this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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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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[–] halfempty@kbin.social 99 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Ubuntu is massively overrated. It's a bloated distro owned by a greedy corporation.

[–] valentino@lemmy.ml 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I respect a lot what they did though. Ubuntu and Fedora worked and improved a lot of Linux's new technologies. Plus their focus and model is more focused on the server side.

[–] lemillionsocks 36 points 1 year ago

Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.

[–] panmeek@lemmy.sdf.org 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)

the snaps are terrible and they now have ads in the server version (CLI)

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[–] jkmooney@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago

Have to agree. They had a great start by enhancing Debian and being user friendly but, then they just kind of lost their way.

[–] Penguincoder 14 points 1 year ago

I agree with this entirely. Back when it was like V 3 or 4, it was amazing to get non-tech people into the Linux userspace. Now, it is atrocious and the last distro I'd ever suggest to someone.

[–] Limitless_screaming@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It should probably take Mint's place on this list.

[–] jkmooney@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Although, speaking as a fan of Mint who used it as my "daily driver" for years, I think the time has come for them to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and embrace Wayland. I know that, if I'd stayed with Mint, I've have gone to LMDE by now.

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[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 71 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All of them: communities are so used to blow their own horn that every Distro becomes overrated in the public debate.
Each single distro is "fine" at best.
Except for Debian.
Debian is Great, Debian is Love.

[–] SaltyIceteaMaker@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And arch. Arch is godly.

(I use Arch btw.)

[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

I'm gonna say "no", but just by personal preference.
I agree that, if you're skilled enough, 90% of distributions out there are completely useless once Arch and Debian are available.

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[–] IuseArchbtw@feddit.de 56 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mint is definitely not overrated. It has done much for the community because they created a distro that is easy to understand if you switch to Linux, easy to maintain and mostly works out of the box. Also they don't use snap.

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 12 points 1 year ago

Agreed. I just have better things to do than muck about with my OS. Just slap Mint on that fucker and get on with your life. Now, of course I i know that many people like to tinker and have everything just so. I'm not in any way knocking that. But if you just want minimal hassle Mint is the shit.

[–] nerdschleife@lemm.ee 49 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable

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[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Arch

  • Being 64-bit doesn't make you special, my Nintendo 64 is 27 yrs old and it's 64-bit

  • 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

  • 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...)

[–] polygon@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I know you're making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I'm running it right now. I was told it's a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you're doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.

..and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It's literally the same as every other distro. "pacman -Syu" is no different from "zypper dup" in Tumbleweed. I don't get the hype. I mean it's fine. I don't have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it's annoying to change distros. It's working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless "arch btw" attitude made me think it would be something special.

I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That's DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's just Linux and it's no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.

[–] Swiggles@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Arch is supposed to be used, it is a normal distribution. It is not hard, it is simple. That's its whole philosophy.

It is only difficult if you are new to Linux, because it doesn't hold your hands and has no opinion about a lot of things hence you must make many decisions yourself and configure everything like you need it. You have to know what you need and want.

The notion of a difficult distro for the sake of it is ridiculous. Who would ever want to use it? Arch is popular, because it is easy to use, but lets you configure the system to your desires for the most part.

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[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

10 years ago the installer dumped you out in the CLI and you had to run pacman -S kde (or whatever your desktop environment was), so that was much more of a "DIY but with good tools and the best wiki" kind of deal.

But yeah, agreed. These days it's pretty dang easy.

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[–] s20@lemmy.ml 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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...

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[–] dotslashme@infosec.pub 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ubuntu. I think of it as the Yahoo of linux distros. It used to be good, but then they made terrible decisions that ultimately made them irrelevant.

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[–] user8e8f87c@berlin.social 23 points 1 year ago (6 children)

@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.

[–] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 36 points 1 year ago

Gotta appreciate the pettiness of this. 😆

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[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] thelinuxcast@lemm.ee 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I already gave mine. They're in the video.

[–] Gingernate@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago

You're going to have to start adding your lemmy contact info in the podcast now lol

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Arch is for sweaty fanboy memes, not workflow

[–] BrianTheFirst@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Zyansheep@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago

Arch is a wiki with an association distro

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[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ubuntu is not overrated. It probably gets more hate than it deserves just because it is so popular. That said, I hate it. Slow and opinionated ( by bad opinions ).

Manjaro because it is lipstick on a pig. Looks gorgeous, seems to offer the benefits of Arch with less pain, is total garbage.

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[–] Rogueren@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 1 year ago

"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.

[–] Nefyedardu@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

Only Manjaro. Every distro has something different. Unfortunately, regular breakages isn't a differentiation people are after.

[–] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My list overrated list additions:

  • Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.

  • Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.

  • RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.

  • 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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[–] RagingToad@feddit.nl 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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).

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[–] Certainity45@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] cynetri@midwest.social 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Mint. Cinnamon is weird. I've had more problems and weird glitches with Cinnamon than any other DE. And it looks like it's straight out of 2004. That's why I'm a KDE junkie on KDE Neon now.

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[–] yrmyli@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For me there is only two distros. They are Arch an Debian. But that is only me. I don't think that any of those distros are overreted they just have their own user types and needs.

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[–] taanegl 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Definitely Arch and Ubuntu.

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[–] Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Fedora is highly overrated.

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[–] moitoi@feddit.de 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Rhabuko@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Linux Mint. People praise it as the perfect Window replacement yet when I tried it for a week, it didn't do anything better than default KDE Plasma Desktop. And since the devs haven't even started to work on Wayland support, the Distro will soon fall way behind.

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