Linux

Arch

(I use Arch btw)

For me it's Ubuntu. Whenever I tried it it was buggy and crashing. It kinda feels like Windows of GNU+Linux.

About Manjaro, I like it. I kinda feel sad seeing Manjaro get so much hate. The only thing I disliked was the accidental DDoS of AUR. But so far it's been working relatively well for me. I use Manjaro with Plasma.

And my favorite is Linux Mint. It just works, and it does so reliably. Also the Linux Mint community is really nice.

As such, I donated to Manjaro, Arch, and Linux Mint. Not much, but at least something.

Just the Oracle Red Hat clone, because, well, Oracle. Also those distros that disappear spontaneously because they were mainly maintained by one person only.

Debian. APT sucks, the installer looks like straight out of 1999 and the packages are just wayyy too old. Also apt-autoremove deleted half of my system the 1st time I tried debian...

A question that begs for a hot take. I love it! Manjaro has always made zero sense to me. The power of Arch is in its rolling release cycle and your ability to customize it from the ground up. Both of which you lose when you downloads someone mix of Arch. It always seemed like a flavor for people who want to run Arch but just don't have the ability to read the documentation to actually run it.

I don't particularly like Arch.

I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).

It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.

Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.

I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)

I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.

Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.

Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.

CentOS. We were stuck on an old version at work. The OS is already designed to use old packages for security/stability, so imagine how outdated they are on an old version. It was a nightmare getting new software running on it. That coupled with the other news surrounding CentOS and RHEL, I'm not touching those anymore w a 10 foot pole. I wish it just crumbles and Debian takes over. I have had amazing success with like 20 years on Debian and it just gets better and better.

Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I've been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I've never use them myself.

Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.

Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.

Red Hat for obvious reasons. Used to run and recommend CentOS before all the fuckery.

Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.

I don't like anything Debian based. The package manager always sits at the core of the experience, and it's just a horrible experience. With a bit of manual intervention, you can upgrade an Arch install from 10 years ago. I've never managed to update any Debian based distribution from the previous release. That aside, a lot of what I do relies on newest packages, and having something that's 5 years out of date just isn't for me

Sorry mate. I love them all! All free software, especially GPL-based but still have high appreciation for the BSDs as well. Even Red Hat that has messed everything up recently, has a soft spot in my heart, with Fedora being the first distro I really enjoyed Linux in 2003 (very first Fedora Core). However, IBM/RedHat make a real effort to become the one and only distro that I may list here.

Gentoo. I just found it a pain, from spending forever figuring why nothing would work only to realise I hadn't enabled some kernel module for my SSD to updates taking forever and completely annihilating my battery if on battery power, it just felt like more work than it was worth.

Well, Ubuntu. I've been skeptical of it from the beginning, but I did use it on and off in the 00's. Canonical has since gone out of their way to make sure I won't install their shit on my computers.

Recent developments have also somewhat soured me on Fedora.

Ubuntu because of forced Snaps

SUSE because of Yast and the (german) company's rumored? stance on antisemitism (google banned Jewish holidays)

Fedora for it's update mechanism with the forced reboot

Arch as the necessary evil

Well, scrolling through every comment, it looks like very few people hate Fedora. I've always been using Debian and Debian based distros but recently moved to Fedora, and I'm not surprised people like it.

Ubuntu. Snaps are a buggy mess. I know you can remove them but I like sane defaults. Snap drives me insane. Mint, PopOS, Debian are better choices for a stable distro.

edit: I also don't like Fedora and CentOS. The installers tend to be very buggy for me.

OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.

For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)

Also, Manjaro