Linux Mint started out as Ubuntu with green theme and media codecs installed by default. It gradually improved. And when Ubuntu thought that it would be great to reinvent the desktop paradigm, Mint said "no way" and created The Cinnamon Desktop. Later, when Ubuntu decided that forcing Snap packages on everyone would be great, Mint said "no way" and maintains all mint packages as regular apt packages and no snap by default. Mint benefits from the popularity of Ubuntu, is nicer to use, and it's friggin beautiful.
and ubuntu started with some guys deciding that debian is a bit too stability focussed. let's take a less stable version and upgrade it. so with mint, ubuntu, zorin and a few others, you get the nice situation of a modern OS, but under the hood it is debian. which also means that hardware manufacturers and programmers just need to support debian and can support a rather large amout of other distributions just as a side effect.
@@F3EDER Depends on the games, but it's probably fine, especially for older games or older hardware. The only game I couldn't smoothly run without periodic crashing with Mint was Elden Ring, which has been notably better with Fedora for me (due to newer kernel and drivers). Other than that, I haven't noticed a difference with the games I've played (mostly Fromsoft and Falcom games). I'm only a couple of months into using Linux though. So far with Mint vs Fedora, I've noticed that things tend to work more easily with Mint, while with Fedora it can take a little more tinkering to get things to work smoothly. Some examples: - Brave wouldn't start when I first installed it in Fedora 38, and I had to install an older version first to get it working (which was recommended on a forum as a workaround). It worked fine with Mint. - I had to fiddle with permissions to get k3b working to burn an audio disc (not necessary with Mint) - I had to manually install a some python gl package to play some Renpy games with gl rendering (which I did not have to do with Mint). - Wine didn't work for me with Fedora like it did with Mint, so I had to use Bottles instead (which is great, probably better for my usage than Wine anyway) - The Steam client would rarely stop responding in Fedora somehow and took down the rest of the desktop with it. Not entirely sure why, but I haven't had it happen since I disabled some of the interface settings that were enabled by default (smooth scrolling, GPU accelerated rendering, hardware video decoding, I think). Never had that happen in Mint. So overall, Mint is pretty great. I only tried out Fedora because of the Elden Ring crashing that was probably something odd with my setup, and now that I've gotten it in a good spot after tinkering, I'm not interested in switching things around. I also preferred Cinnamon to Gnome, and Mint had a better "welcome" experience and default software installed, IMO.
@@ordinaryhuman5645 thank you for this nice info. I have a 5-6 year old gaming laptop, gen 7 i7. win 11 works just with workarounds, going back to win 10 means it is a complete reset and it is deprecated in 1,5 years anyways. so... mint it is.
@@robertheinrich2994 Yeah, I think if you're coming from Windows, Mint is probably the best place to start. Odds are it'll be fine, but if it isn't, you'll have a particular problem that would inform your next distribution choice (or giving up and going back to Windows, if there are too many unsolvable problems). In my case, I wanted the newer drivers for gaming (Ryzen 7 3700x + RX 5700 XT). I haven't booted Windows 10 yet since I started using Linux a couple of months ago, and I doubt that I'll need to boot it again for personal use.
Mint was my 2nd stop after windows. Ubuntu then mint. I had a hell of a time in mint with the nvidia drivers, finally giving up and back to windoze. Today thought I've been running manjaro KDE plasma, I love it. Been using it for about 2yrs now. Sadly though I still had to recently purchase win10 (I owned win7 but missed the free update to 10) to play my steam games...proton just doesn't cut it for me cause I hate F'ing around to get a game to work. Win10 for gaming ManjaroKDE plasma daily driver...
@@miketurgeon5506 Heh, i just avoid games the community say don't easily work with wine/proton, or don't have native ports. They will never feel any pressure otherwise. And I'm very experienced with Wine, i can make games work with wine staging+nvidia easily as long as they are in the appdb wine page, often they work without steam but not with steam, which is ironic, unless steam itself is also launched in wine, of course. I don't have THAT much time for that many games anyway, and Linux working games are plentiful.
Clem does NOT actually listen. The team STILL has not started work on Wayland and they killed the KDE edition, despite receiving outcry from the users.
I'm happy to see Mint getting love. When I first got into Linux, I used to get teased for using Mint, but it helped me get the feel for Linux at my own pace. The accessibility made a big difference.
I've been a Linux user for almost 20 years now and I've gone through Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, CentOS and of course Mint, I've written code for Linux in C and all I can say is this: At the end of the day you want to get shit done and have a usable system you feel comfortable with without having to customize for days. Mint does just that for me. The last few years I had to switch to Windows on my main PC because I had to use Office and develop in VS (also kinda nice for games and other software not yet ported to Linux or running unstable, but I can't wait to switch back. I really couldn't care less about what anybody else says about me using Mint and neither should you. If you can do anything you need to do with it and like the OS, it's the right one for you. At the end of the day you want an enjoyable user experience and a stable system. In case you ever want to try out other Distros, I can only give you one piece of advice: Put your home directory on a separate partition, it makes the process a lot more comfortable.
I went from windows straight to arch. Was a difficult experience but I love it. Aswell the community around arch is amazing and really friendly for when you inevitably break something.
@@piecepaper2831 I hope the rude responses from some commenters doesn't ruin your opinion of Arch users. Reports of Arch being buggy or horribly unstable are greatly exaggerated. It's also really not that difficult to set up, and the whole process is documented so will in both text and video that it's basically a non-issue this point. It'll teach you a lot about how Linux works and how to customize your OS to be exactly how you want it.
In my opinion the huge problem Ubuntu has is that so many other distros and system infrastructure (like servers) depend on it working and staying somewhat consistent. It is just not possible for them change any core element and not get a huge amount of hate for it.
They already changed a core element recently, that it removed any support for flatpak that comes by default to force their users to use "Snap". Just like how Microsoft forces users to use their Edge.
@@edwinpj7637 ... and they get a lot of hate for that move. Maybe Canonical has a greater vision with snaps and they want to follow it. Why should anybody be allowed to tell Canonical what they can and can not do with their distro (that you can use free of charge). After all it's Linux: If you don't like it you don't have to use it. All I wanted to say is that Ubuntu is in a spot where changes can not be done without making some part of the community feel like Canonical deliberately stepped on their toes.
System infrastructure is not really a point for me as no reputable company would ever use a desktop version of Linux on a server and there would, at least in my opinion, not speak anything against going different routes on desktop and server versions of the distro. Other distros okay, but also meh. As a company in their own interest they could also go the route of saying: Well others completely relying on us is not stopping our own evolvement, so the would have to build around that. Not perfect and many would hate it but in my view absolutely possible.
@@Hardcore_Remixer to be fair, for most people, if you were able to have no browser on your computer by default, it would be considered a broken system. I know that people have this irrational hatred of having a browser they'll never use on their system, but the fact is it's kind of a necessity. That being said, they really should make it so that you can choose not to have it come back with updates, but that should be disabled by default because when you're designing products for the lowest common denominator, you have to design them for the assumption that people are absolute morons. You have to make a product that can save the users from themselves. That's why the steam deck uses an immutable desktop, so that you can't accidentally change system files by default.
@@KuruGDI the problem with snaps is that (to the best of my knowledge) the server is source-unavailable, let alone free or open source. So they clearly don't have a greater vision for snaps if they can't at least release the source code for people to view If people are using snaps (which as we've established they've not only released to the public, but with stuff like this actively promote), it is one of their fundamental rights to be able to have the complete source needed to (in theory - disregarding monetary, expertise/competency, and legal issues) reproduce in fully-identical (with the sole exception of differing secret keys leading to slightly different but 100% identical in function) form and modify as wanted the product in question (snaps here). Canonical has failed to respect this basic right, and people are obliged to tell them what they can't do
Made the switch to Tumbleweed a bit over a year ago now, been fantastic so far. It does make me sad that openSUSE is basically never talked about, even in videos about companies in Linux.
I would definitely put Pop OS higher. System76 has done a bad job communicating this, but the reason Pop OS hasn't gotten a point release in a while is because they are actually treating the distro as a rolling release built on top of Ubuntu 22.04. All of the packages related to desktop graphic performance like drivers and kernels and libraries are all up-to-date, unlike Ubuntu or Zorin OS.
Yeah I like POP!_OS too. My first Linux was Mint, but I have a lot of hardware driver trouble. Wlan and Nvidia graphic doesn't work well. Then I tried POP!_OS and I am super happy with it.
NixOs' single file config and their take on preventing dependency issues by making each dependency version a hash and using symlinks to let apps use different versions on the same system at the same time is cool!
@@alexstone691 I switched to vim after I came to nix. I haven't had any issues. My plugins all allowed me to set the lsp executable by hand. Edit: I'm setting up neovim with Homemanager.
So pleased to see Gentoo ranked as good. It's so versatile. But, indeed, it has a pretty daunting learning curve, and it only makes sense in the first place if you want to spend time to learn how to make use of it. One thing that is not mentioned, though probably it's out of scope, is that it is very good for very specific use cases. Niches. Like, running the latest Linux on a 486 from 30 (yes, thirty) years ago. Because it gives you so much power, it can also be extremely minimalistic. Going forward, knowing that you focus on practical stuff in general, I'd say the top pick for what distro to check next has to be openSuse, by a large margin. It's the underdog of distros, seemingly always in the shadow of Fedora. Plus, you gotta show some more european love (if I'm not mistaken, they're from Germany). I'm also personally interested in NixOS, but I don't think it's a good everyday distro, at least not yet. But their package manager is very interesting.
This is what I came here to say. Gentoo's approach to rolling release is refreshing when compared to Arch where everything is immediately pushed. Gentoo has a nice balance of stable packages on a rolling platform with the option to get more bleeding edge versions of anything by just setting a flag on the package. Once the initial install is done, the update times are pretty reasonable (assuming you don't have an update for nodejs or go...). Even a full KDE suite update only took a few minutes on my 5800X. It's somehow been more stable than Fedora on my desktop, and I haven't experienced any of the Arch memes like things randomly breaking following a software update (which only took about 2 weeks the last time I swapped back to Arch). I can't shill it hard enough, it's genuinely a great distro.
NixOS is a great distro if you love the concept and the fiddling that Linux requires. It’s like how when you first switch to Linux you gotta learn all the different things when compared to windows, but now you do it again, learning the changes from NixOS to normal Linux 😂
This video couldn't have come out at a better time for me. I've been looking for an update on the state of Linux distros, haven't been able to keep in touch with the Linux world much lately since my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install has been going strong for over 2 years. Thanks for the tier list, Nick, Keep the awesome Linux content coming!
Nice summary. I ran Open-Suse Tumbleweed for about nine months, and even though I have now returned to Arch I found pretty decent, and it run really well out of the box on Dell laptops (which was why I ended up using it for so long). So I would certainly say it deserves a video. The other distro which I have recently stumbled upon, and been impressed by is Voyager. It is basically a tweaked Ubuntu - but it looks and feels really modern, so just for the aesthetics alone it gets an honourable mention from me.
I was using Fedora dual boot with Windows 11. I tryed to use it with flatpaks, but it's visible more slow than .rpms or appimage. Then my Fedora just stopped working 3 times this years... The last one 5 days ago... I don't know a lot about OpenSuse, but after try CentOS, EndeavourOS and Kinoite(coudn't even install with dual boot....), I finally tryed OpenSUSE LEAP with flatpaks. It's impressive the performance with flatpaks, it works perfect in the same machine that I used Fedora with Flatpaks. I'm curious about Yast, it appears to be a very good solution for diagnosing a lot of infraestructure problems with an easy interface! I'm not using zypper yet because all softwares I needed was downloaded via flatpak, and that was one reason I was afraid to chance to OpenSUSE some months ago. But the system looks very solid and I'm enjoying use it with almost standard KDE interface. I hope it will last longer than my Fedora installations...
I'm stoked that you put Linux Mint at the top! It often gets a rap as being only a beginner distro for it's ease of use but honestly, I've been using Linux for almost 20 years and I while I continue to try different distros from time to time, Linux Mint is the one that I use the most as my daily driver.
No wonder, you are an old fart 😂😂😂 I too use Linux Mint, I am too old to spend time making my OS pretty or super up to date. Good enough is the way to go for me 😊
I'm using EndeavourOS the past year, which is based on Arch but with calamares installer. You get to pick from a lot of DEs on installation, which is super cool. Still needs some tweaking after installation but still way less hassle than Arch. The repos used are the Arch repos + a small side repo of Endeavour for the few apps they maintain. It is a very good distro i'd say, but not for total beginners.
Same for me. I switched from Manjaro after the controversy straight to EndeavourOS and no complaints about EndeavourOS thus far. Very powerful; tasteful changes and accessible. They have a good model in place. Very good to excellent.
