which linux distro do you NOT like, and why?

You're going to get a lot of comments about Ubuntu and snaps. Definitely one of the reasons I switched away from it.
- For the uninitiated, as someone who's looking to move from Windows to Linux and Ubuntu is probably my first choice, can you share what's not to like about this?
  Edit - insightful answers. Thank you
  
  Snaps are technically foss but the server thst hosts them are proprietary to Ubuntu, when flatpak is perfectly reasonable. It’s a bit of a pattern of things they do, finding solutions to things they weren’t really problems (cough netplan cough)
  
  Performance and functionality.
  When I click the Firefox icon, I expect Firefox to open. Like, right away.
  When Ubuntu switched it to a snap, there was a noticeable load time. I'd click the icon and wait. In the background the OS was mounting a snap as a virtual volume or something, and loading the sandboxed app from that. It turned my modern computer with SSD into an old computer with a HDD. Firefox gets frequent updates, so the snap would be updated frequently, requiring a remount/reload every update.
  Ubuntu tried this with many stock apps (like Calculator), but eventually rolled things back since so many people complained about the obvious performance issues.
  I'm talking about literally waiting 10X the time for something to load as a snap than it did compared to a "regular" app.
  The more apps you have as snaps, the more things have to be mounted/attached and slowly loaded. This also use to clutter up the output when listing mounted devices.
  The Micropolis (GPL SimCity) snap loads with read-only permissions. i.e., you cannot save. There are no permission controls for write access (its snap permissions are only for audio). Basically, the snap was configured wrong and you can never save your game.
  I had purged snapd from my system and added repos to get "normal" versions of software, but eventually some other package change would happen and snapd would get included with routine updates.
  I understand the benefits of something like Snaps and Flatpaks - but you cannot deny that there are negatives. I thought Linux was about choice. I've been administering a bunch of Ubuntu systems at work for well over a decade, and I don't like what the platform has been becoming.
  Also, instead of going with an established solution (flatpak), Ubuntu decided to create a whole new problem (snap) and basically contributes to a splitting of the community. Which do you support? Which gets more developer focus to fix and improve things?
  You don't have to take my word for any of this. A quick Google search will yield many similar complaints.
  
  For context:
  Snaps are a way to build applications so that they can run on any platform with one build method. It makes it easier for developers to publish their apps across multiple different Linux distro without having to worry about dependency issues.
  Snaps have been very poorly received by the community, one of the largest complaints is that a snap program with take 5-10 seconds to start, where as the same program without snap will start instantly.
  Ubuntu devs have been working for years to optimize them, but it's a complex problem and while they've made some improvements, it's slow going. While this has been going on, Ubuntu is slowly doubling down more and more on snaps, such as replacing default apps with their snap counterparts.
  On the other hand, other methods like flatpak exist, and are generally more liked by the community.
  This has led to a lot of Ubuntu users feeling unheard as their feedback is ignored.
  
  One word: snapd
  If you like the idea of ubuntu, but wish to avoid ubuntu, you might want to check out Linux Mint.
  
  You get a lot of recommendations for Mint here, but I'd like to toss in a recommendation for Pop!_OS. Also based on Ubuntu without all the crap. I would say the biggest difference between pop and mint is the UI, as Mint comes standard with cinnamon and pop with Gnome (soon cosmic) as their DE's.
  Just take a look at those two and choose one of them, they are both great distros, and absolutely the two I would recommend to just about anyone. Easy to use and very straightforward for new people trying out Linux.
- I’ve been using Ubuntu for a long time for its out-of-the-box zfs support, but the snap annoyances are getting harder to ignore.
  
  Firefox is one of the worst snaps. It pops up an annoying notification everyday reminding you to restarted it. Then came the crashing. It got to a point where I couldn't keep my browser running more than a few minutes at a time.
  I wanted to like snaps, and I'm not overall negative on Ubuntu, but keeping the web browser functional is minimum requirement. The Firefox PPA is much more reliable.
- For the record...

My Linux from Scratch install. It was built by a moron.
- It’s that pesky root user, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.
- You can make an OS in Scratch? I didnt know that
  
  Linux From Scratch is a series of (online) books that walk you through building up your own linux system from the ground up, from compiling the kernel to all the individual systems that turn the kernel into a functional OS.
  It's meant to be an educational tool to help people learn about what goes into making a Linux distribution and give you better knowledge of how to build software from source. Some people turn these systems into their own distributions or personal (I guess gentoo-like?) Linux installs
  
  Not only can you make your own OS but you can use one of the package managers and build your own repo and do a whole ecosystem yourself.
  I used LFS to build a distro for embedded systems I designed at work. Was a fun experience but way too much work.

