I labeled some of the lesser known logos. The criteria are arbitrary and I made this based on how much I liked using it.
Note that Fedora Sway Atomic isn’t bad, but I had a bad experience because I was trying to install NIri on it and it clearly wasn’t meant for that. Basically, it’s just not for me.
I wanted to rank Manjaro low because I heard bad things about it, but I think I used it for like a few minutes because I wanted to try Gnome, and I didn’t like Gnome after trying it and didn’t want to deal with uninstalling all the Gnome stuff manually, so I just hopped to another distro.
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Huh? … Why’s that a Debian swirl and not a Devuan ping/swoosh thing on that top row with void and artix?
And go on, throw gentoo up there too while you’re at it. ;)
…
Then that’s the standard 4 I first put in my bedrock linux.
Artix, Devuan, Gentoo, Void.
Solid.
Previous Manjaro user here. You can place it in F.
In all honesty i don’t get it the E for endravourOS on my old ass laptop everything works just fine, even the nvidia card
I was getting really mad, the I realized what you did there.
How dare you rank Debian at…oh. I see what you did there. Nice.
Wait, where’s Gentoo?
the dark and forbidden G tier
Here’s mine:
- Note 1: This tierlist only includes distros I’ve tried.
- Note 2: Slackware would rank higher now; I made this about month ago.
- Note 3: The “noob” tier doesn’t mean the distro is bad. If it weren’t there, Mint would rank higher.
Aw. Why’s PCLinuxOS on the devil tier?
I always think PCLinuxOS deserves more respect. … But not like that! ;D
For me, it’s the combination of its American base, its lack of disk encryption in the installer, the fact that I’ve never managed to get a usable installation, and the fact that Mageia (another Mandriva derivative) and Salix (a Slackware-based distro with a similar UX) are objectively better.
If you are happy with PCLOS, however, godspeed.
Noob here.
I tried CachyOS because read good things about it. But wifi only worked during installation. After installation it was a hassle to get WiFi running again.
So Zorin it is for me. Simply runs.
CachyOS in S, based.
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Damn, you’ve tried a lot of different distros. I’ve been using Linux for 15 years but only been on like 8 different ones. Installed personally about 5.
Well, I began in 2019, but I distrohopped a lot.
Gentoo in the top tier, checks out
Redhat and Ubuntu are controversial for me. Don’t want them for desktop, but for any professional server I would choose them over any of the others (and preferably alpine for any docker containers running on them)
So, why would you pick RedHat over Rocky or Alma?
Or Ubuntu over Debian?
Genuinely curious, not judging
It’s way easier to explain to customers “these companies have enterprise commitments and long term support available if needed”, I realize that they all essentially run the same stuff but frankly I can’t guarantee I’m always gonna be the one supporting them and it is an added safety net for when they decide not to upgrade for an eternity. Not to mention just about every VPS provider has at least one of those two options available out of the box, they’re frankly the safe boring choices.
Why try so many distros? It’s not like most of them are gonna be substantially different.
its like racecars
You never know, the grass might be greener elsewhere. I will say though, to me that only applies to independent distros. At this point i only bother trying distros that are actually different at their core. Arch- or debian-based distros are all kind of the same to me.
Idk, autism?
Gentoo is good only if you got a powerful computer.
Official binhost exists now.
I used gentoo on not-powerful-computer, because it was not a powerful computer. Did not care about the compile times. Cared about the performance when I was using it. Even did a ```USE=“-*” setup once or twice, to keep it even more lean on resources, and more focused to meet needs and no more unecessary fluff and bloat than that.
I used to run it on my Raspberry Pi 5 without complaint.
Some stuff did take a while to compile, but the trick is to do other things — like make some tea, go for a walk, or watch TV — instead of staring at the terminal the whole time (I am 100% serious; this is not sarcasm).
Need to add Qubes os as S+ tier
no hannah montana linux??
That’s at least two tiers above S, obviously
I use fedora workstation but it’s so boring because it just does what I need and I never have any problems 🥲
I might give Debian a spin at some point
I wish it wasn’t built on Wayland.
What’s wrong with Wayland? Havnt noticed any problems
I use Anydesk for work and Rustdesk for personal and the lag is so bad. Also added the hot keys and super button doesn’t transfer to the remote computer.