@@Rommsey EndeavourOS is my number one choice for even slightly more experienced than beginner Linux distro recommendations! Especially KDE Plasma ones!
I found MX to be a complete experience. With easy access to common package downloads, flatpaks, testing branch, and back ports packages, makes this handy. Also, if you are running Intel graphics, you can choose the Intel graphics driver. I don't know if it works with Iris graphics. It also provides the option to install Nvidia drivers. .The kernel is a bit older, but a newer kernel version is available, for newer hardware, if needed. XFCE, isn't the prettiest desktop,but it can be themed. Appearance doesn't matter to me very much. I'm ok with an older look. MX is the best distro, if being used as a live USB, with persistence, bar none.
Did you experience upgrading from 19 to 21? The thing about evaluating a distro, is that its not limited to the "i just installed it" experience, but what comes later down the road. He just gave a lower rating to Pantheon for the same thing MX Linux did there... Distros that can't upgrade are an obstacle to the user.
Great list. My first distro was building Gentoo from source, it took days on my hardware in the 90s but I learned basically everything I know about Linux today and way more about how my hardware worked. Today I basically use Debian or most every server I can, I normally don't install a DE but I have one have one desktop system that also uses Debian, it's not used as a normal desktop so it's been fine for my needs.
I always enjoy your honest and transparent Linux user experience :-) I volunteer in the community and support those with lack of access to tech; I source older laptops (7-10yr) primarily ThinkPads; upgrade the ram & install an ssd whilst 'cleaning' & thermal pasting. I use MX-Linux, and so far it has been great.
Should consider EndeavourOS as Manjaro substitute for the next tier list video. Used it before I switched to Arch, been hearing good things about it ever since.
I understand the purpose of Manjaro as a distribution, it's snapshots of Arch aiming for more stability, now Endevour is just Archlinux with an installer, why not install Arch right?
@@joaopauloalbq It's awesome for intermediate users which may not want to get into Arch yet but want to try something more advanced than, say, Linux Mint. EndeavourOS is basically Arch + great installer + a bunch of little utilities that make the experience more straightforward for new users
Another vote for NixOS. I don't actually care much about its place in a ranking, but I really think that if anyone is able to do a good introduction to this distro for beginners, you are the guy who can pull it off :) There are a few videos on it on TH-cam already but they all seem to be geared to Linux (or at least distro-hopping) experts.
Honestly, I would compare Fedora to Linux Mint. They both are great for beginners and advanced users alike. The thing I love about Fedora is that it lets me customise things I care about to my heart content, while also providing sensible defaults for the rest. Other than the Flathub issue the rest are just minor pain points in the beginning, but after you get past those it's a very nice experience.
13:20 is why I always recommend Garuda instead of Manjaro for beginners. Garuda actually uses the Arch repositories and simply adds an additional distro-specific repository on top of them PPA-style instead of repackaging software as their own and remaining 3 weeks behind Arch in the process as Manjaro does. XeroLinux is another good choice as far as that goes, but Garuda also uses the Fish shell to make command-line use easier and on top of that automatically makes btrfs snapshots whenever software updates are installed. It also integrates all your btrfs snapshots into GRUB, so in the event that an Arch update breaks your system, no problem, just boot into a snapshot and roll back. This should make Windows users familiar with System Restore feel right at home since those btrfs snapshots function as bona fide restore points in that case and they do a fantastic job of making an otherwise unstable rolling release distro feel more stable than it actually is.
I also loved Garuda when I tried it out but have never daily driven. I would love to see the Dragonized themeing, FireDragon browser and a host of other features and defaults on a Debian base. It would be a winner! Not that Garuda isn't already imo.
Wow. I've always liked Mint because it includes a lot of hardware support out of the box that other distros require you to install manually (and thus makes for a really good utility liveOS, since you don't have to worry about installing drivers for whatever hardware you're trying to fix), but I didn't expect it to be ranked any higher than just "good."
Very good video ! I personally really like Pop OS for its simplicity (mainly NVDIA drivers and all), it was the only distro to work out of the box with my NVIDIA card and my 144hz monitor
I still run and like Manjaro. It adds some stuff like extra window switchers, nice theme tweaks or a nice default terminal configuration. I know these can be added to other distros, but when I first installed Manjaro it felt like a really polished experience. The only thing I'm not so happy about is that it takes quite a long time sometimes to get new versions of some packages. It took over 3 months since I saw the review of KDE 5.25 on this channel until it arrived in Manjaro. I have no idea how long it takes in other distros, but if it's called rolling release then I'd like to try new things before I forget about them 😀
The reason Manjaro delays Plasma so much is because they ship it on their computers. They don't want to risk shipping a broken system. Other updates get out a lot faster, but they messed up keeping 5.25 for so long. Going from Manjaro>Fedora KDE led to an objectively superior experience. What I think would really help Manjaro is a "housekeeping event" or something. A lot of their editions ship with old/broken themes, some Manjaro-specific apps are GTK, some are QT so require a bunch of extra packages on Gnome and have inconsistent visuals. You'll see there are inconsistent teal shades used, etc. If you install Zorin or Elementary, you see this super-consistent visual polish, whereas Manjaro IMO has THE BEST branding, but little bits of jankyness that make it feel more unstable than it is.
I've slowly gained more and more problems running Manjaro, to the point i think it has no good reason existing. It is arch based, and i love pacman as a package manager. However, because they keep their own repos for the main but also allow you to access the AUR over time a you'll get a significant amount of desync, after running it for a year updating the system became a gamble on when the star aligned on dependencies or not. All in all, it is Arch made easy, but at the same time takes away most of what is good of arch. It makes more sense forking a different distro to run it like this.
@Guitarzen I'm sorry, but this comment does upset me a little. Even though i personally often am the cause for many of my own computer problems, if you have read my original comment, you aught reconsider if this is a picnic case or not. I am glad Manjaro is working out for your choices, but I don't think your experience invalidates my competency. I wouldn't consider the user the problem when that which fails the updates literally, as reported by pamac itself, is out-of-date dependencies. Using the AUR on Manjaro is very hit-or-miss, which they themselves obviously usually acknowledge. However at the same time the facilitate this use by providing the options with pamac. After having moved away i have realized Manjaro itself offered little but annoyance over other distros about. As a more experienced linux user, an easier experience installing has not been worth it if over a system that runs and updates more reliable. The same combinations of software is not giving me any problems on Arch now thankfully.
Imo it's hard to justify choosing Manjaro when there is OpenSUSE. Sure the look and feel might be different and the package managers are different, but both OS' are for more advanced users who customize everything to begin with, so you can make both distros look and feel identical. In the end you get one on the bleeding edge full of instability and another on the cutting edge which might cut you from time to time, but you're not likely to bleed from these cuts. This gives an all around far better experience once setup. I will say though that Manjaro has less out of the box necessary configuration to do than OpenSUSE so at first it does seem better.
I'd be interested in comparing gaming-related distros like Nobara, HoloISO and ChimeraOS. It would be interesting to know whether they offer noticeable advantages in performance and how do they work for non-gamining daily desktop usage.
I use Debian as a daily desktop. Softwares are not always up to date, but it's not really a problem. Why would we really need it ? The only flatpak I use is for Kicad 7, and Firefox from the official website instead of the Debian repo. I don't use Arch, but their wiki and documentation is impressive and very useful, even with other distro.
I'm using Zorin os lite so there's hardly any difference, since Xfce has hardly changed much❤. (Zorin os is still a good distro for windows to linux, it's very intuitive to use) if a distro works for you you should keep using it❤
I personally abandoned ZorinOS because of their payware 'Pro' variant which only includes some additional freely available packages and the inclusion of a macOS like dock. Things like this should be in a single free variant.
can you please make this a yearly serie .. like every year do tier list of the distros you ve tested that year im sure it will something special i imagine like the mkbhd phone awards XD
I didn't expected this result honestly, lot of reputed distro not on the top. Very instructif thank you. Linux Mint I use this distro and it's really nice. Stable and trustable. It has it's own visual identity now and it's LTS base a little on the late is a promise that it will become even better in the futur with tested and solid updates.
I've been using Linux for about six months now, and while I am sometimes tempted to go and rice Arch (my friend has this *gorgeous* hyprland install,) I find myself sticking to pop because it consistently works, it has some awesome features, and I've only had a major break once! And that was day one trying to connect Airpods. Love Pop! Sticking with it for the forseeable future.
I moved from Debian (stable) to LMDE a couple of years ago. Recently, to get some newness, I went to Mint 21 and haven't been this happy with a distro for a long time! So glad to see it ranked well here. As for others, Where's Lite? I can't believe it got left out! And Endeavour? I'd like to see your take on DistroWatches' #2.
Me too. Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon for the past few months has been working pretty good. However, LMDE left a bad taste in my mouth many many years ago, so I won't ever try it again. Lite was okay when I also used it old school. However, when it broke, another bad taste. No need to go Lite ever again. I will only stay with the best track records since if they broke in the past there is too large of a chance to break again. Linux Mint for the win!
I'd like to suggest a deeper dive into the Arch (Garuda, EndeavourOS, ArcoLinux) and Fedora (Nobara, Regata, Ultramarine (You already mentioned openSUSE)) areas, as well as Vanilla and Blend OS.
Crazy enough, I've been using Manjaro on three different PC's, my work laptop, work desktop, and gaming PC for about 3 years now and have never had a single issue with it. I love the rolling release, even with the slight package delay updates. Provides stability for me and still close to the latest packages.
Same for me. It's fast and stable. Faulty driver on several pc and laptops since long time. Ligger mein is number two for me but while Manjaro always work stable life Neon have few hiccups and required reinstalling
@@hardbrocklife yup that's how I feel, but the business side doesn't really matter to me as long as everything else is running as expected, which it has.
Try Nobara - I installed it as a "gaming distro' initially but when nothing broke I never got around to changing it and after a few months I realised that I'd stopped thinking about what distro to try out next, which had been my default way of thinking about Desktop Linux for several years. I'm a little uneasy that so much depends on GE, but he really does seem to be hitting it out of the park and with the rapid improvements the Fedora people are making Nobara has an exceptionally solid base that's also very current. Importantly for me, I also know that I can always just pivot to mainstream Fedora should Nobara development tail off at some future date.
I can definitely vouch for mint. It was the only OS where I could fix literally anything without pulling my hair out. My dad runs it by default. I had to help him set it up and he does music production and gaming. All of the other operating systems seemed to insist on themselves too much. Mint is low key and since it is based on Ubuntu you can run very up to date stuff as well as keep some of the more stable stuff. I myself am looking to fully transition to mint once they have HDR support as a few things I do still require it (like video editing). Anyways I think it's a good tier list. I started with Red Hat 7 that I got in a book from a computer store. Ever since then, I've seen it gradually grow from something only really nerdy people used to actually being a solid choice for most users who just want a simple and easy desktop experience. The greatest thing about Linux though is that it challenges you to take on a growth mindset and actually learn more about your computer as you use it.
I was very surprised to see Mint as the best rated, being that there isn't enough talk in the channel about it. It is what I use as a dev and recommend to all new linux users, although it is true that I needed to compile drivers for my new lenovo yoga's realtek wifi/bluetooth. Spot on list!
@@cameronbosch1213 Broadcom at least half-supports Linux with a kernel driver, even if nonfree firmware is required. Realtek doesn't have any official Linux WiFi drivers, with only community supported drivers existing (although Realtek does contribute heavily, but the drivers suck for the first year or so of their existence)
I use MX, about which I like to say 'it is to Debian what Mint is to Ubuntu'. well put together, incredibly stable, customisable and with nifty features which make computing way easier.
A few distros I love that never got mentioned: - Mageia, the continuation of Mandrake since 2011. It's just generally competent and the fact it has a getting started screen is a very good touch. - Slackware, one of the OGs and it shows. It's a fun breather from all the high tech of a more modern OS, with just what you need for a desktop. Plus, there are some cli tools it has that I miss when using other OSes. - Honorable mention: OpenBSD. I have it installed on a tiny little Mebius PC and it just works. I can install it on a PowerBook if I want, and in fact for some of them (especially the ones with nViia graphics), it's the best OS for them.
I mean this is a list especially for new-comers to the linux world and a intuitive workflow and style. Of course slackware just like some others will take more space on our hearts older linux users (just like i love Gentoo).
@@draftofspasiba2 > older linux users Oh yeah. In 1996 I got Slackware with a "Learn Linux" book and it led to my first Unix job (transitioning from PC networking).
