Original question by @POTOOOOOOOO@reddthat.com
Really? I guess everyone was 15 at some point and hadn’t heard that distro wars are useless 🤣
There is no best. Period.
Does what I want and gets out of my way.
Debian. It works so well that I never even looked at different distros during the last 20 years or so…
To each its own in accordance to their needs. Debian is great unless you want to add proprietary stuff like GPUs. That’s the whole reason so many distros (e.g. Ubuntu) raised to fame and gained popularity while being based on Debian… That, and the fact that until recently Debian installation guide was not updated and called to download an ISO to be burned in 1-2 CDs… that was so f*ing unclear. Of course you can use a pendrive, but if the guide talks about CDs… that’s just confusing to newbies. None pointed that out, but to me is like being even less friendly than Arch :P Just my opinion. That said, I have been using Debian based distros for most of my time, even today (desktop PC with MX ‘ahs’.)
It isn’t, it is the least bad
I’m convinced it isn’t.
I’ve been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.
It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband’s laptop.
It’s allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I’ve switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).
NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.
Mine’s the best, because it fits with what I want. Might not be your best, but it’s mine.
This week alone I’ve used Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora. Its Arch. By a short way, and mostly thanks to the wiki. Tbh they are all converging, and I go with KDE variants when I use a GUI and no distro does too much to customise it
How about Qubes? if you have the specs, you get sandboxes (VMs) and all distros are available into 1. Heck, you can even have windows VMs…
And if you don’t have the specs, just use any linux and install distrobox (docker) !
For a long time I considered Gentoo the best, because I know my things around there. A month ago I said goodbye to my last Gentoo installation in favour for Debian trixie (the next stable release). Gentoo was too time consuming despite the binary repo.
If it would be my job to maintain a Gentoo system I would gladly accept, but there should be a need for it by the users. Otherwise I would just recommend Debian stable or Fedora.
My favourite is Debian over Fedora, because I often don’t need the latest versions of a software. And there is flatpak.
Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement
Because it lets me use a list of packages instead of needing to remember what to install, has every package I need and let’s me use them without installing them, and has a good rollback system to go along with cutting edge packages.
Because I can hit “next” a couple of time and have a working install