I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit the mark for us because it can be very helpful.
So, I’d like to ask: What is your least favorite Linux distribution and why? Please remember, this is not about bashing or belittling any specific distribution. The aim is to have a constructive discussion where we can learn about each other’s experiences.
My personal least favorite is probably Manjaro.
Consider:
- What specific features/lack thereof made it less appealing?
- Did you face any specific challenges?
- How was your experience with the community?
- If given a chance, what improvements would you suggest?
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Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.
If Debian is not great as a desktop distro, it’s at the very least remarkably stable as a server distro. The sentiment extends somewhat to Ubuntu LTS. It could be better, but in terms of uptime and just working I can’t fault either distro.
I just now discovered why people are hating on Ubuntu pro by receiving a note that Ubuntu will not provide security updates for some apps it came with unless you activate Pro.
I think I’m done with Ubuntu on any personal machines.
I don’t have many issues on Ubuntu like you imply. It’s the reason why I stick with it despite snaps.
I was an Ubuntu fan many moons ago. Then I fell in love with Mint when it was just all around a better version of Ubuntu.
Then I ended up with a new Windows laptop for years and forgot about Linux entirely. But this year, I’ve actually returned to Ubuntu. I like how it has a fresh and different look and it still performs well on my now aging laptop. Mint is always my go to recommendation to others, but I just wanted a different look than your standard Windows-like look that Cinnamon has. I was initially turned off way back when, when Ubuntu switched to Unity, but now a difference in look appeals to me. We’ll see if I get annoyed with Snaps or not. So far, everything has been running smoothly.
If there was a GNOME fork of Mint, I’d likely be using that. I get that you can technically install whatever desktop environment in whatever distro you want, but for compatibility sake, it’s best to roll with what your distro comes with.
Ubuntu: For shilling all kinds of profrietary garbage by default. If I wanted that I’d be on Windows.
Also the changes they make to GNOME make it worse, they take away what makes it good, the flow.
Exactly what I came here to say.
Prompt me for Ubuntu Pro once (in the GUI on first login)? Shame on you, but I’ll move past it.
Put an ad in the terminal every time I update my system though? Straight to jail.
I’m going to mention two:
Manjaro. I’ve attempted to use Manjaro a few different times, and outside of a VM it just didn’t work properly; on my laptop it would boot loop for reasons I don’t understand, it had poor hardware support and optimization on a Raspberry Pi, and it didn’t last long on my desktop. It’s had its chances, I’m done trying.
I really did not hitch horses with Pop!_OS, and it’s almost entirely because Pop!_OS started at Gnome and kept fucking going. Just thinking about the two miserable weeks I spent trying to get Gnome to do anything is making me physically angry. Words like disobedient and belligerent come to mind when I think of what it’s like to use Pop!_OS. Linux Mint is designed to feel familiar to anyone coming from Windows. Pop!_OS feels like it’s designed to be the opposite of that, it deliberately doesn’t work the way you think it does. YOU have to conform to IT. And I FUCKING hate it. It is never welcome on my hardware ever again.
yep. i dont see a reason to use Manjaro when EndevourOs is basically the same, but better (and a nicer color theme!)
Why does endeavor OS describe itself as a terminal-centric OS?
That alone turns me off from using it. I try to avoid the terminal at all costs.
im pretty sure you can get by pretty well without the terminal, for the most part. although, it is arch based, and its kind of the point. no distro is for everyone.
its besides the point, but why dont u like the terminal?
its besides the point, but why dont u like the terminal?
Because it’s way harder to remember and use text commands than it is to navigate a GUI.
I also don’t like taking my hand off the mouse if I can avoid it.
Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.
Hey, they at least prioritise contributing upstream. Canonical is much worse.
Had to scroll way too far for this.
Manjaro. Its just Arch but worse
Yeah I was gonna say Manjaro too. I used it for a while while I was heading towards Arch but wasn’t feeling fully confident to go full Arch as a daily driver yet, and it was nothing but trouble for me. I found that it tried to prevent me from breaking things, which is not necessarily bad, but it would also break things by itself and then this feature would prevent me from going in and fixing them.
I much prefer it when the OS just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want, even if it’s dumb lol
I’m using Manjaro daily for +5 years and had one or two package conflicts, never any boot problems. I don’t understand where all the Manjaro hate is coming from…
Ubuntu / snaps
NIXOS. It has a very steep learning curve without acceptable documentation and once I climbed the learning curve, I realized that it was very different from the Linux that I love.
I hope you dont give up on it for too long, I think it’s a great OS once you get the hang of nix. To this day, its the only OS I trust where I could install anything I want and can still rollback without worries. Also I can make sure that my installation is the same as others, which means other people can literally just copy paste my config to test.
Pull out your pitchforks, debian.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good in a VM or a server, but it’s the worst Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had.
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Apt sucks, it’s the worst package manager imo (and I use Gentoo). Slow, bad a dependency resolution and apt-autoremove nuked my system both times I tried to use debian.
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It’s old. LTS is only good for servers, you cannot change my mind and I don’t see a reason to use sid or unstable, when I can use literally why other distro with a better prepare manager.