I've been using EndeavourOS for several months and - as someone who worked with Windows for 15+ years - it's a great fork of Arch that doesn't throw me in a tumble dryer immediately, and lets me get my sea legs as I adjust, adapt, and adopt Linux. Any problems I have at this point I logic out as "Every computer has problems" and do my best to fix it
I feel like 1) Feren Os was missing, which is an interesting distribution due to the mix of Linux Mint and KDE plasma. 2) EndeavourOS, with its primary desktop being xfce, 3) Artix Linux, which not only doesn't consume much RAM, but many people classify it as the best Arch-based distribution, and 4) Kubuntu, which in my opinion could be the most solid KDE Plasma distro.
Would love to see Garuda in the next tier list if possible to rep as an Arch based distro. Would be interesting to hear your experience Nick especially since it uses the zen kernel by default.
@@BNBPhotofr Yeah, its got to be one of the better ones out there, nice and pretty stable. Except the 2 times when Dr460nized KDE broke my activity switcher setup😅. Other than that, very performant, super pretty plus a slightly spicy community forum(depending on the issue), whats not to love about that🤷♂.
Initially, I thought it's just another tier list but you explained and gave context to to your choices. So I feel like this is a video all beginners should watch before switching over from Windows or MacOS.
Zorin was I think the 2nd distro I tried when I finally came back to Linux. And honestly the built in tools and out of the box customization It had, is why I still use Linux as my preferred daily driver. Enough hand holding to keep you from doing anything to stupid, and enough tools to make it feel usable out of the box when compared feature to feature with Windows or Mac OS.
It would be interesting to compare Debian Testing or Unstable with the others in the family (eg Ubuntu). Stable is stable, but old, while testing or unstable might just be the sweet spot, or maybe not?
"Sweet spot" can mean different things for different people, it's hard to generalize. It really depends on what you want to do with your system. If you depend on your system being stable and have decent security, stick to stable releases (duh). If you want cutting edge stuff (drivers for gaming, current software releases etc.), you can fiddle around with other versions. For Debian the release cycle is Unstable -> Testing -> Stable and Ubuntu technically draws from Testing for the LTS versions and from Unstable for the other versions. However, Ubuntu's stable releases are still usually more "stable" than Debian's Testing because they only use Unstable as a starting point to add their own software, fix bugs, etc. It also depends on what sources you add to your system. Ubuntu officially supports only the main/restricted branches, the rest is community supported and always a risk (albeit a somewhat low risk, because it's such a widely used distro with such a big user and coder base).
If you're going to use Debian, I would recommend Testing branch rather than Unstable branch (as title says, I'm assume it's prone to crash pretty often) or Stable (installed programs and available packages being pretty / insane outdated).
Unless you are really wanting to be a tester (as the name clearly suggest), no I wouldn't recommend Debian testing, it's the perfect mix of old packages and unfinished features. Either use stable for production, or unstable if you are tech savy.
If you don’t like the arch install process then have a look at endeavouros. It’s a continuation of antegros and is basically just arch with a graphical installer and recommended packages pre-installed. It’s still not a great idea for beginners because it’s still arch but if you know how to chroot and keep a separate home partition, and work updates and installation from the command line, then it’s a pretty good option
I was surprised to see Gentoo come up, I thought I was the only one still interested in it. I adopted it in 2006 because it was the only one I could get to run well on the old and outdated hardware I had at the time and I just stayed with it, it's the one for me. Thank you for an interesting video.
I run it as well as the main desktop, won't change it for anything, rock solid + updated, you just can't have that with binary distros. Everything i hated from Arch updates just works pleasantly with Gentoo updates, oh and the flexibility of picking the things you want in the compiles, plus the fact that compiling things just work and you don't end solving a gazillion issues like when you want to compile in a binary distro. Its just another world, its so good, Mint is bloat, old and unstable at the same time in comparison. But sure, Gentoo is not for newbies. Of the binary distros its decent, i guess with the others being even worse; except maybe Void, which is like Netbsd. Of course Gentoo was originally inspired by Freebsd which is also a source distro, it is a thing of pure beauty, things work, things don't break, etc. But you need to remove habits from using other distros, for sure, and learn new things in the process, things you didn't even knew you could do but the other distros just didn't let you do... Long live Gentoo!
I used MX Linux 21 Wildflower with the xfce environment for 10 months last year. I think it is a very good distribution. It has a lot of what you need. Good for beginners and advanced users alike.
Yep. I tried it and stuck with it. I have it on 3 laptops now that, one or the other, gets daily use. XFCE seems to not get much love but it's perfect for me and I love it.
I'd love to see a comparison of immutable distros like openSuSe MicroOS, Fedora CoreOS/Silverblue/(their KDE variant), nixOS, Ubuntu Core(?), SteamOS(?!) ... This seems to be the next great paradigm shift for Linux - especially for the Desktop.
This was honestly a great way to make a tier list. Not the generic "lets just drag icons around", but actually explaining the reasoning. My recommendations would be MX Linux and Slackware
Maybe a nice video idea (if you didnt already did one) would be about the different options to create your own distro. Like LFS (linux from scratch), cubic (custom ubuntu iso creator), or the programs that make your current installed OS+installed apps into a live iso etc.
I tried MX Linux for the simple reason that it was on the top position of the list of distrowatch. I've been using it for years and the experience has been great. It would be nice of you to review it.
Manjaro has been legendary for me. Incredibly flexible, yet rock solid and easy to fix if I break anything. Been running 3 systems on it for 4 years now.
I have been using manjaro for four years (after using antergos), but I grew tired of fixing my system after regular system updates and I disliked their Gnome desktop Implementation.
I haven't had any issues I didn't cause, and it was related to display/nvidia nonsense I created. Been using it on my laptop and desktop for months as my DD. The most rece t update fixed the multi display issues I was having. Work, play, and run a small business on the side with it. Its all I've used on my laptop for a year. Proton allowed me to transition my desktop over to manjaro too. The company has def been derpy lately, but the distro itself with KDE has been a wonderful experience.
@@hardbrocklife I can't even have issues I try to cause haha, I mean, a year or two ago I've done a full copy of my OS drive (symlinks and all) to a new ssd and to a new filesystem (from ext4 to btrfs), I was fully prepared to have to reinstall, but its just kept going. Even got AMDs ROCm working in manjaro before I could get it to work in ubuntu (which its supposed to officially support). I did have a period of time where updates only showed in terminal and not in pamac, which could be related to their certificate shenanigans, but that's about it.
You should make the next episode as the continuation to this one, rather than as a separate one, as I'd like to see how you'd score the ones not already covered against the ones you already have. Oh, and by the way, please rank MX Linux as well - preferably the XFCE edition, as none what you've reviewed so far had the XFCE DE.
I'm glad that you added super stable Debian, and I use it on my laptop and servers. The issue with somewhat 'not the latest' desktop version is not a huge concern for me. For the apps, the back ports application repository is usually not that far behind. I also had the love/hate relationship with Ubuntu., but once Debian eliminated most driver/hardware tweaks, I never look backed to Ubuntu - and that was a decade ago. Cheers.
Longtime Debian user here. Perhaps because I don’t game on it is why Debian stable has never been an issue for me. It does everything that I need. For me I will trade a bit of cutting edge for super stable environment. Perhaps if I used a cutting edge linux distributor my opinion might change.
Currently running MX Linux on my machine. I found the old 5.20 KDE version of Debian to be unironically substantially more stable than the newer versions on Fedora or Kubuntu. I also like how holistic the OS experience is with all the custom MX tools. Debian doesn't make sense until you start using it, in my experience. The software are all older versions, true, but because they are so thoroughly battle-tested there is hardly any conflict between packages, meaning that the software can be even more reliable than what Ubuntu or Fedora provides. Flatpak is available as well, but because I have a slow internet connection with a limited plan the native packages fit my needs more.
I'm also using MX Linux (Xfce) and am very happy with it. I have never run pure Debian but what I can see from videos, MX Linux has a much improved UI. I run it on my laptop and get an easy yet solid user experience.
I like Zorin more than you do specifically for new users - who will not notice the drawbacks you discussed. I suggest you try out MX next; it's my second favorite after Mint. I run all three on different machines.
The "drawbacks" he discussed were not even drawbacks. And he did not discuss them. Nick dismissed Zorin OS immediately based on the fact it is not rolling or semi-rolling release. What little he did say was not even accurate. Zorin OS has a timely release cycle, includes a much later kernel on par with 22.04, not 20.04 and has one of the fastest Bug-Stamping I have ever seen in any distro. Nick came across far more strongly as having Preconceptions that he refused to actually test. This shows clearly in his video where you can see he *did not test* the distro. He just played around with the Settings for a moment and moved on. If you are going to say that you tested something - actually *test* it. Don't play for five seconds and call that a test. Nick goes in the "No Thanks" category for reliability, integrity and thoroughness. Oh and by the way, there is a Big Difference between asserting an Opinion and Stating a mistruth. And often, those that mislead others later hide behind "Well... it's my 'Opinion.' " Riiight.
@@samspade4703 I tried Zorin in the past when I was first transitioning away from Windows.. It was recommended as a very familiar environment for Windows users. I actually loved it but I also found that it didn't seem to update as often as other distros... I may have to give it another look.
@@iwurm It updates quite often. However, what I think you are referring to is that Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu and therefor, always is behind Ubuntus "latest release Packages" by about a year. While this is not unusual for a distro that is based on Debian or Ubuntu, there are some things to note: Zorin OS 16 uses the same kernel (about) as Ubuntu 22.04, in spite of being based on Ubuntu 20.04. Zorin OS 16 Lite was released with XFCE 4.16 even though Xubuntu 20.04 came with XFCE 4.14. The ZorinGroup often includes later packaging than the base included as long as it is safe, stable and does not conflict with other software. Zorin OS focuses more on *stability* than on "Latest but possibly buggy." While some users may prefer to always have the Latest Packages, many distros and Rolling Releases cater to that. This can easily give a bit of an impression that Zorin OS is outdated (hardly) or does not Update (Updates happen quite often) when a user focuses only on "Only the latest possible package counts as Up To Date". Which is untrue. This becomes a bit of an odd point since if the user just wants the latest possible packages, Zorin OS comes with Flatpak and Snap installed and ready. They can use those alternative formats to get later releases on those packages. What remains is Gnome... Which as contentious as Gnome4+ is... still is the latest Gnome while the current Release of Zorin OS 16 (17 is due later this year based on Ubuntu 22.04) is using Gnome 3.38. And this one is confusing because the Gnome Devs released the 4+ series very, very quickly in succession to each other whereas the point releases of Gnome 3 were released at a far more sedate pace. This gives many users the illusion that Gnome is just way way ahead... When in actuality Gnome 43 is a point release of Gnome 40. Gnome just changed the naming convention and released quickly due to the large amount of bugs that needed fixing in the rushed release of 40 (they hoped to get 40 accepted into Ubuntu 20.04 in time). And you have users whose primary concern is being able to use Gnome 4+ extensions on Zorin OS. I hope this helps add some clarity and remove some misconceptions or at least answer some questions. In spite of it being so long winded.
@@elementneon Sam Spade is a character in The Maltese Falcon as well as the name of a hacking utility. I have no idea if you "know me" or are thinking of another person. It is not really relevant to what you said. Your comment clearly states that you think my comment was in poor form and a Better Person would have been Better not to say it. I disagree. I think Nick was in very poor form and I called him out on it and my words hold him accountable. That IS "Better than" behavior. And It Always Will Be.
I would suggest trying out Void Linux. A custom package manager and the runit init system are the loudest standouts imo. The documentation is sufficient and the void-packages helps out with the rest too. It is on the deeper end but worth a try. I saw you like a openSUSE comment. I want to try it as well.
I daily Void because it's such a problem free distro. It's so incredibly stable, yet rolling so you aren't left in the dust. I've never had an update related breakage in the year or so I've been using it.
Another great standout yet nobody seemed to cared or mentioned is that they offer musl variant. When you can't run glibc on your machine, or tired about GNU, it's such a breeze to have it. Right now I can see only Void and Gentoo are offering this flavour.
I almost forgot that Alpine uses musl too. Sorry. If you read this, OP, please also try out Void Linux and Alpine Linux, both offering similar minimalistic user experience yet feature rich and super stable.
About debian, I use it a lot on my desktops (this and fedora) but not the iso they first expose on their website, a few more clicks lead you to a much lighter (less packages) version which allows me to pretty much create my custom distro
@@0xKrem this was for my work computer so I didn't need much more than neovim and a web browser The main things I installed were bspwm with polybar, picom, nix and kitty But I then switched to NixOS last week
I am mostly using Garuda Linux KDE dragonized edition. In my opinion it’s a good one, brings arch power without need of terminal, a lot of customization and good looking with all animations and neon effects. Also, stable with zen kernel and doesn’t let users break it easily. Besides has performance tweaks and power saver tweaks that users can choose based on PC or laptop for example. Also has strong build on chaotic-AUR which offers pre-compiled packages 📦
The arch's power is minimalism, you kind of lose that if you bring the kitchen sink and everything because arch packages are never optimised to work together They are simple and close to source as possible to keep them stable
@@mrmoomoo3373 On my 8 years laptop works faster than Manjaro and Deepin that I tried in the past. It is using some more RAM but for own performance goods like cache.
