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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.
Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.
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.
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.
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.
Void. Boots in 2 seconds to Xfce if not for udev. Maybe i'll try mdev.
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.
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
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:
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 --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)_/¯
I just wish more distros made their terminal prompt and updater look as good as Gentoo's, it's weirdly the one thing I miss most about messing around with it
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.
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.
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.
+1 for Alpine. I had my reservations due to their mistrust for glibc which rattled my GNU sensibilities, but musl is rock steady and all my apps feel stable and hackable.
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.
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...
I'm a bazzite user coming from silverblue, Jorge and the team have really done a great job when you think how daunting silverblue can be at first but how accessible the I ublue projects are.
But I'll add another point to Garruda because I completely miss judged it. Initially thought yup another edgy gamerz distro but their tools are awesome particularly the btrfs manager.
Gentoo's USE flags. <3
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.
I love it, but the configuration is messy. Many packages are out of date, but the Scheme syntax makes it easy to update them and build them on your system.
Problem is, getting these updates merged with the upstream never happens generally speaking (I have several open patches), so you end up having two working trees in your local Guix repo, and heaven forbid you run guix pull on the wrong branch.
Void Linux, very clean and fast on old hardware.
Just switched over to EndeavourOS & it’s been great
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.
LFS: Not being so complicated actually. Arch: That a fully fletched OS install can be done in less than 10 minutes.
LFS isn't a distro.
Then let's call my install 30p87OS, that was made from scratch. Now it's a distro.
Deal. :D Edit: Congratz BTW, that's a huge feat to create own distribution from LFS. My hats off!
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, 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
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.
I think KDE is doing the heavy lifting of being like Windows. As a long time Windows user who would every now and then try Ubuntu and hate it, it was Gnome that really turned me off. KDE is so much nicer, IMO.
I agree. It's not that I expect Linux to be like windows. It's not and that's a good thing. I'm just thinking for when I encounter people and they ask me, "Hey, I was thinking about trying a Linux. What should I do? Which one should I pick?"
I'm going to recommend Kubuntu.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Pop OS has worked out well for me even better than Ubuntu & Fedora.
Arch Wiki
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
You were able to get to the bootloader with a fucked up bootloader?
Maybe i "fucked the bootloader config" should be better, and with fedora unified kernel support, you can rollback using the UEFI entry so even a fucked bootloader wouldn't stop you
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.
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.