Manjaro, because because the team behind it fuck's up a bit to often for my tastes. And Ubuntu, because they force snap onto their users.

I spent the last 10 mins reading all the comments and I think we managed to shit on all the distros available.
That's the Linux community I love, good job people <3
- No one gets left behind
  Akuna Matata or some shit
- Haven't seen Santoku or Kali or several other special use-case distros (E: or Hannah Montana Linux hahahaha). But, yes, this is exactly the community I love and that extreme hate/love for specific distros is the reason I tried Linux in the first place (and the reason I stayed) hahaha
- Nobody shits on MX, it's a sign 😁

Garuda. It feels like being inside a gaming rig full of blinking RGB lights. Way over the top with the "gamer aesthetic".
- Same reason but different vibe with Kali for me. I'm sure it's good for its intended purpose, but I get the feeling that there are many who install it in an attempt at being a kewl h4x0r. I used used Parrotsec for work for a while, and it's a lot less flamboyant about it.
- My desktop "breathes" in RGB so it sounds perfect for me. Plug me into the Matrix.
- Fwiw it does have a 'Lite' edition that doesn't include any theming.

Ubuntu.It' went from a great beginner distro to a dumpster fire filled with snaps and telemetry.
- Serious question: what do you not like about snaps? I find the isolation and dependency desolation to be pretty great.
  
  Snap is vendor lock in. They don’t work on many distros, tooling pushes their platform, and they control the only store.
  For desktop apps Flatpak is just technically better anyway so what’s the point.

Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.
Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!
Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!
- How does Manjaro add incompetence? I've not used either for a while, buy Manjaro never failed me, while arch did manage to make my system nuke itself a couple times just running pacman -Syyu. Granted, this was a long time ago, but it's the only distro to so this to me ever.
  
  The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.
  The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.
  The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.
  Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.
  Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.
  
  it's a reddit imported hate-train because they didn't renew certificates twice in twenty years and a bug in pamac cause the aur to be ddosed for a few hours total, to tell you how much of an empty bandwagon it is, few years back, manjaro tried to push a closed source office suite in their base installers and none of the clowns parroting anti-manjaro mantras ever mention it, they didn't think about adding it to the agreed list of accusations in the early days so their copy pasted opinions don't feature it.
- RHEL code is available with git. Stop this FUD.
  
  If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.
  Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.
  Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.

Manjaro, for its incompetence.
I don't hate Gentoo, but will never use it. I hate compiling.
- Upvoted for Manjaro, downvoted for gentoo. (no vote as a result)
  
  Console issued server command: /force_vote @a

Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.
Ubuntu because snaps.
The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.
- Every time I have used manjaro on x86 it has been broken within a few months. Their Raspberry Pi 4 port is pretty stable though for some reason.

Arch, I want to get some work done not save 3 extra CPU cycles on boot.
- I thought that's gentoo.
  
  I ran Gentoo for years. I run Arch now.
  You're not wrong, lol.
  'Course, I was running Gentoo when hardware was slow enough that you could see the real-time performance improvement from tailored compiles. Now shit's so fast that any gains are imperceptible by a human for day-to-day desktop usage. Arch can also be a bit of a time sink, I get it, especially setting it up takes time and thought. That's also why I like it, and always come back to it: I can set it up exactly how I want it, and it's really good at that. There's always weird shit that seems to happen to me when I try to remove Gnome in Ubuntu or other crazy shit that, yeah, everyone would tell you not to do, but Arch doesn't care. If I want combination of things, I can hunt for a distro that has it, or I can likely just set it up on Arch.
  After setup, though, it's not any more effort to maintain than any other distro. shrug
  
  Binary speed is really the least reason to use Gentoo.
  There are a lot of thorny issues in package distribution that source builds completely sidestep.
  Install-it-yourself plus source updates are a lot to ask, but if you can get the hang of it the benefits are pretty sweet.
- So what you're actually saying is: you don't like Arch because you don't want to take the time to learn how to use Arch.
  (Which is fine)
  
  Yeah, that's pretty much it. I don't want to use a kit/show car for commuting.
  