I personally can't wait for your take on the Vanilla OS, they're doing something new and exciting with Linux in a way that I haven't really seen before.
i personally went with bodhi linux, I'm fairly new to linux and coming from about 30 years of exclusively using windows, going to bodhi was a breeze, it's similar enough to windows in many ways and the flow in how you use the start menu, navigate the file browser, everything is familiar enough that you can easily just make minor adjustments, so it's not offputting, it's also very stable, very set it and forget it, so, it's my personal preference as a htpc, at least for now.
Please test OpenSuse and MX. Then remake this list. It would be interesting to see where you put them. But one thing is certain, Mint is almost irreplaceable from the top! 🙌
Ubuntu is my distro of choice largely because, like you, it's the first Linux distro I ever used and it's generally very stable and runs great on anything I throw it at. Recently though I've been toying with Linux Mint and it's really growing on me.
Agreed with almost all of them, but I'd put Zorin and Pop on good. The lack of a newer base would prevent them being in great, but they have an awesome usability and great tools. I suppose OpenSuse TW will make it to good once you test it, it's really great all around but has the same issue as Fedora, gotta install drivers and tinker a bit.
@@qqq1581 not a change of heart, I believe. It's just that we're mid-2023 and the most recent Zorin still has the 20.04 Ubuntu base, so it's really due for an upgrade.
@@qqq1581 oh I really like it! If updated and had more recent gnome it would be my daily system for sure. Great layouts, stable, and very user friendly, handles steam and proton very nicely, it's an awesome distro
For me, ZorinOS would move up to 'good' if they maintained a more up to date OS and finally got rid of the payware variant, which basically forces you to pay $30 if you like the macOS dock layout.
I have tried all of these distros and while mint was ok for a bit I finally settled for Zorin OS and to this date it's my daily driver. I get updates almost every 2 weeks and its blazing fast and I get everything done in a jiffy. Im a photographer so video and photo manipulation softwares which are resource hogs run seamlessly for me. No issues at all
I've been all linuxmint at home for a few years now, with Windurrs relegated to VMs when I absolutely need it. Good call on having it at the top of the list!
I use both MX and Mint as my goto distros. Sometimes my choice is driven by whichever works best on the target PC. Other times the choice is driven by which USB stick I find first and whether or not the distro on it works OK.
Over the past 15 years or so, I've had a look at some different distro's and have recently downloaded their iso on to dvd's and have even tried them out (without a full install) and wondered whether you have already looked at them: 1. Peppermint (32 bit) 2. MX-Linux (32 bit) 3. AntiX Linux (for older PC's) (32 bit) 4. Void Linux (32 bit) 5. Qimo 2.0 (for younger users) (32 bit) 6. Bionic_Pup 8.0 (32 bit) or Puppy Linux (32 bit) 7. Twister OS (32 bit - ARM) for Raspberry Pi 400 8. Google Chromium OS (64 bit - ARM) for Raspberry Pi 400 (like other Chromebooks Linux apps can be installed inside it like in a sandbox). Great video as usual and I look forward to your review of the above. I generally use Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint for my main computers and Google Chromium OS, MX Linux, Twister OS and Raspbian OS on my Raspberry Pi 400.
I'm considering switching from Manjaro to Endeavour OS. It seems to follow Arch more closely and looks quite cool from what I can tell. In addition, Pamac hasn't been able to install or update AUR packages for a while now, which was one of my reasons for going with it in the first place.
I use AUR with Manjaro. Occasionally there is an error on update saying it can't sync with AUR. But that has always gone away if I wait and try again later.
@@me_fault honestly, 'try again later' should not really be a/the way to fix a problem. For me these kept stacking up, and eventually i got sick of it. I moved away to proper arch, and the same combination of software has had significantly fewer problems. If you just use the linux to toy around and don't really depend on it, why not try out arch either way. If your system is more important to be stable to you, i am not sure if any arch based distro is a good call.
True, a 'try again later' fix isn't ideal. At the moment Manjaro works well enough that just sticking with it is easier than trying Arch. Although, I would like try it out at some point.
Mint was the first distro I was really comfortable with, and I keep coming back to it, but I'll be interested to hear your comparison between Open SUSE and KDE Neon: the Plasma desktop and the K apps are very appealing.
I use Mint for the desktop and Debian for servers. I recommended Mint to a friend and he liked it however he switched to Linux Lite, another Debian distro. For beginners Lite does seem easier to set up and use than Mint, which amazed me. However I found doing the advanced stuff was harder because they'd simplified it too much.
I am a Zorin 16 Pro user. The first month was a little disappointing, but after that it has been a pretty good stable experience. Zorin does deliver on their promise of a user friendly experience. I love the idea of Elementary OS, but hate their execution of the idea. Not having an office suite and the better browsers available early on is a terrible idea. I think I am going to wait a cycle on POP OS the Cosmic version, so they can get the early bugs out of the way.
I'm liking Zorin as well, but I also don't have much linux experience. I've only ever tried Ubuntu/Xubuntu, and Linux Mint XFCE. I did try out Debian via Live CD, but that was ages ago and even back then the version was outdated.
Linux Mint is great. It took me ages to settle on a semi reasonable Linux Desktop (and honestly, I haven't the time to mess around with DE's). Mint is like the best Windows-like experience mixed with Ubuntu compatible software. It sorta ticks all the right boxes imo.
I think a good idea for a video would be to compare (not rank as it would bring war in the comments) the different immutable linux distros and their approaches to it, what advantages they have over normal distros, over the others immutable distros as well as their drawbacks due to the way they implement immutability.
Nice review. I have started to use Linux Mint Debian Edition, which replaces the Ubuntu dependencies with Debian. Uses a lot of flatpacks, but I don't think this is a problem if you have a decent system with decent SSD storage.
I have been using Mint for 2 weeks. It's my first time Linux experience, only one thing I'm missing is that lack of Photoshop, rest is far better than windows
Recently moved to mint as well. The package manager doesn't unexplainedly lock up or take forever and just works. Games run faster than on any other distro I've tried and it just works, no odd issues or dependencies missing etc.
I agree with your rankings. I would love your take on Vanilla OS and MX Linux. I normally treat distros in combination with desktop environments. For example: Gnome ---> Fedora KDE ---> Tuxedo OS, MX Linux (KDE) Cinnamon ---> Linux Mint XFCE ---> MX Linux Budgie ---> Ubuntu Budgie
Same here but I also like Slackware. Used SuSE for years long time ago. Now I settled for Fedora on my main PC with backup RHEL installation, Ubuntu on servers and Kali on my laptop. Couldn’t be happier.
Nick, gotta say, i love your content. I switched to Linux in Christmas 2022 for about a month, tried to get some things working that I used in Windows but couldn't, so i switched back to Windows for several months before moving back to Linux for good once i got Linux gaming set up. Huge shout out to the "Linux" channel for that. I appreciate your input on distros, problems with those distros, the pros and cons, all of it really. I've watched your content off and on for a while but recently just let your stuff play and listen while doing other stuff. Again, thanks for the content copain (i hope used that right)
Nobara OS fixes alot of of base Fedora's issues. It's what I started using Linux on about half a year ago and it's been a very seamless and user-friendly experience so far!
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [2/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qJbQs_nhjD4/mqdefault.jpg)
Download Safing's Portmaster and take control of your network traffic: safing.io
Can you please make a tutorial on postmaster setup on linux
What about CachyOs. ArchLinux Derev
Arch over Ubuntu, f. e can you find display docking station drivers? Amd pro drivers, etc. etc. No - your videos are complete and utter garbage.
You forgot CentOS, VMWare and Proxmox as virtualization platforms, and Kali(really my favorite distro), ParrotOS and Blackarch for pentesting purposes
@@ernestoditerribile He didn't forget them. This is his list of distros he used or tried recently.
Linux Mint started out as Ubuntu with green theme and media codecs installed by default. It gradually improved. And when Ubuntu thought that it would be great to reinvent the desktop paradigm, Mint said "no way" and created The Cinnamon Desktop. Later, when Ubuntu decided that forcing Snap packages on everyone would be great, Mint said "no way" and maintains all mint packages as regular apt packages and no snap by default. Mint benefits from the popularity of Ubuntu, is nicer to use, and it's friggin beautiful.
and ubuntu started with some guys deciding that debian is a bit too stability focussed. let's take a less stable version and upgrade it.
so with mint, ubuntu, zorin and a few others, you get the nice situation of a modern OS, but under the hood it is debian.
which also means that hardware manufacturers and programmers just need to support debian and can support a rather large amout of other distributions just as a side effect.
How is Mint for gaming?
@@F3EDER Depends on the games, but it's probably fine, especially for older games or older hardware. The only game I couldn't smoothly run without periodic crashing with Mint was Elden Ring, which has been notably better with Fedora for me (due to newer kernel and drivers). Other than that, I haven't noticed a difference with the games I've played (mostly Fromsoft and Falcom games). I'm only a couple of months into using Linux though.
So far with Mint vs Fedora, I've noticed that things tend to work more easily with Mint, while with Fedora it can take a little more tinkering to get things to work smoothly. Some examples:
- Brave wouldn't start when I first installed it in Fedora 38, and I had to install an older version first to get it working (which was recommended on a forum as a workaround). It worked fine with Mint.
- I had to fiddle with permissions to get k3b working to burn an audio disc (not necessary with Mint)
- I had to manually install a some python gl package to play some Renpy games with gl rendering (which I did not have to do with Mint).
- Wine didn't work for me with Fedora like it did with Mint, so I had to use Bottles instead (which is great, probably better for my usage than Wine anyway)
- The Steam client would rarely stop responding in Fedora somehow and took down the rest of the desktop with it. Not entirely sure why, but I haven't had it happen since I disabled some of the interface settings that were enabled by default (smooth scrolling, GPU accelerated rendering, hardware video decoding, I think). Never had that happen in Mint.
So overall, Mint is pretty great. I only tried out Fedora because of the Elden Ring crashing that was probably something odd with my setup, and now that I've gotten it in a good spot after tinkering, I'm not interested in switching things around. I also preferred Cinnamon to Gnome, and Mint had a better "welcome" experience and default software installed, IMO.
@@ordinaryhuman5645 thank you for this nice info. I have a 5-6 year old gaming laptop, gen 7 i7. win 11 works just with workarounds, going back to win 10 means it is a complete reset and it is deprecated in 1,5 years anyways. so... mint it is.
@@robertheinrich2994 Yeah, I think if you're coming from Windows, Mint is probably the best place to start. Odds are it'll be fine, but if it isn't, you'll have a particular problem that would inform your next distribution choice (or giving up and going back to Windows, if there are too many unsolvable problems). In my case, I wanted the newer drivers for gaming (Ryzen 7 3700x + RX 5700 XT).
I haven't booted Windows 10 yet since I started using Linux a couple of months ago, and I doubt that I'll need to boot it again for personal use.
In my opinion, Solus isn't a dying distro. It's a dead distro. At this point their focus is the budgie desktop environment.
Yeah, Distro watch (for all it’s worth) removed their “active” status recently
@@TheLinuxEXP It's one more outage away from literally kicking the bucket.
But wasn’t Budgie separated from Solus and is now basically its own independent project?
Budgie isn't apart of the Solus Project anymore now it's being worked on by Buddies of Budgie
Yeah It could be the distro of choice for Budgie whenever 11 comes out and they move from GTK to EFL
Mint checks all the boxes for me. Clem actually listens and meets the needs of his user base. I like the simplicity and reliability.
Mint is so cool. I love it above all the other ones I used.
Mint was my 2nd stop after windows. Ubuntu then mint. I had a hell of a time in mint with the nvidia drivers, finally giving up and back to windoze. Today thought I've been running manjaro KDE plasma, I love it. Been using it for about 2yrs now. Sadly though I still had to recently purchase win10 (I owned win7 but missed the free update to 10) to play my steam games...proton just doesn't cut it for me cause I hate F'ing around to get a game to work. Win10 for gaming ManjaroKDE plasma daily driver...
@@miketurgeon5506 Heh, i just avoid games the community say don't easily work with wine/proton, or don't have native ports. They will never feel any pressure otherwise. And I'm very experienced with Wine, i can make games work with wine staging+nvidia easily as long as they are in the appdb wine page, often they work without steam but not with steam, which is ironic, unless steam itself is also launched in wine, of course. I don't have THAT much time for that many games anyway, and Linux working games are plentiful.
