xero, etc. Don't make a lot of sense to me either. But at least they're not effectively accidentally DDOSing the AUR...
The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.
Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?
@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.
"Gaming" distros, save for Steam OS as that's for a console-like device.
Pretty much every distro can play games relatively close in performance to any other distro. The only real difference is how new your GPU drivers are.
For me, every non-mainstream distro. IMO every fork which is just a rebuild .iso should ratherly be an install script and extra repos. Simply because the lack of maintenancers and userbase tends to make those projects to die or getting updates way less often tahn should. People should join any existing project rather than creating new ones.
For all its strengths, Arch is kind of a pain in the ass to maintain. I daily drive it but I risk breaking something if I don't update regularly. My youtube laptop can't update at all anymore from something I don't care to fix (when Firefox breaks then its a big deal lmao) and my main rig needed to use the fallback initramfs for a while after I forgot to update for a while. mkinitcpio -P (I think) fixed it though
I realized Arch was overrated when I got a brand new 7900 XT and it didn't work on Arch at all because their LLVM was a version behind. It was up-to-date on Fedora and even Ubuntu, but not Arch. Then there was the whole broken grub thing. Bleeding edge and unstable I get, but you can't be unstable and also behind. You can run Arch in any distro with distrobox, I don't see why you wouldn't just do that.
Ubuntu has ads in the terminal when you update. Runs a highly modified GNOME that doesn't play well with some extensions. Snaps by default (although maybe not that bad now that they seem to launch a bit quicker). Unfortunately so many things only have Ubuntu support if they have Linux support at all, it's such a shame.
I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine. But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".
(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).
My list overrated list additions:
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Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.
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Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.
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RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.
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Any Linux without systemd or glibc: Mistakes were made, and then different mistakes were made trying to prove systemd made mistakes. Musl based Linux distros are going to have compatibility problems, so I might as well run a different OS. The BSDs are *nix-like systems without glibc with a history and larger communities.
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The good/bad Linux distro circlejerk.
People are constantly speaking about what's the best or worst distro in long argumentation loosing their time. Instead, it would nice to make people actually switch to a Linux distro and stay on a distro. Each people people switching from another OS is a win. This matters and how making Linux distros more accessible to everyone.
AH, so this is a "tell me your favourite distro" post again. Tribalism isn't cool, man.
Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.
It's not bad by any means, but it's a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.
It also still doesn't come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Mint isn't a bad ditro its just overhyped for new users.
Nobara is very overrated. Comes with so much bloat apps and is confusing for new users. Don't understand why people recommended it.
It has some kernel tweaks and niche bug fixes for certain games but its just overrated.
Ubuntu is decent but definitely lost its touch over the years.
@valentino I know Ubuntu is the meme answer but I’ve never been satisfied when I use it. On servers and desktops where I want stability, I find Debian to be much more reliable and straightforward. I had two Ubuntu pcs recently and the upgrade gui tool would just kill itself when trying to go to the next version so I had to look up the terminal option. And looking up packages only to find out I’m installing outdated snaps where the permissions get in the way
Gentoo. Gentoo users have pretty much supplanted Arch (btw) users in the "annoying poweruser" niche.
I agree with you a bit on Garuda, even as someone myself who uses it. I've had it break multiple times on me, I still use it mainly because it has all the stuff I like by default (and a cool dragon theme, which should be a requirement of all distros).
Other than that, I'm gonna be boring and say Ubuntu. Just a worse Debian.
"Overrated" is a very specific word here. Some of the distros he just talks about their users and not the distro itself. Confusingly, he also then ignores the users entirely for other distros. I went into this assuming it would be low effort content, but it went even lower and ended up being just a "what comes to my mind when I think of this distro" list, which doesn't seem very fair towards some of the distros (near the top of the list even!) that don't have real complaints weighed against them.
IMHO NixOS, which is what I'm using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use "a long time ago", which leads me to believe he doesn't fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the "nix package manager", which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.
What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.
So it's like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel's, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.
It is however overtly complex, there's a disconnect between old nix ("stable") and new nix (flakes, "unstable", experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.
Thought I'd just chime in, because this guy's take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive...
...though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.
Manjaro Zorin Garuda Nobara. Any Gaming Oriented distro except SteamOS. These 3 especially feel overbloated
Gentoo. I say this as someone who used to daily drive it.
And arch too.
The first several minutes are just him apologizing in case someone feels attacked he said their distro was overrated. What an obnoxious waste of time.
Currently my answer is ubuntu. I tried to use lubuntu recently but just so much wasn't working out of the box like nm-applet wasn't running on startup. The apt package manager is really tedious to use too.
This could also be boiled down to my general incompetence when it comes to Ubuntu based systems though :p
Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it's still one of my favorite distributions and the one I'm using usually. I'm comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).
Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.
