I labeled some of the lesser known logos. The criteria are arbitrary and I made this based on how much I liked using it.
Note that Fedora Sway Atomic isn’t bad, but I had a bad experience because I was trying to install NIri on it and it clearly wasn’t meant for that. Basically, it’s just not for me.
I wanted to rank Manjaro low because I heard bad things about it, but I think I used it for like a few minutes because I wanted to try Gnome, and I didn’t like Gnome after trying it and didn’t want to deal with uninstalling all the Gnome stuff manually, so I just hopped to another distro.
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Uhhh, I, uhhh
I use Arch by the way :3
Sorry I couldn’t help it. Technically I started this install as Antegos, but since that project ended I used some voodoo to convince my OS that it’s Arch now with moderate succes.
Oh I do dislike Manjaro. I tried it a few times on some PCs and every time it ended in a dumpster fire. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but it has something to do with pitting me pick the kernel but also completely going to shit if I didn’t pick the right one at the right moment. Constant errors, pain and suffering. When I switched that machine to Fedora it was suddenly happily purring like a kitten without any issues.
Why is OpenSUSE at the bottom? I’d heard good things about it. EndeavourOS is my current OS but I’m always looking for a new distro.
It’s in the “Unranked” tier because OP hasn’t used it enough to have an opinion.
When I used it decades ago, I was a kid. It seemed pleasant enough for me back then. On one hand, I’d say “works for children” is an endorsement. On the other, child-me never tried any of the advanced stuff I’d care about today.
I love nixos for my homelab! Out of curiosity, why C tier for KDE Neon? (My desktop and laptop both daily drive them, and I’ve loved it since abandoning Ubuntu post-Unity)
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How dare you rank Debian at…oh. I see what you did there. Nice.
Wait, where’s Gentoo?
the dark and forbidden G tier
In all honesty i don’t get it the E for endravourOS on my old ass laptop everything works just fine, even the nvidia card
I was getting really mad, the I realized what you did there.
Artix really needs an archinstall like script though. Setting it up more than once is really tiring.
Here is mine:
Mint
Haven’t really tried anything else or it was 10+ years ago.
Haha! You beat me to it! Great ranking. I 100% agree with where you’ve places each/it.
Very nice. I would rank down debian because it has weird defaults like not having /sbin in the user PATH but other than that I agree
I mean, NixOS has lots of weird “defaults” in that sense, too. 🙃
I use fedora workstation but it’s so boring because it just does what I need and I never have any problems 🥲
I might give Debian a spin at some point
I wish it wasn’t built on Wayland.
What’s wrong with Wayland? Havnt noticed any problems
I use Anydesk for work and Rustdesk for personal and the lag is so bad. Also added the hot keys and super button doesn’t transfer to the remote computer.
Debian + nix home-manager is hard to beat. Confining my bleeding edge software to be rootlesson top of a bulletproof distro is very much the same – boring (in the best way). Plus the latest apt in debian 13 just feels nicer than dnf to me somehow.
Here’s mine:
- Note 1: This tierlist only includes distros I’ve tried.
- Note 2: Slackware would rank higher now; I made this about month ago.
- Note 3: The “noob” tier doesn’t mean the distro is bad. If it weren’t there, Mint would rank higher.
CachyOS in S, based.
Damn, you’ve tried a lot of different distros. I’ve been using Linux for 15 years but only been on like 8 different ones. Installed personally about 5.
Well, I began in 2019, but I distrohopped a lot.
Gentoo in the top tier, checks out
Why try so many distros? It’s not like most of them are gonna be substantially different.
its like racecars
Idk, autism?
You never know, the grass might be greener elsewhere. I will say though, to me that only applies to independent distros. At this point i only bother trying distros that are actually different at their core. Arch- or debian-based distros are all kind of the same to me.
The only list I get behind. It is missing NixOS for S tier, but otherwise very logical.
I want to like NixOS. I love the idea of declarative system configuration, but I always found NixOS quite easy to break. It also didn’t seem to like Eduroam much.
Gentoo is good only if you got a powerful computer.
I used to run it on my Raspberry Pi 5 without complaint.
Some stuff did take a while to compile, but the trick is to do other things — like make some tea, go for a walk, or watch TV — instead of staring at the terminal the whole time (I am 100% serious; this is not sarcasm).
Redhat and Ubuntu are controversial for me. Don’t want them for desktop, but for any professional server I would choose them over any of the others (and preferably alpine for any docker containers running on them)
So, why would you pick RedHat over Rocky or Alma?
Or Ubuntu over Debian?
Genuinely curious, not judging
It’s way easier to explain to customers “these companies have enterprise commitments and long term support available if needed”, I realize that they all essentially run the same stuff but frankly I can’t guarantee I’m always gonna be the one supporting them and it is an added safety net for when they decide not to upgrade for an eternity. Not to mention just about every VPS provider has at least one of those two options available out of the box, they’re frankly the safe boring choices.
Need to add Qubes os as S+ tier
no hannah montana linux??
That’s at least two tiers above S, obviously
So high it wouldn’t fit on your screen
“High” in every sense
Void, Debian and Artix being in S tier is just based.
I enjoy linux mint a lot
I put LM on my n100 HTPC and hasn’t done a thing more besides updates. It just works…
I’ve been recommending it as the beginner’s distro for years. Default DE is very windows familiar, install is easy, out of box experience is great, built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck. There’s nothing really wrong with it unless you need newer drivers or something
Only Linux Mint Debian Edition is built on Debian. Linux Mint (main) is built on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a Debian distro too. Either way mint is a Debian distro.
There’s the Linux Mint main distro build off Ubuntu and a separate Linux Mint Debian distro build directly from Deb.
Specificity is useful, especially in the context that you said “Mint is built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck” - well actually, not directly. It’s built on Ubuntu, which a lot of people complain has a more bloat and thus less stability than Debian.
Personally I’ve not had issues with any of the three, they’re all good, but there are differences. Mint includes a number of packages that Debian does not (PPAs, Snap, Wayland infegration), because it’s inherited them all from Ubuntu. Mint is 64-bit whereas Debian supports 32/64 and other architectures, because again… Mint (standard) is based on Ubuntu, which is 64-bit only.
Void and NixOS in S tier is based, my two favorite distros. Because of me using void though i kinda miss using Runit when i want to use a declaritive system like nix. I’m working on a gnu guix config in a vm now to see if i can use that as an alternative instead. It’s not runit per se, but who knows, maybe i’ll still like shepherd better than systemd.
If you can handle nix why bother with other distros
I enjoy this comment. I don’t even know, if I’d rank NixOS as S-tier in general, but because I can handle it, yeah, don’t really have a reason to bother with other distros…
I can handle it but I wanted a more traditional package manager so I could search the repos from the command line without relying on external tools, so I went back to Void Linux after a year and a half of using NixOS. Also, I tried a lot of those before even knowing about NixOS.
you mean like
nix-shell -p tldr?I mean like
apt searchorpacman -SsNixOS also doesn’t show what packages were updated after an update, and doesn’t show which version they changed to, which is slightly annoying.
I can recommend nh. Its a wrapper around the nix* commands and includes
nh search, giving you a list of packages (not sure about nixos module options, I think not). It also uses nix-output-monitor giving you a nice dependency graph when building (plus downloads etc) as well as a diff between the current and new generation, with version changes, added, removed etc.It would have been nice to know about that, I already heard about it before but only after I’d switched to Void anyway. Maybe one day if I try NixOS again I will use it.