Clem does NOT actually listen. The team STILL has not started work on Wayland and they killed the KDE edition, despite receiving outcry from the users.
@@miketurgeon5506 Simply not use nVidia cards on Linux. There is no need to create artificial problems for yourself and then to solve them.
I'm happy to see Mint getting love. When I first got into Linux, I used to get teased for using Mint, but it helped me get the feel for Linux at my own pace. The accessibility made a big difference.
I do wish the documentary would be way more instead of relying on Ubuntu (which sometimes didn't help either)
I've been a Linux user for almost 20 years now and I've gone through Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, CentOS and of course Mint, I've written code for Linux in C and all I can say is this:
At the end of the day you want to get shit done and have a usable system you feel comfortable with without having to customize for days. Mint does just that for me. The last few years I had to switch to Windows on my main PC because I had to use Office and develop in VS (also kinda nice for games and other software not yet ported to Linux or running unstable, but I can't wait to switch back.
I really couldn't care less about what anybody else says about me using Mint and neither should you. If you can do anything you need to do with it and like the OS, it's the right one for you. At the end of the day you want an enjoyable user experience and a stable system.
In case you ever want to try out other Distros, I can only give you one piece of advice: Put your home directory on a separate partition, it makes the process a lot more comfortable.
@@B20C0 wil u sing my pc big fan
@@B20C0 One of the few sensible people. Also, how do you put your home directory on a separate partition?
I went from windows straight to arch. Was a difficult experience but I love it. Aswell the community around arch is amazing and really friendly for when you inevitably break something.
i want to game and develop software. not debug by os 😅
@@piecepaper2831 u r stroke boboboobobobobb STroke???
@@piecepaper2831 just get good
@@piecepaper2831 I hope the rude responses from some commenters doesn't ruin your opinion of Arch users. Reports of Arch being buggy or horribly unstable are greatly exaggerated. It's also really not that difficult to set up, and the whole process is documented so will in both text and video that it's basically a non-issue this point. It'll teach you a lot about how Linux works and how to customize your OS to be exactly how you want it.
@@brandoncouture-hachey1542 "Really friendly community" 😂
In my opinion the huge problem Ubuntu has is that so many other distros and system infrastructure (like servers) depend on it working and staying somewhat consistent. It is just not possible for them change any core element and not get a huge amount of hate for it.
They already changed a core element recently, that it removed any support for flatpak that comes by default to force their users to use "Snap". Just like how Microsoft forces users to use their Edge.
@@edwinpj7637 ... and they get a lot of hate for that move.
Maybe Canonical has a greater vision with snaps and they want to follow it. Why should anybody be allowed to tell Canonical what they can and can not do with their distro (that you can use free of charge).
After all it's Linux: If you don't like it you don't have to use it.
All I wanted to say is that Ubuntu is in a spot where changes can not be done without making some part of the community feel like Canonical deliberately stepped on their toes.
System infrastructure is not really a point for me as no reputable company would ever use a desktop version of Linux on a server and there would, at least in my opinion, not speak anything against going different routes on desktop and server versions of the distro.
Other distros okay, but also meh. As a company in their own interest they could also go the route of saying:
Well others completely relying on us is not stopping our own evolvement, so the would have to build around that. Not perfect and many would hate it but in my view absolutely possible.
@@Hardcore_Remixer to be fair, for most people, if you were able to have no browser on your computer by default, it would be considered a broken system. I know that people have this irrational hatred of having a browser they'll never use on their system, but the fact is it's kind of a necessity. That being said, they really should make it so that you can choose not to have it come back with updates, but that should be disabled by default because when you're designing products for the lowest common denominator, you have to design them for the assumption that people are absolute morons. You have to make a product that can save the users from themselves. That's why the steam deck uses an immutable desktop, so that you can't accidentally change system files by default.
@@KuruGDI the problem with snaps is that (to the best of my knowledge) the server is source-unavailable, let alone free or open source. So they clearly don't have a greater vision for snaps if they can't at least release the source code for people to view
If people are using snaps (which as we've established they've not only released to the public, but with stuff like this actively promote), it is one of their fundamental rights to be able to have the complete source needed to (in theory - disregarding monetary, expertise/competency, and legal issues) reproduce in fully-identical (with the sole exception of differing secret keys leading to slightly different but 100% identical in function) form and modify as wanted the product in question (snaps here). Canonical has failed to respect this basic right, and people are obliged to tell them what they can't do
Distro hopping always brings me back to Mint. It really is an excellent OS.
Same. After years of exploration, I settled down on Mint for the long term. It’s the best Linux experience I’ve come across
This might be my next stop.
Linux mint (with cinnamon desktop!) was my first linux os, and I really loved it.
currently not using it, but still a solid choice.
with massive compatibility issues in places where you cant tolerate that. without that- simply superior home distro
I'm new to Linux I'm thinking of using ubuntu as know nothing is it a good choice for my i3 2nd gen pc😅
openSUSE is an amazing distro (especially Tumbleweed), and it's honestly kinda sad that it isn't talked about much
I have a video planned about it this month!
openSUSE Tumbleweed is my all around top choice for a Linux distribution.
Made the switch to Tumbleweed a bit over a year ago now, been fantastic so far. It does make me sad that openSUSE is basically never talked about, even in videos about companies in Linux.
I love openSuse. Really great.
totally agreed! It is the distro which made me stop the "distro hopping". proud openSUSE TW user since 2019
I would definitely put Pop OS higher. System76 has done a bad job communicating this, but the reason Pop OS hasn't gotten a point release in a while is because they are actually treating the distro as a rolling release built on top of Ubuntu 22.04. All of the packages related to desktop graphic performance like drivers and kernels and libraries are all up-to-date, unlike Ubuntu or Zorin OS.
Yeah I like POP!_OS too. My first Linux was Mint, but I have a lot of hardware driver trouble. Wlan and Nvidia graphic doesn't work well. Then I tried POP!_OS and I am super happy with it.
Pops out of the box driver support is at an industry leading level.
I started using Linux Mint in 2011, looked at many others over the years, but Mint always comes out on top for me.
NixOs' single file config and their take on preventing dependency issues by making each dependency version a hash and using symlinks to let apps use different versions on the same system at the same time is cool!
I wish it was more mature, but it can easily cause issues with apps, like neovim lsp plugins dont work sometimes as they csnt find system libs
It would be very interesting to see his take on NixOS… I don’t know if he has the time to make a proper review lmao
@@alexstone691 NixOS is weird, some places feel super mature while others, well not so much
@@alexstone691 I switched to vim after I came to nix. I haven't had any issues. My plugins all allowed me to set the lsp executable by hand.
Edit: I'm setting up neovim with Homemanager.
@@leoschafer5172 I used nix-env on ubuntu and pylsp just wouldnt execute because of system libs, maybe its less stable than homemanager?
So pleased to see Gentoo ranked as good. It's so versatile. But, indeed, it has a pretty daunting learning curve, and it only makes sense in the first place if you want to spend time to learn how to make use of it. One thing that is not mentioned, though probably it's out of scope, is that it is very good for very specific use cases. Niches. Like, running the latest Linux on a 486 from 30 (yes, thirty) years ago. Because it gives you so much power, it can also be extremely minimalistic.
Going forward, knowing that you focus on practical stuff in general, I'd say the top pick for what distro to check next has to be openSuse, by a large margin. It's the underdog of distros, seemingly always in the shadow of Fedora. Plus, you gotta show some more european love (if I'm not mistaken, they're from Germany).
I'm also personally interested in NixOS, but I don't think it's a good everyday distro, at least not yet. But their package manager is very interesting.
This is what I came here to say. Gentoo's approach to rolling release is refreshing when compared to Arch where everything is immediately pushed. Gentoo has a nice balance of stable packages on a rolling platform with the option to get more bleeding edge versions of anything by just setting a flag on the package. Once the initial install is done, the update times are pretty reasonable (assuming you don't have an update for nodejs or go...). Even a full KDE suite update only took a few minutes on my 5800X. It's somehow been more stable than Fedora on my desktop, and I haven't experienced any of the Arch memes like things randomly breaking following a software update (which only took about 2 weeks the last time I swapped back to Arch). I can't shill it hard enough, it's genuinely a great distro.
@@1Raptor85 what game engine do you use on gentoo?
@@tostadorafuriosa69 custom/in house, but stuff like godot/unreal/etc work just fine if that's what you're concerned about.
R crashes like ffs on Gentoo... can't use it
NixOS is a great distro if you love the concept and the fiddling that Linux requires. It’s like how when you first switch to Linux you gotta learn all the different things when compared to windows, but now you do it again, learning the changes from NixOS to normal Linux 😂
This video couldn't have come out at a better time for me. I've been looking for an update on the state of Linux distros, haven't been able to keep in touch with the Linux world much lately since my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install has been going strong for over 2 years.
Thanks for the tier list, Nick,
Keep the awesome Linux content coming!
Nice summary. I ran Open-Suse Tumbleweed for about nine months, and even though I have now returned to Arch I found pretty decent, and it run really well out of the box on Dell laptops (which was why I ended up using it for so long). So I would certainly say it deserves a video. The other distro which I have recently stumbled upon, and been impressed by is Voyager. It is basically a tweaked Ubuntu - but it looks and feels really modern, so just for the aesthetics alone it gets an honourable mention from me.
I've always liked OpenSuse. It will be interesting to hear your opinion on it in 2023.
I was using Fedora dual boot with Windows 11. I tryed to use it with flatpaks, but it's visible more slow than .rpms or appimage. Then my Fedora just stopped working 3 times this years... The last one 5 days ago... I don't know a lot about OpenSuse, but after try CentOS, EndeavourOS and Kinoite(coudn't even install with dual boot....), I finally tryed OpenSUSE LEAP with flatpaks. It's impressive the performance with flatpaks, it works perfect in the same machine that I used Fedora with Flatpaks. I'm curious about Yast, it appears to be a very good solution for diagnosing a lot of infraestructure problems with an easy interface!
I'm not using zypper yet because all softwares I needed was downloaded via flatpak, and that was one reason I was afraid to chance to OpenSUSE some months ago. But the system looks very solid and I'm enjoying use it with almost standard KDE interface. I hope it will last longer than my Fedora installations...
0/10
No Minecraft
I'm stoked that you put Linux Mint at the top! It often gets a rap as being only a beginner distro for it's ease of use but honestly, I've been using Linux for almost 20 years and I while I continue to try different distros from time to time, Linux Mint is the one that I use the most as my daily driver.
No wonder, you are an old fart 😂😂😂
I too use Linux Mint, I am too old to spend time making my OS pretty or super up to date. Good enough is the way to go for me 😊
They do many things right and now they try to make it more prettier too, so i think they are in the right way.
Im An Advanced Linux User and i Stick with Mint...Because Their Community is Sophisticated.
Linux mint is boring because it don't have anything to ''Fix'' it works out of the box..
@@costascostas1760 LOL, same... Tinkering is no longer fun when I have work to do. I just want it to work , not interested in fixing anything.
I'm using EndeavourOS the past year, which is based on Arch but with calamares installer. You get to pick from a lot of DEs on installation, which is super cool. Still needs some tweaking after installation but still way less hassle than Arch. The repos used are the Arch repos + a small side repo of Endeavour for the few apps they maintain. It is a very good distro i'd say, but not for total beginners.
Same for me. I switched from Manjaro after the controversy straight to EndeavourOS and no complaints about EndeavourOS thus far. Very powerful; tasteful changes and accessible. They have a good model in place. Very good to excellent.
@@Rommsey EndeavourOS is my number one choice for even slightly more experienced than beginner Linux distro recommendations! Especially KDE Plasma ones!
It's great, they are not biting off more then they can shew, some small helper apps, some rices and that is it.
Their community is super friendly and supportive as well!
Endeavour is probably my favorite Arch based distro.
I found MX to be a complete experience. With easy access to common package downloads, flatpaks, testing branch, and back ports packages, makes this handy. Also, if you are running Intel graphics, you can choose the Intel graphics driver. I don't know if it works with Iris graphics. It also provides the option to install Nvidia drivers. .The kernel is a bit older, but a newer kernel version is available, for newer hardware, if needed. XFCE, isn't the prettiest desktop,but it can be themed. Appearance doesn't matter to me very much. I'm ok with an older look. MX is the best distro, if being used as a live USB, with persistence, bar none.
Did you experience upgrading from 19 to 21? The thing about evaluating a distro, is that its not limited to the "i just installed it" experience, but what comes later down the road. He just gave a lower rating to Pantheon for the same thing MX Linux did there... Distros that can't upgrade are an obstacle to the user.
