Linux

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

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.

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

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...)

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?

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

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.

@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 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.

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).

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

MX Linux.

I don't know why it gets recommended so often, I don't actually think many people use it, but for some reason it's brought up all the time. I blame Distrowatch.

Arch is for sweaty fanboy memes, not workflow

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.

AH, so this is a "tell me your favourite distro" post again. Tribalism isn't cool, man.

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.

Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.

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.

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.

@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

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.

Definitely Arch and Ubuntu.

"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.