For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
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Ubuntu is massively overrated. It’s a bloated distro owned by a greedy corporation.
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.
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.
It should probably take Mint’s place on this list.
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.
I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.
Linux Mint surely is disabling more “features” from Ubuntu than it’s using at this point.
That’s why some people at wondering why wont Mint not rebase to Debian, and go from there… would be better than ‘repairing’ everything Ubuntu breaks.
the snaps are terrible and they now have ads in the server version (CLI)
Wait they just include lines of advertisements or something in the command line??
It’s in the MOTD. Very easy to permanently disable, but still annoying.
Windows
AH, so this is a “tell me your favourite distro” post again. Tribalism isn’t cool, man.
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.
Whichever your favorite one is, that’s the most overrated one
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 use Arch BTW
Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
Great, just in time. Uninstall it and try a serious distro like Fedora or Opensuse TW
I wouldn’t consider Fedora or Opensuse TW better than Manjaro. Just trading one issue for another. Honestly I replaced my 1 year old Manjaro install (when I borked my DE) with Fedora.
Fedora lasted 1 month before the btfs filesystem broke and I lost all of my files with no way to recover. Ontop of the difficulty of adding community copr repos for features like XPadNeo, DNF being so slow that Discover would barley function, and being about 2 months behind software fixes for a specific graphic driver bug that prevented me from playing some UE4 game.
Wasn’t Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That’s what I’ve heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn’t (isn’t?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me. I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn’t break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn’t even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated
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.
More like OpenOffice. It still has some power on its branding, but new users should stay away from it and go for LibreOffice, that is any other main distro (Arch, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Debian, etc.). There’s nothing exciting happening in Ubuntu anymore, but a lot of people still know its name.
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…
One good reason to have distros like EndeavourOS is if you have to use an Enterprise WiFi network while installing Arch. Pain in the ass to get iwd to work with them.
https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
Endeavouros is more community welcoming & does not make bad choices with a real copyleft license.
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.And arch. Arch is godly.
(I use Arch btw.)
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.I’ve used Arch on many different computers over the years. It’s not stable, it breaks. I don’t understand why it’s great. Debian (minimal install) is better.
I’ve only had one problem with arch (it broke after an update once) except for that one problem it was always very stable and solid in my experience.
Debian is too “old” for me. I prefer bleeding edge and i refuse to use any flatpaks or such because they are a pain in the ass to set up right in my experience
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?
The issue is new users.
If you have a vague understanding that Linux has distros and to switch to Linux, you’ll likely Google “best Linux distro.” Results that say “they all are good for different reasons” are unhelpful. Having sort through 50 options isn’t helpful.
New users want to know what to install. This means that some distros get hyped up as the best, and then people point out the cracks.
Until there is a clear and objective list of distros with pros and cons labeled the cycle will continue.
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.
My list overrated list additions:
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Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.
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Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.
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RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.
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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.
Having gone through the Arch install myself, what part dod you find you had to babysit? Boot the install media, format the drive, mount the mounts, install system, configure the system, and done. Maybe it’s just a more involved process than you’d like?
It’s everything after the install I don’t have time for. The install is the easy part. 😆
There are distros which are semi-rolling (Fedora) or rolling (Tumbleweed) which make it easy to maintain the install without lots of configuration.
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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.
But it is less pain. Distros that package Arch to make it fit for human consumption perform a vital service for it IMO. Arch is a fine distro that I could never use otherwise because it’s too much work to keep it together. With Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda etc. you get to use Arch albeit indirectly.
Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you’re not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They’ve made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for “stability” will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.
ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore.
I see this stability argument come up a lot but it’s not like Arch is a paragon of stability. I wouldn’t use Arch for a server, for example, I would use Debian stable.
For a desktop machine it depends on what your needs are. If it’s a personal, non-critical desktop machine then I don’t care about stability that much. Yeah Manjaro screws the pooch sometimes but the way it makes Arch simpler to use makes up for the occasional hiccup.
AUR does not figure into any of this IMO. Using “stability” or “compatibility” when it comes to AUR is nonsense. You take AUR packages as they come, there are no guarantees of stability or security or anything, and you should expect them to break at any time. If I need to rely on a 3rd-party package I use flatpaks or appimages not AUR.
I hear that. I wasn’t saying that the AUR is what causes the problems though. The AUR works better in Arch where everything is kept up to date, since that’s what the AUR targets. Manjaro holding back packages causes problems because the libraries and other packages might not be as up to date as the AUR scripts expect. This ends up causing more potential issues than the AUR otherwise would. If you’re not using the AUR then this all won’t have any effect on your usage of Manjaro, of course.
Arch
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Being 64-bit doesn’t make you special, my Nintendo 64 is 27 yrs old and it’s 64-bit
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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
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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…)
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.
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.
You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).
My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
I run Arch as my daily but I installed Endeavour as my teen’s first intro to Linux (and also because I couldn’t be arsed manually installing Arch). I really liked Endeavour’s Welcome screen thing. It has yay installed by dafault and you can run stuff like system update just from pressing a button on that Wecome UI. Which means my teen who is clueless about pacman and has no fucks to give for learning can run and install stuff just from clicking buttons.
As to whether it’s better or worse than Manjaro (which is my usual go to for Arch based newbie distros), I’m not sure. I think Endeavour feels lighter on its feet than Manjaro but I haven’t dine any benchmarks to say for sure. I do like pamac and have it installed on my system and I do think it’s great for new folks or people who like a GUI. That said, you can still install EndeavourOS and plonk pamac on there too.
Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I’ll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I’m not completely happy I’ll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can’t say I’ve had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
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