Great list. My first distro was building Gentoo from source, it took days on my hardware in the 90s but I learned basically everything I know about Linux today and way more about how my hardware worked.
Today I basically use Debian or most every server I can, I normally don't install a DE but I have one have one desktop system that also uses Debian, it's not used as a normal desktop so it's been fine for my needs.
I always enjoy your honest and transparent Linux user experience :-) I volunteer in the community and support those with lack of access to tech; I source older laptops (7-10yr) primarily ThinkPads; upgrade the ram & install an ssd whilst 'cleaning' & thermal pasting. I use MX-Linux, and so far it has been great.
Should consider EndeavourOS as Manjaro substitute for the next tier list video. Used it before I switched to Arch, been hearing good things about it ever since.
Same here.
As far as I've seen, its basically Arch with a few extra customizations. More or less a lot like a kit car with a reputable 3rd party assembly service
I understand the purpose of Manjaro as a distribution, it's snapshots of Arch aiming for more stability, now Endevour is just Archlinux with an installer, why not install Arch right?
@@joaopauloalbq Because the EndeavourOS community is _far_ better than the Arch community.
@@joaopauloalbq It's awesome for intermediate users which may not want to get into Arch yet but want to try something more advanced than, say, Linux Mint. EndeavourOS is basically Arch + great installer + a bunch of little utilities that make the experience more straightforward for new users
Another vote for NixOS. I don't actually care much about its place in a ranking, but I really think that if anyone is able to do a good introduction to this distro for beginners, you are the guy who can pull it off :) There are a few videos on it on TH-cam already but they all seem to be geared to Linux (or at least distro-hopping) experts.
Nix is one of the most underrated OS’s
@@Ogbobbyjohnson92010it's starting to die soon
Honestly, I would compare Fedora to Linux Mint. They both are great for beginners and advanced users alike. The thing I love about Fedora is that it lets me customise things I care about to my heart content, while also providing sensible defaults for the rest. Other than the Flathub issue the rest are just minor pain points in the beginning, but after you get past those it's a very nice experience.
fedora works for me. All the sane configs
I still dont know, what do usually customs?
13:20 is why I always recommend Garuda instead of Manjaro for beginners. Garuda actually uses the Arch repositories and simply adds an additional distro-specific repository on top of them PPA-style instead of repackaging software as their own and remaining 3 weeks behind Arch in the process as Manjaro does. XeroLinux is another good choice as far as that goes, but Garuda also uses the Fish shell to make command-line use easier and on top of that automatically makes btrfs snapshots whenever software updates are installed. It also integrates all your btrfs snapshots into GRUB, so in the event that an Arch update breaks your system, no problem, just boot into a snapshot and roll back. This should make Windows users familiar with System Restore feel right at home since those btrfs snapshots function as bona fide restore points in that case and they do a fantastic job of making an otherwise unstable rolling release distro feel more stable than it actually is.
I also loved Garuda when I tried it out but have never daily driven. I would love to see the Dragonized themeing, FireDragon browser and a host of other features and defaults on a Debian base. It would be a winner! Not that Garuda isn't already imo.
Wow. I've always liked Mint because it includes a lot of hardware support out of the box that other distros require you to install manually (and thus makes for a really good utility liveOS, since you don't have to worry about installing drivers for whatever hardware you're trying to fix), but I didn't expect it to be ranked any higher than just "good."
Very good video !
I personally really like Pop OS for its simplicity (mainly NVDIA drivers and all), it was the only distro to work out of the box with my NVIDIA card and my 144hz monitor
120 Hz might have better compatibility.
Interesting. Never had any issues with my triple 144hz monitors and an nvidia card on Mint. Well, not issues related to the monitors anyway...
@@vezquex Maybe ! I remember with Ubuntu having issues for everything > 60Hz, and things not properly displaying.
Try 432Hz next time
I still run and like Manjaro. It adds some stuff like extra window switchers, nice theme tweaks or a nice default terminal configuration. I know these can be added to other distros, but when I first installed Manjaro it felt like a really polished experience. The only thing I'm not so happy about is that it takes quite a long time sometimes to get new versions of some packages. It took over 3 months since I saw the review of KDE 5.25 on this channel until it arrived in Manjaro. I have no idea how long it takes in other distros, but if it's called rolling release then I'd like to try new things before I forget about them 😀
The reason Manjaro delays Plasma so much is because they ship it on their computers. They don't want to risk shipping a broken system. Other updates get out a lot faster, but they messed up keeping 5.25 for so long. Going from Manjaro>Fedora KDE led to an objectively superior experience.
What I think would really help Manjaro is a "housekeeping event" or something. A lot of their editions ship with old/broken themes, some Manjaro-specific apps are GTK, some are QT so require a bunch of extra packages on Gnome and have inconsistent visuals. You'll see there are inconsistent teal shades used, etc. If you install Zorin or Elementary, you see this super-consistent visual polish, whereas Manjaro IMO has THE BEST branding, but little bits of jankyness that make it feel more unstable than it is.
I've slowly gained more and more problems running Manjaro, to the point i think it has no good reason existing. It is arch based, and i love pacman as a package manager. However, because they keep their own repos for the main but also allow you to access the AUR over time a you'll get a significant amount of desync, after running it for a year updating the system became a gamble on when the star aligned on dependencies or not. All in all, it is Arch made easy, but at the same time takes away most of what is good of arch. It makes more sense forking a different distro to run it like this.
@Guitarzen I'm sorry, but this comment does upset me a little. Even though i personally often am the cause for many of my own computer problems, if you have read my original comment, you aught reconsider if this is a picnic case or not.
I am glad Manjaro is working out for your choices, but I don't think your experience invalidates my competency. I wouldn't consider the user the problem when that which fails the updates literally, as reported by pamac itself, is out-of-date dependencies. Using the AUR on Manjaro is very hit-or-miss, which they themselves obviously usually acknowledge. However at the same time the facilitate this use by providing the options with pamac. After having moved away i have realized Manjaro itself offered little but annoyance over other distros about. As a more experienced linux user, an easier experience installing has not been worth it if over a system that runs and updates more reliable. The same combinations of software is not giving me any problems on Arch now thankfully.
@@OssWiX Ever tried GarudaLinux? ArchBased and actively developed. I like it, it is my daily driver.
Imo it's hard to justify choosing Manjaro when there is OpenSUSE. Sure the look and feel might be different and the package managers are different, but both OS' are for more advanced users who customize everything to begin with, so you can make both distros look and feel identical. In the end you get one on the bleeding edge full of instability and another on the cutting edge which might cut you from time to time, but you're not likely to bleed from these cuts. This gives an all around far better experience once setup. I will say though that Manjaro has less out of the box necessary configuration to do than OpenSUSE so at first it does seem better.
I'd be interested in comparing gaming-related distros like Nobara, HoloISO and ChimeraOS. It would be interesting to know whether they offer noticeable advantages in performance and how do they work for non-gamining daily desktop usage.
I’ve been very interested in ChimeraOS too, but there’s not a lot of videos out there about it. I’d be interested in a video on that also.
Yes, please.
I would like that comparison too.
Absolutely. I'm still holding out on the full SteamOS release for my laptop and haven't wanted to bother myself with HoloISO's process yet.
Garuda
I use Debian as a daily desktop.
Softwares are not always up to date, but it's not really a problem.
Why would we really need it ?
The only flatpak I use is for Kicad 7, and Firefox from the official website instead of the Debian repo.
I don't use Arch, but their wiki and documentation is impressive and very useful, even with other distro.
Love this rundown, and shows I made the right choice with Mint after trying many many Distros and coming back to it everytime!
I'm using Zorin os lite so there's hardly any difference, since Xfce has hardly changed much❤. (Zorin os is still a good distro for windows to linux, it's very intuitive to use) if a distro works for you you should keep using it❤
Of course! These are just my opinions, and it’s highly subjective!
Zorin Lite has a great take on Xfce. I was using that for a bit a year and a half ago. Then I found MX Linux.
I personally abandoned ZorinOS because of their payware 'Pro' variant which only includes some additional freely available packages and the inclusion of a macOS like dock. Things like this should be in a single free variant.
Mint XFCE and MX linux are way better than ZorinOS lite. Xubuntu too.
can you please make this a yearly serie .. like every year do tier list of the distros you ve tested that year im sure it will something special i imagine like the mkbhd phone awards XD
That’s the plan!
I didn't expected this result honestly, lot of reputed distro not on the top. Very instructif thank you.
Linux Mint I use this distro and it's really nice. Stable and trustable. It has it's own visual identity now and it's LTS base a little on the late is a promise that it will become even better in the futur with tested and solid updates.
I've been using Linux for about six months now, and while I am sometimes tempted to go and rice Arch (my friend has this *gorgeous* hyprland install,) I find myself sticking to pop because it consistently works, it has some awesome features, and I've only had a major break once! And that was day one trying to connect Airpods. Love Pop! Sticking with it for the forseeable future.
I completely agree with your ranking. I'm also a linux enthusiast and really enjoy my highly customized version of mint.
I moved from Debian (stable) to LMDE a couple of years ago. Recently, to get some newness, I went to Mint 21 and haven't been this happy with a distro for a long time! So glad to see it ranked well here.
As for others, Where's Lite? I can't believe it got left out! And Endeavour? I'd like to see your take on DistroWatches' #2.
Me too. Linux Mint 21.1 Cinnamon for the past few months has been working pretty good. However, LMDE left a bad taste in my mouth many many years ago, so I won't ever try it again. Lite was okay when I also used it old school. However, when it broke, another bad taste. No need to go Lite ever again. I will only stay with the best track records since if they broke in the past there is too large of a chance to break again. Linux Mint for the win!
I'd like to suggest a deeper dive into the Arch (Garuda, EndeavourOS, ArcoLinux) and Fedora (Nobara, Regata, Ultramarine (You already mentioned openSUSE)) areas, as well as Vanilla and Blend OS.
Crazy enough, I've been using Manjaro on three different PC's, my work laptop, work desktop, and gaming PC for about 3 years now and have never had a single issue with it. I love the rolling release, even with the slight package delay updates. Provides stability for me and still close to the latest packages.
Same here.
True
Same for me. It's fast and stable. Faulty driver on several pc and laptops since long time. Ligger mein is number two for me but while Manjaro always work stable life Neon have few hiccups and required reinstalling
Same. Like the dev group is derpy, but the distro has been by DD for months now with no issues.
@@hardbrocklife yup that's how I feel, but the business side doesn't really matter to me as long as everything else is running as expected, which it has.
Try Nobara - I installed it as a "gaming distro' initially but when nothing broke I never got around to changing it and after a few months I realised that I'd stopped thinking about what distro to try out next, which had been my default way of thinking about Desktop Linux for several years.
I'm a little uneasy that so much depends on GE, but he really does seem to be hitting it out of the park and with the rapid improvements the Fedora people are making Nobara has an exceptionally solid base that's also very current.
Importantly for me, I also know that I can always just pivot to mainstream Fedora should Nobara development tail off at some future date.
I can definitely vouch for mint. It was the only OS where I could fix literally anything without pulling my hair out. My dad runs it by default. I had to help him set it up and he does music production and gaming. All of the other operating systems seemed to insist on themselves too much. Mint is low key and since it is based on Ubuntu you can run very up to date stuff as well as keep some of the more stable stuff. I myself am looking to fully transition to mint once they have HDR support as a few things I do still require it (like video editing). Anyways I think it's a good tier list. I started with Red Hat 7 that I got in a book from a computer store. Ever since then, I've seen it gradually grow from something only really nerdy people used to actually being a solid choice for most users who just want a simple and easy desktop experience. The greatest thing about Linux though is that it challenges you to take on a growth mindset and actually learn more about your computer as you use it.
I was very surprised to see Mint as the best rated, being that there isn't enough talk in the channel about it. It is what I use as a dev and recommend to all new linux users, although it is true that I needed to compile drivers for my new lenovo yoga's realtek wifi/bluetooth. Spot on list!
I try to cover each major update of Mint, but apart from that, yeah, it’s not necessarily the distro I cover the most
Realtek is the worst company for Linux support.
@@DistrosProjects Broadcom?
@@cameronbosch1213 Broadcom at least half-supports Linux with a kernel driver, even if nonfree firmware is required. Realtek doesn't have any official Linux WiFi drivers, with only community supported drivers existing (although Realtek does contribute heavily, but the drivers suck for the first year or so of their existence)
@@cameronbosch1213 nope, Realtek
I use MX, about which I like to say 'it is to Debian what Mint is to Ubuntu'.
well put together, incredibly stable, customisable and with nifty features which make computing way easier.