Debian + nix home-manager is hard to beat. Confining my bleeding edge software to be rootlesson top of a bulletproof distro is very much the same – boring (in the best way). Plus the latest apt in debian 13 just feels nicer than dnf to me somehow.
I enjoy linux mint a lot
I’ve been recommending it as the beginner’s distro for years. Default DE is very windows familiar, install is easy, out of box experience is great, built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck. There’s nothing really wrong with it unless you need newer drivers or something
Only Linux Mint Debian Edition is built on Debian. Linux Mint (main) is built on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a Debian distro too. Either way mint is a Debian distro.
There’s the Linux Mint main distro build off Ubuntu and a separate Linux Mint Debian distro build directly from Deb.
Specificity is useful, especially in the context that you said “Mint is built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck” - well actually, not directly. It’s built on Ubuntu, which a lot of people complain has a more bloat and thus less stability than Debian.
Personally I’ve not had issues with any of the three, they’re all good, but there are differences. Mint includes a number of packages that Debian does not (PPAs, Snap, Wayland infegration), because it’s inherited them all from Ubuntu. Mint is 64-bit whereas Debian supports 32/64 and other architectures, because again… Mint (standard) is based on Ubuntu, which is 64-bit only.
I put LM on my n100 HTPC and hasn’t done a thing more besides updates. It just works…
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Why is OpenSUSE at the bottom? I’d heard good things about it. EndeavourOS is my current OS but I’m always looking for a new distro.
It’s in the “Unranked” tier because OP hasn’t used it enough to have an opinion.
When I used it decades ago, I was a kid. It seemed pleasant enough for me back then. On one hand, I’d say “works for children” is an endorsement. On the other, child-me never tried any of the advanced stuff I’d care about today.
Thanks for that. I’ve permanent donkey-brains and overlooked that entirely.
Here is mine:
Mint
Haven’t really tried anything else or it was 10+ years ago.
Haha! You beat me to it! Great ranking. I 100% agree with where you’ve places each/it.
I love nixos for my homelab! Out of curiosity, why C tier for KDE Neon? (My desktop and laptop both daily drive them, and I’ve loved it since abandoning Ubuntu post-Unity)
Honestly I didn’t use it for very long, and while I liked the customization, I didn’t like the Plasma apps as much as Linux Mint’s apps.
That’s fair enough. I can’t say I’ve used Mint very much, I’ve just known it as something to suggest to newbies. My brother revived his 2009 Macbook Pro with it, but it’s so old he mostly uses it for character sheets during Pathfinder night.
Void and NixOS in S tier is based, my two favorite distros. Because of me using void though i kinda miss using Runit when i want to use a declaritive system like nix. I’m working on a gnu guix config in a vm now to see if i can use that as an alternative instead. It’s not runit per se, but who knows, maybe i’ll still like shepherd better than systemd.
Yep. Void’s been surprising me for over a decade, since it was still “new”, at how well kitted out it is, and what a joy of simplicity and cleanliness it is. Rarely any hunting down the superfluous complexity of a package’s name-extra-words-after-the-program-name. A real joy. Very few complaints. Big love for VoidLinux.
PS, Runit is niiiiice. :)
Void, Debian and Artix being in S tier is just based.
Uhhh, I, uhhh
I use Arch by the way :3
Sorry I couldn’t help it. Technically I started this install as Antegos, but since that project ended I used some voodoo to convince my OS that it’s Arch now with moderate succes.
Oh I do dislike Manjaro. I tried it a few times on some PCs and every time it ended in a dumpster fire. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but it has something to do with pitting me pick the kernel but also completely going to shit if I didn’t pick the right one at the right moment. Constant errors, pain and suffering. When I switched that machine to Fedora it was suddenly happily purring like a kitten without any issues.
artix mentioned!!!
as an artix/gentoo user, where would you place gentoo?
I “tried” installing gentoo once but i didn’t know what a tarball was at the time so i can’t really rate it. the documentation did help me a lot with OpenRC on artix though.
i did hear nixOS is also source-based in a way, but i’m not sure on the details.
Worth revisiting now. :)
You want the USE flags. *enticing gesturing*
Yes, NixOS and GNU Guix are both technically source-based, but they pull from a binary cache server by default to prevent it from building everything. You could disable it, but i don’t really see the point since as far as i’m aware, nix and guix don’t have the use flags stuff like Gentoo has.