I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I'm a bit lazy to explore other options.
Everything other than Debian :D
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Debian (Testing) I used it for a good month, and man was I disappointed. Only some things are actually up to date and packaged correctly. The nvidia drivers don't load the drm module because it's not called nvidia-drm on Debian (testing) it's called nvidia-current-drm. Also apt is the worst package manager
I'm using ZorinOS with Windows 11 Pro. It's good enough for everything I do.
I've never used Mint so wouldn't want to comment but it does seem to get a lot of praise and I can't see why.
EndeavorOS would be my vote. Arch with a GUI installer and horrible theme.
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Mint is hugely over-recommended to new users imo. The fact that it doesn't have an option for a DE like Gnome 3 or KDE just kinda sucks at teaching newbies what to expect. Cinnamon also feels kinda jank in my opinion, looks old and unattractive.
@valentino All of them; they're mostly the same! /jk But seriously try another OS: OpenBSD, Haiku, Serenity, Plan 9...
I got my slacks on with dramatic music Slackware Linux! crowd gasps
I think Elementary OS a bit. It's not bad necessarily (although I do think they're a bit over-aggressive about monetization which I don't really like) but I always see people talk it up about how functional and beautiful-looking it is, whereas when I tried it it just seemed like a pretty standard Ubuntu-based distro themed to look like a Mac.
Unless there's something amazing in there that I just didn't catch on to, but it just didn't really click for me.
Windows
Arch
I really really enjoyed this video. Matt is great, every video of his is a different type of gold, great content.
As for the distros:
Mint (my first distro, favourite beginner distro; when I tried using it a few months ago, however, the facade was stripped: it's not good for my use case anymore and that's fine)
Zorin
All the *buntus, but especially Kubuntu for some reason
Arch (I say that as a bit of an Arch fanboy)
NixOS (I say that as a NixOS user)
Most, if not all of the Arch-based distros (literally just Arch with an installer, some preinstalled stuff, and extra repos, except Manjaro which is a failure, but that's a different topic)
I haven't really heard anyone speak highly on Elementary OS or Solus so I don't exactly agree about them being overrated.
Extra (that will piss off a lot of power users, also rant and story time): Void Linux. It just feels like it's weird for the sake of being weird. And a lot of times I tried to get river working, to no avail, and that is literally my greatest issue with Void, as well as the fa t it tries to be like Arch, but more stable. Don't het me wrong, that's literally the type of distro I want to run, but I just find it to be a bit of a mess for some reason. Arch has always besn smooth sailing, with Archinstall or via a manula install, while with Void I felt like I was fighting the system to make it do what I want it to. So yeah, Void. Love the "Enter the Void" marketing, and the idea, as well as the logo. The installer was fine, xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated, and I had a hard time getting river and sddm working properly. Runit was weird but I could get used to it if it actually worked well. The main issue I was having was that at first, the river session did not appear. I fixed that, but then I couldn't het sddm enabled on Void because it didn't have a service file for runit! Cue me trying to get that set up for an hour or two, until I gave up and moved on to Tumbleweed (where zypper broke on me and I had to depend on Yast to manage packages, sighs). And then I gave up on Tumbleweed, went to Arch, where things were ok, but I didn't really want a rolling relese so when NixOS 23.05 launched, I jumped ship and have been there since. It's a bit crazy to me that this system has been on my laptop since the start of June, but it does all of what I need in a good way, and that's without even taking advantage of the full capabilities of NixOS. I only use Home manaher to set my gtk and icon themes, and have not even touched flakes yet.
I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers here, but: Ubuntu.
Back when Linux distros were less user-friendly, Ubuntu was basically a necessity for everyone who wasn't an expert or wanted things to work without much additional configuration. But since then other distros (like Debian) have come a long way, and Ubuntu has gotten much worse. I think Ubuntu is still dominant now because they have such widespread recognition, not because they're better than the alternatives.
definitely ubuntu
I've got to go with Endeavour. I'm not sure it's so much that it's overrated, but more that the community talks about it as a replacement for Manjaro which is far from the case. The installation may be easier than arch but once it's all up and running you're going to need to be comfortable in the terminal to sort things out. The documentation for endeavour is incredibly lacking too. It's an unnecessary middle step between a "beginner" distro and arch. If you can't follow the arch installation guide on the wiki then you're going to have even more trouble when it comes to endeavour
@valentino really surprised nobody said Fedora or CentOS since they're pretty much the same thing now: unpaid beta testing for RHEL.
Seeing a lot of Manjaro here, what's the deal? I installed it just yesterday on a test machine to check it out as I plan on steering over from windows long-term so just browsing what's out there. Don't really have issues and it ticks the boxes of a more user-friendly installation and comes out of the box with Plasma. I may try out pure Arch or the GUI fork just not to have the hassle of setting up the DE
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