A few distros I love that never got mentioned:
- Mageia, the continuation of Mandrake since 2011. It's just generally competent and the fact it has a getting started screen is a very good touch.
- Slackware, one of the OGs and it shows. It's a fun breather from all the high tech of a more modern OS, with just what you need for a desktop. Plus, there are some cli tools it has that I miss when using other OSes.
- Honorable mention: OpenBSD. I have it installed on a tiny little Mebius PC and it just works. I can install it on a PowerBook if I want, and in fact for some of them (especially the ones with nViia graphics), it's the best OS for them.
I mean this is a list especially for new-comers to the linux world and a intuitive workflow and style. Of course slackware just like some others will take more space on our hearts older linux users (just like i love Gentoo).
@@draftofspasiba2 > older linux users
Oh yeah. In 1996 I got Slackware with a "Learn Linux" book and it led to my first Unix job (transitioning from PC networking).
Isn't OpenBSD something different than Linux 🤔
@@jan-lukas Yes, but I'm listing it here since it's similar here and is a "distribution" of some sort.
I've been using EndeavourOS for several months and - as someone who worked with Windows for 15+ years - it's a great fork of Arch that doesn't throw me in a tumble dryer immediately, and lets me get my sea legs as I adjust, adapt, and adopt Linux.
Any problems I have at this point I logic out as "Every computer has problems" and do my best to fix it
I feel like 1) Feren Os was missing, which is an interesting distribution due to the mix of Linux Mint and KDE plasma. 2) EndeavourOS, with its primary desktop being xfce, 3) Artix Linux, which not only doesn't consume much RAM, but many people classify it as the best Arch-based distribution, and 4) Kubuntu, which in my opinion could be the most solid KDE Plasma distro.
Would love to see Garuda in the next tier list if possible to rep as an Arch based distro. Would be interesting to hear your experience Nick especially since it uses the zen kernel by default.
I second that. I had to install Garuda after upgrading to a RX 7900 XTX because it wouldn't work on Mint. Just love it.
@@BNBPhotofr Yeah, its got to be one of the better ones out there, nice and pretty stable. Except the 2 times when Dr460nized KDE broke my activity switcher setup😅. Other than that, very performant, super pretty plus a slightly spicy community forum(depending on the issue), whats not to love about that🤷♂.
I installed Garuda one year ago. It's fast, stable with good design. Have tried many other distros but found Garuda to be the best.
i love garuda's sway config
Yes, the dragonized version of course
Initially, I thought it's just another tier list but you explained and gave context to to your choices. So I feel like this is a video all beginners should watch before switching over from Windows or MacOS.
Zorin was I think the 2nd distro I tried when I finally came back to Linux. And honestly the built in tools and out of the box customization It had, is why I still use Linux as my preferred daily driver. Enough hand holding to keep you from doing anything to stupid, and enough tools to make it feel usable out of the box when compared feature to feature with Windows or Mac OS.
the best Ui/UX user of ALL. unfortunatelly, its sems 'scamm', and privacy problems.
It would be interesting to compare Debian Testing or Unstable with the others in the family (eg Ubuntu). Stable is stable, but old, while testing or unstable might just be the sweet spot, or maybe not?
"Sweet spot" can mean different things for different people, it's hard to generalize. It really depends on what you want to do with your system. If you depend on your system being stable and have decent security, stick to stable releases (duh). If you want cutting edge stuff (drivers for gaming, current software releases etc.), you can fiddle around with other versions.
For Debian the release cycle is Unstable -> Testing -> Stable and Ubuntu technically draws from Testing for the LTS versions and from Unstable for the other versions. However, Ubuntu's stable releases are still usually more "stable" than Debian's Testing because they only use Unstable as a starting point to add their own software, fix bugs, etc.
It also depends on what sources you add to your system. Ubuntu officially supports only the main/restricted branches, the rest is community supported and always a risk (albeit a somewhat low risk, because it's such a widely used distro with such a big user and coder base).
If you're going to use Debian, I would recommend Testing branch rather than Unstable branch (as title says, I'm assume it's prone to crash pretty often) or Stable (installed programs and available packages being pretty / insane outdated).
Unless you are really wanting to be a tester (as the name clearly suggest), no I wouldn't recommend Debian testing, it's the perfect mix of old packages and unfinished features. Either use stable for production, or unstable if you are tech savy.
Stable is the sweet spot for me.
Seeing that older Ubuntu 8.04 default desktop wallpaper hit me with a wave of nostalgia.
Ubuntu 1:33
Linux Mint 2:44
Elementary OS 4:09
Arch Linux (btw) 6:09
Solus 8:12
Fedora 9:30
Deepin 10:55
Manjaro 12:20
Debian 13:55
Pop!_OS 15:20
Gentoo 16:47
Zorin OS 17:45
KDE Neon 19:02
The video has chapters and time stamps in the description, but thanks :)
@@TheLinuxEXP i only realized that after making it halfway lol. I just decided to continue bcz why not
“big” is cool, from Brazil
If you don’t like the arch install process then have a look at endeavouros. It’s a continuation of antegros and is basically just arch with a graphical installer and recommended packages pre-installed. It’s still not a great idea for beginners because it’s still arch but if you know how to chroot and keep a separate home partition, and work updates and installation from the command line, then it’s a pretty good option
I would love a video comparing the newly official Ubuntu Cinnamon with Linux Mint.
Merci beaucoup!
Arch and Debian on top. Rest are forks on one of these. Basically learn Arch/Debian and how to customize them and then you're set
I was surprised to see Gentoo come up, I thought I was the only one still interested in it. I adopted it in 2006 because it was the only one I could get to run well on the old and outdated hardware I had at the time and I just stayed with it, it's the one for me. Thank you for an interesting video.
I run it as well as the main desktop, won't change it for anything, rock solid + updated, you just can't have that with binary distros. Everything i hated from Arch updates just works pleasantly with Gentoo updates, oh and the flexibility of picking the things you want in the compiles, plus the fact that compiling things just work and you don't end solving a gazillion issues like when you want to compile in a binary distro. Its just another world, its so good, Mint is bloat, old and unstable at the same time in comparison. But sure, Gentoo is not for newbies. Of the binary distros its decent, i guess with the others being even worse; except maybe Void, which is like Netbsd. Of course Gentoo was originally inspired by Freebsd which is also a source distro, it is a thing of pure beauty, things work, things don't break, etc. But you need to remove habits from using other distros, for sure, and learn new things in the process, things you didn't even knew you could do but the other distros just didn't let you do... Long live Gentoo!
@@freeculture FreeBSD is not a distro per se to be precise. And it supports both binary packages as well as source based package management (ports)
I used MX Linux 21 Wildflower with the xfce environment for 10 months last year. I think it is a very good distribution. It has a lot of what you need. Good for beginners and advanced users alike.
I thought MX users were only bots pinging distrowatch to increase rank
Yep. I tried it and stuck with it. I have it on 3 laptops now that, one or the other, gets daily use. XFCE seems to not get much love but it's perfect for me and I love it.
I'd love to see a comparison of immutable distros like openSuSe MicroOS, Fedora CoreOS/Silverblue/(their KDE variant), nixOS, Ubuntu Core(?), SteamOS(?!) ...
This seems to be the next great paradigm shift for Linux - especially for the Desktop.
SteamOS is just Arch with the fancy SteamOS UI. That's what the deck uses anyway.
This was honestly a great way to make a tier list. Not the generic "lets just drag icons around", but actually explaining the reasoning.
My recommendations would be MX Linux and Slackware
Still slackware... 👍👍👍 And yes he should test Suse a direct child of slackware and there since the 1990s and still there
Maybe a nice video idea (if you didnt already did one) would be about the different options to create your own distro. Like LFS (linux from scratch), cubic (custom ubuntu iso creator), or the programs that make your current installed OS+installed apps into a live iso etc.
I ran Solus for two years but the lack of updates and minor bugs taking weeks to fix I switched to MX Linux, very happy with it.
I tried MX Linux for the simple reason that it was on the top position of the list of distrowatch. I've been using it for years and the experience has been great. It would be nice of you to review it.
Same. I became aware of it because it was #1 and has been my main distro since 17.3 iirc.
Perhaps a MX Linux vs Linux Mint???
Manjaro has been legendary for me. Incredibly flexible, yet rock solid and easy to fix if I break anything. Been running 3 systems on it for 4 years now.
Same, though I essentially use it because it packages pamac in its repos, as supposed to getting it from AUR, I love that GUI package manager
Same. All the fluff about them being a bad distro is just reddit innuendo
I have been using manjaro for four years (after using antergos), but I grew tired of fixing my system after regular system updates and I disliked their Gnome desktop Implementation.
I haven't had any issues I didn't cause, and it was related to display/nvidia nonsense I created. Been using it on my laptop and desktop for months as my DD. The most rece t update fixed the multi display issues I was having. Work, play, and run a small business on the side with it. Its all I've used on my laptop for a year. Proton allowed me to transition my desktop over to manjaro too. The company has def been derpy lately, but the distro itself with KDE has been a wonderful experience.
@@hardbrocklife I can't even have issues I try to cause haha, I mean, a year or two ago I've done a full copy of my OS drive (symlinks and all) to a new ssd and to a new filesystem (from ext4 to btrfs), I was fully prepared to have to reinstall, but its just kept going. Even got AMDs ROCm working in manjaro before I could get it to work in ubuntu (which its supposed to officially support). I did have a period of time where updates only showed in terminal and not in pamac, which could be related to their certificate shenanigans, but that's about it.
You should make the next episode as the continuation to this one, rather than as a separate one, as I'd like to see how you'd score the ones not already covered against the ones you already have. Oh, and by the way, please rank MX Linux as well - preferably the XFCE edition, as none what you've reviewed so far had the XFCE DE.
I'm glad that you added super stable Debian, and I use it on my laptop and servers. The issue with somewhat 'not the latest' desktop version is not a huge concern for me. For the apps, the back ports application repository is usually not that far behind. I also had the love/hate relationship with Ubuntu., but once Debian eliminated most driver/hardware tweaks, I never look backed to Ubuntu - and that was a decade ago. Cheers.
Longtime Debian user here. Perhaps because I don’t game on it is why Debian stable has never been an issue for me. It does everything that I need. For me I will trade a bit of cutting edge for super stable environment. Perhaps if I used a cutting edge linux distributor my opinion might change.
Currently running MX Linux on my machine. I found the old 5.20 KDE version of Debian to be unironically substantially more stable than the newer versions on Fedora or Kubuntu. I also like how holistic the OS experience is with all the custom MX tools. Debian doesn't make sense until you start using it, in my experience. The software are all older versions, true, but because they are so thoroughly battle-tested there is hardly any conflict between packages, meaning that the software can be even more reliable than what Ubuntu or Fedora provides. Flatpak is available as well, but because I have a slow internet connection with a limited plan the native packages fit my needs more.
well said.
i use Xfce version, which - interestingly - has a fresher DE version than a majority of Debian-based distros.
I'm also using MX Linux (Xfce) and am very happy with it. I have never run pure Debian but what I can see from videos, MX Linux has a much improved UI. I run it on my laptop and get an easy yet solid user experience.
I like Zorin more than you do specifically for new users - who will not notice the drawbacks you discussed. I suggest you try out MX next; it's my second favorite after Mint. I run all three on different machines.
The "drawbacks" he discussed were not even drawbacks. And he did not discuss them. Nick dismissed Zorin OS immediately based on the fact it is not rolling or semi-rolling release. What little he did say was not even accurate. Zorin OS has a timely release cycle, includes a much later kernel on par with 22.04, not 20.04 and has one of the fastest Bug-Stamping I have ever seen in any distro. Nick came across far more strongly as having Preconceptions that he refused to actually test. This shows clearly in his video where you can see he *did not test* the distro. He just played around with the Settings for a moment and moved on. If you are going to say that you tested something - actually *test* it. Don't play for five seconds and call that a test.
Nick goes in the "No Thanks" category for reliability, integrity and thoroughness. Oh and by the way, there is a Big Difference between asserting an Opinion and Stating a mistruth. And often, those that mislead others later hide behind "Well... it's my 'Opinion.' " Riiight.
@@samspade4703 I tried Zorin in the past when I was first transitioning away from Windows.. It was recommended as a very familiar environment for Windows users. I actually loved it but I also found that it didn't seem to update as often as other distros... I may have to give it another look.