And it just does some bizarre things, like not setting up sudo with the graphical installer…
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I know it’s probably an odd choice, but ChromeOS. It has the potential to be not just a good starting point for new Linux users but also a distro that could allow Linux to be a lot more accessible to people who aren’t as technologically capable. The main problem is that, similar to android, Google prevents ChromeOS from being used as a proper Linux distro. Right now, it might be a good alternative to Windows and MacOS but as a Linux distro, it’s just not worth using. Especially considering that Linux already has some options available for running android apps, such as Waydroid, that work pretty well.
I really think Google has no idea what it wants ChromeOS to be anymore, they’re just kinda shoving in shoddy solutions to its problems so they can say “hey we can do that too!”
soon they’re gonna introduce Steam and I look forward to that being a big shitshow lol
It’s Pichai’s handiwork from what I understand. He was in charge of it before becoming CEO according to Wikipedia.
Have they ever? ChromeOS’s original “app store” was just Chrome’s extension store. It’s been awhile since I’ve checked but Google doesn’t (or at least didn’t) officially support running android apps in ChromeOS Flex. Instead of focusing on getting more apps running on ChromeOS, they’re actively working on Google Play Games for Windows (which also hurts android). For which I think I saw that there are games that work in Google Play Games but they don’t work in ChromeOS for some reason. I’d imagine that there are a lot of other weird things but it’s been a while since I’ve actually used it.
It’s just one of those things where, ChromeOS has the potential to be a good competitor to Windows and MacOS (and maybe even a good Linux distro) but for some reason Google does nothing with it to make it worth using and actually seems to be actively harming it.
I use Fedora as my primary desktop distro. It’s a sturdy base with relatively up-to-date packages from the repos. It doesn’t really push technology I consider undesirable, like Snaps. Even though I have to rely on RPMFusion for a number of proprietary parts, due to Fedora’s free software stance, I don’t have any particular qualms about that. I also increasingly use Flatpaks anyway.
When I used to use Reddit the /r/fedora community was helpful and welcoming.
One downside is because the kernel changes frequently, and I (sadly) own a Nvidia GPU, akmods runs very often. Another downside is sometimes that frequently changing kernel can cause issues. I think in the past year or two I’ve had two distinct occasions where a kernel upgrade caused my mounted shares to not mount correctly. Reporting an issue to upstream also takes quite some involvement, as I discovered when I had to create some Red Hat account to report an issue about the packaging of some software in a beta release of Fedora.
So all-in-all I would say Fedora is a strong distro. It is probably not the most beginner-friendly one, though, given how you have to dip your toes into RPMFusion and related challenges. It used to be worse, since DejaVu used to be the default font system-wide and you had to install a fonts package from COPR to make the system actually look pleasant. Since then they switched to Noto, which makes the font situation MUCH better.
On servers and VMs I use Debian because I do not have the patience to maintain a faster moving Fedora multiple times over. This is exacerbated by the awful defaults of Gnome, which I have to bend into shape with extensions. When Fedora 40 releases later this year I fully intend to reinstall from scratch since KDE Plasma 6 will be available.
edit: i misread the prompt and just talked about my favorite distro that i actively use. whoops.
My least favorite distro could be Manjaro if I actually used it, but it is Ubuntu because of how close it is to being a great distro. Snaps really soured me to that deal. Snapd and Snaps make it difficult to use in VMs, too, because now you have to over-commit resources for something that could and should be smaller and simpler. Debian stays winning, as usual.
I agree with you.
I don’t hate Manjaro’s developers, but they simply do not know what they are doing. They over promise and under deliver.
Hannah Montana Linux. Do I have to explain?
Yes.
You can’t have the best of both worlds
I hate that I understood this joke. Take my angry upvote.
Is it because it came in like a wrecking ball?
Sorry, I think you meant to post this in the “best distro” thread
Manjaro always broke on me. I can’t even trust them to keep their SSL certs up to date.
Sorry Manjaro devs, no hate, I just got burned way too many times by this arch-not-arch frankendistro.
Been on it for the last two years. Never broke. Idk what’s going on
For me personally: Something like Arch. I want to spend as little time as possible on installation and configuration, and I don’t want to have to read update notes or break my system. But I get that it’s great for some people, and their wiki is just next level!
In general: Ubuntu. It feels like I read something about Canonical causing trouble every other week, and don’t even get me started on snaps!
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Completely agree on both points. Canonical always acts against the spirit of open-source whenever they get the chance.
And while Arch is great, I prefer things that work out of the box.
TL;DR: Ubuntu. Because I want choices.
Ubuntu. And I’ve felt that way for a long time, so it’s not something recentish like snaps.
I don’t want my distro to decide what DE and software I’m using for me. They used to have a minimal iso which gave you, as the name suggests, a very minimal install. But now their minimal image is meant for containerized stuff and if memory serves comes with some extra cruft for that purpose.
I got annoyed and I left. And every distro I’ve tried since, even if I didn’t stick with it, I liked better.
To add some constructiveness, as that’s just complaining. That can be a good thing, just depends on the user. If they want the crafted experience Ubuntu provides, then it’s a good pick. It’s just not for me.