@@iwurm It updates quite often. However, what I think you are referring to is that Zorin OS is based on Ubuntu and therefor, always is behind Ubuntus "latest release Packages" by about a year. While this is not unusual for a distro that is based on Debian or Ubuntu, there are some things to note:
Zorin OS 16 uses the same kernel (about) as Ubuntu 22.04, in spite of being based on Ubuntu 20.04. Zorin OS 16 Lite was released with XFCE 4.16 even though Xubuntu 20.04 came with XFCE 4.14. The ZorinGroup often includes later packaging than the base included as long as it is safe, stable and does not conflict with other software.
Zorin OS focuses more on *stability* than on "Latest but possibly buggy." While some users may prefer to always have the Latest Packages, many distros and Rolling Releases cater to that.
This can easily give a bit of an impression that Zorin OS is outdated (hardly) or does not Update (Updates happen quite often) when a user focuses only on "Only the latest possible package counts as Up To Date". Which is untrue.
This becomes a bit of an odd point since if the user just wants the latest possible packages, Zorin OS comes with Flatpak and Snap installed and ready. They can use those alternative formats to get later releases on those packages.
What remains is Gnome... Which as contentious as Gnome4+ is... still is the latest Gnome while the current Release of Zorin OS 16 (17 is due later this year based on Ubuntu 22.04) is using Gnome 3.38.
And this one is confusing because the Gnome Devs released the 4+ series very, very quickly in succession to each other whereas the point releases of Gnome 3 were released at a far more sedate pace. This gives many users the illusion that Gnome is just way way ahead... When in actuality Gnome 43 is a point release of Gnome 40. Gnome just changed the naming convention and released quickly due to the large amount of bugs that needed fixing in the rushed release of 40 (they hoped to get 40 accepted into Ubuntu 20.04 in time).
And you have users whose primary concern is being able to use Gnome 4+ extensions on Zorin OS.
I hope this helps add some clarity and remove some misconceptions or at least answer some questions. In spite of it being so long winded.
@@samspade4703 the sam spade I know is better than the above comment here.
Edit: First comment, second is great.
@@elementneon Sam Spade is a character in The Maltese Falcon as well as the name of a hacking utility. I have no idea if you "know me" or are thinking of another person. It is not really relevant to what you said. Your comment clearly states that you think my comment was in poor form and a Better Person would have been Better not to say it.
I disagree. I think Nick was in very poor form and I called him out on it and my words hold him accountable. That IS "Better than" behavior. And It Always Will Be.
I would suggest trying out Void Linux. A custom package manager and the runit init system are the loudest standouts imo. The documentation is sufficient and the void-packages helps out with the rest too. It is on the deeper end but worth a try.
I saw you like a openSUSE comment. I want to try it as well.
Void lover over here and I'm also interested in a test of tumbleweed
I daily Void because it's such a problem free distro. It's so incredibly stable, yet rolling so you aren't left in the dust. I've never had an update related breakage in the year or so I've been using it.
Another great standout yet nobody seemed to cared or mentioned is that they offer musl variant. When you can't run glibc on your machine, or tired about GNU, it's such a breeze to have it. Right now I can see only Void and Gentoo are offering this flavour.
I almost forgot that Alpine uses musl too. Sorry. If you read this, OP, please also try out Void Linux and Alpine Linux, both offering similar minimalistic user experience yet feature rich and super stable.
About debian, I use it a lot on my desktops (this and fedora) but not the iso they first expose on their website, a few more clicks lead you to a much lighter (less packages) version which allows me to pretty much create my custom distro
@@0xKrem this was for my work computer so I didn't need much more than neovim and a web browser
The main things I installed were bspwm with polybar, picom, nix and kitty
But I then switched to NixOS last week
Excellent breakdown and analysis of these popular distros.
I am mostly using Garuda Linux KDE dragonized edition. In my opinion it’s a good one, brings arch power without need of terminal, a lot of customization and good looking with all animations and neon effects. Also, stable with zen kernel and doesn’t let users break it easily. Besides has performance tweaks and power saver tweaks that users can choose based on PC or laptop for example. Also has strong build on chaotic-AUR which offers pre-compiled packages 📦
Garuda KDE Dragonized is SO HEAVY. uses so much system resources
The arch's power is minimalism, you kind of lose that if you bring the kitchen sink and everything because arch packages are never optimised to work together
They are simple and close to source as possible to keep them stable
@@mrmoomoo3373 On my 8 years laptop works faster than Manjaro and Deepin that I tried in the past. It is using some more RAM but for own performance goods like cache.
I personally can't wait for your take on the Vanilla OS, they're doing something new and exciting with Linux in a way that I haven't really seen before.
i personally went with bodhi linux, I'm fairly new to linux and coming from about 30 years of exclusively using windows, going to bodhi was a breeze, it's similar enough to windows in many ways and the flow in how you use the start menu, navigate the file browser, everything is familiar enough that you can easily just make minor adjustments, so it's not offputting, it's also very stable, very set it and forget it, so, it's my personal preference as a htpc, at least for now.
Please test OpenSuse and MX. Then remake this list. It would be interesting to see where you put them. But one thing is certain, Mint is almost irreplaceable from the top! 🙌
SUSA!
I came back to Mint this year and was very impressed. Currently my favorite.
Am I the only one who thinks Garuda should snag the seat at the table Manjaro had?
Yes!
Ubuntu is my distro of choice largely because, like you, it's the first Linux distro I ever used and it's generally very stable and runs great on anything I throw it at. Recently though I've been toying with Linux Mint and it's really growing on me.
Agreed with almost all of them, but I'd put Zorin and Pop on good. The lack of a newer base would prevent them being in great, but they have an awesome usability and great tools.
I suppose OpenSuse TW will make it to good once you test it, it's really great all around but has the same issue as Fedora, gotta install drivers and tinker a bit.
i'm surprised because his review of zorin 16 was really positive, why the sudden change of heart?
@@qqq1581 not a change of heart, I believe. It's just that we're mid-2023 and the most recent Zorin still has the 20.04 Ubuntu base, so it's really due for an upgrade.
@@amaralbc besides the upgrade issue, may i ask how you feel about zorin?
@@qqq1581 oh I really like it! If updated and had more recent gnome it would be my daily system for sure. Great layouts, stable, and very user friendly, handles steam and proton very nicely, it's an awesome distro
For me, ZorinOS would move up to 'good' if they maintained a more up to date OS and finally got rid of the payware variant, which basically forces you to pay $30 if you like the macOS dock layout.
I have tried all of these distros and while mint was ok for a bit I finally settled for Zorin OS and to this date it's my daily driver. I get updates almost every 2 weeks and its blazing fast and I get everything done in a jiffy. Im a photographer so video and photo manipulation softwares which are resource hogs run seamlessly for me. No issues at all
I've been all linuxmint at home for a few years now, with Windurrs relegated to VMs when I absolutely need it. Good call on having it at the top of the list!
Great list! I like Endeavour OS myself.
Hi Nick, I use MX Linux for web development and it works like a charm.
I use both MX and Mint as my goto distros.
Sometimes my choice is driven by whichever works best on the target PC. Other times the choice is driven by which USB stick I find first and whether or not the distro on it works OK.
I feel like you can never go wrong with Arch based distros such as Garuda and EndeavourOS. They're definitely the superior Arch experience.
14:03
I thought Manjaro being sponsored by a proprietary office suite was bad
Over the past 15 years or so, I've had a look at some different distro's and have recently downloaded their iso on to dvd's and have even tried them out (without a full install) and wondered whether you have already looked at them:
1. Peppermint (32 bit)
2. MX-Linux (32 bit)
3. AntiX Linux (for older PC's) (32 bit)
4. Void Linux (32 bit)
5. Qimo 2.0 (for younger users) (32 bit)
6. Bionic_Pup 8.0 (32 bit) or Puppy Linux (32 bit)
7. Twister OS (32 bit - ARM) for Raspberry Pi 400
8. Google Chromium OS (64 bit - ARM) for Raspberry Pi 400 (like other Chromebooks Linux apps can be installed inside it like in a sandbox).
Great video as usual and I look forward to your review of the above.
I generally use Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint for my main computers and Google Chromium OS, MX Linux, Twister OS and Raspbian OS on my Raspberry Pi 400.
Id highly recommend looking at the testing and unstable versions of Debian, i think you’d like testing and unstable is a lot of fun too
All the server machines for my current clients run Debian Stable. That gives us high confidence that things will work.
I'm considering switching from Manjaro to Endeavour OS. It seems to follow Arch more closely and looks quite cool from what I can tell.
In addition, Pamac hasn't been able to install or update AUR packages for a while now, which was one of my reasons for going with it in the first place.
I use AUR with Manjaro. Occasionally there is an error on update saying it can't sync with AUR. But that has always gone away if I wait and try again later.
@@me_fault honestly, 'try again later' should not really be a/the way to fix a problem. For me these kept stacking up, and eventually i got sick of it. I moved away to proper arch, and the same combination of software has had significantly fewer problems. If you just use the linux to toy around and don't really depend on it, why not try out arch either way. If your system is more important to be stable to you, i am not sure if any arch based distro is a good call.
True, a 'try again later' fix isn't ideal. At the moment Manjaro works well enough that just sticking with it is easier than trying Arch. Although, I would like try it out at some point.
Mint was the first distro I was really comfortable with, and I keep coming back to it, but I'll be interested to hear your comparison between Open SUSE and KDE Neon: the Plasma desktop and the K apps are very appealing.
I use Mint for the desktop and Debian for servers. I recommended Mint to a friend and he liked it however he switched to Linux Lite, another Debian distro. For beginners Lite does seem easier to set up and use than Mint, which amazed me. However I found doing the advanced stuff was harder because they'd simplified it too much.
I am a Zorin 16 Pro user. The first month was a little disappointing, but after that it has been a pretty good stable experience. Zorin does deliver on their promise of a user friendly experience. I love the idea of Elementary OS, but hate their execution of the idea. Not having an office suite and the better browsers available early on is a terrible idea. I think I am going to wait a cycle on POP OS the Cosmic version, so they can get the early bugs out of the way.
I'm liking Zorin as well, but I also don't have much linux experience. I've only ever tried Ubuntu/Xubuntu, and Linux Mint XFCE. I did try out Debian via Live CD, but that was ages ago and even back then the version was outdated.
Linux Mint is great. It took me ages to settle on a semi reasonable Linux Desktop (and honestly, I haven't the time to mess around with DE's). Mint is like the best Windows-like experience mixed with Ubuntu compatible software. It sorta ticks all the right boxes imo.
I think a good idea for a video would be to compare (not rank as it would bring war in the comments) the different immutable linux distros and their approaches to it, what advantages they have over normal distros, over the others immutable distros as well as their drawbacks due to the way they implement immutability.
Nice review. I have started to use Linux Mint Debian Edition, which replaces the Ubuntu dependencies with Debian. Uses a lot of flatpacks, but I don't think this is a problem if you have a decent system with decent SSD storage.
I have been using Mint for 2 weeks. It's my first time Linux experience, only one thing I'm missing is that lack of Photoshop, rest is far better than windows
I think Photopea is a good, free alternative.
you could just run a windows vm for anything that you want to do that you can only do on windows
@@user-ks1oh2wx6o my PC isn't that powerful
@@stabokboseThat's fair because mine isn't either
Recently moved to mint as well. The package manager doesn't unexplainedly lock up or take forever and just works. Games run faster than on any other distro I've tried and it just works, no odd issues or dependencies missing etc.
I agree with your rankings. I would love your take on Vanilla OS and MX Linux. I normally treat distros in combination with desktop environments. For example:
Gnome ---> Fedora
KDE ---> Tuxedo OS, MX Linux (KDE)
Cinnamon ---> Linux Mint
XFCE ---> MX Linux
Budgie ---> Ubuntu Budgie
There are Arch Versions that Prevent User Error, mostly because they don't use their own update Firmware. Like Garuda Linux.
After a VAST distrohopping adventure I can say that I prefer company-made distros like Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL. 🙏😊
Same here but I also like Slackware. Used SuSE for years long time ago. Now I settled for Fedora on my main PC with backup RHEL installation, Ubuntu on servers and Kali on my laptop. Couldn’t be happier.
I use Debian with xfce since forever i think, i really really value stability over anything else.
I use Debian (with wmaker first, since enough RAM with KDE) and i don't care about stability...
Nick, gotta say, i love your content. I switched to Linux in Christmas 2022 for about a month, tried to get some things working that I used in Windows but couldn't, so i switched back to Windows for several months before moving back to Linux for good once i got Linux gaming set up. Huge shout out to the "Linux" channel for that. I appreciate your input on distros, problems with those distros, the pros and cons, all of it really. I've watched your content off and on for a while but recently just let your stuff play and listen while doing other stuff.
Again, thanks for the content copain (i hope used that right)
Nobara OS fixes alot of of base Fedora's issues. It's what I started using Linux on about half a year ago and it's been a very seamless and user-friendly experience so far!