  Just use Arch in a Distrobox on Fedora or openSUSE. That's the best of both worlds.
- Honestly… I don’t get this. It’s a bit more work than other distros but I think that Linux users often get to a point in their Linux journey where customizing a system with defaults is more difficult than just starting from a blank slate.
  
  Customizing all-in-one distros is a shitty uphill battle that isn't worth the trouble, so I get how Arch is worth the work there. But recommending a kit car when people are asking for a commuter just bugs me.
  
  It is definitely not a bit more work. It’s hours and hours of reading manuals, following video guides and configuring every last detail.
  This is a gross simplification
  
  I don’t find this the case at all. I barely change the wallpaper, I’m not spending time removing a bunch of stuff I don’t use it just sits there unused. I did my time with Arch and Gentoo (before Arch existed) for years, but I would rather someone else do the work and I will use it as long as it has sane defaults, for my actual work that doesn’t care.
- Lol, how does booting quicker prevent you from doing work?
  
  It doesn't. All the time you spent reading manuals and tweaking configs to get it to boot quicker does.
  
  If booting quicker means to have less/older software or a bloated system once running...
- And also, I have work to do... I don't like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.
  All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.

Ubuntu, because of their shenanigans with ads in the OS, forcing snap and just generally demonstrating disdain for their userbase.
Manjaro for their office suite debacle, and general instability.
RHEL for their recent attempts to subvert GPL.
Debian because packages are never, ever, ever up to date.
Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
- I actually like Gentoo for the same reason you hate it. But I was a FreeBSD guy for around 10 years before migrating to linux, and I probably some long lasting damage still lingering from that era.
  
  Damn I'm contemplating going to FreeBSD. What made you go the other way? What do you miss from FreeBSD?
  
  Well, I like gentoo for it's top notch security and I see why you'd use it for extremely security sensitive applications, but people that use it as a desktop are nuts.
- Gentoo because any sane person would get sick of compiling.
  But...
  
  But why bother using gentoo then?

Ubuntu because they put ads in the terminal
- Just thinking about this pisses me off all over again.
- "they put ads in the terminal" isn't really accurate.
  Their "ubuntu-advantage-tools" adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing "ubuntu-advantage-tools". It's definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.
  
  You can’t easily uninstall the advantage tools package, they set Ubuntu-minimal meta package to depend on it
- They do? I've never seen any.
  
  https://nitter.net/omgubuntu/status/1574759306544701443 https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/10/ubuntu-pro-terminal-ad The advertised product is literally free under certain conditions so I don't consider this offending.

Ubuntu: broke my LTS 20 by upgrading to LTS 22, pushes snaps and other ridiculous things over the years while offering relatively little value these days

Ubuntu, dont understand me wrong, the distro is nice but, canonical... My point because i dont like Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has been on a downward spiral for the last decade or more, at this point they have spend more years being bad, than being good. Started when they were trying to push their own Wayland alternative, their own Gnome alternative, and now they try to force their proprietary appstore shop on everybody.
Ubuntu was really good when they were just Debian with some much needed updates and polish, but those days are long gone.
And it's not like I wouldn't love to get rid of .deb, it's a terrible packaging format that had it's best days 25 years ago when it was up against raw tarballs and when packages where shipped on CD-ROM. It's in dire need of a fundamental upgrade, but Snap really is not the way forward and the way they underhandedly force it on users is just disgusting. Either build a packaging format of the future and just use it for everything, or don't.
- Search for "how to install Firefox in Arch". Snapstore page which asks you to first install snap from AUR, and then install Firefox through Snap is the second entry, I kid you not!
  And they have same pages for Fedora erc.
  This predatory behavior is to try and get any potential new Linux users to use their crapstore instead of their distro's package is disgusting and malicious.
- Remember when they included a bunch of Amazon integration in Unity?
  
  Yup; that's when I bailed on Ubuntu and went for Mint.
  
  Yuck
- I have mixed feelings about Mir and Unity. Having competition is a good thing. If we only had gnome, Linux would be far less interesting. But at the same time, they could have spent the effort trying to improve Wayland and Gnome, and they would have made a significant difference.
  But snaps being forced upon me, they can fuck right off. I don't need my browser in a semifunctional container, when it worked perfectly before. And i hate that they made mount barely unusable.

Wish Linux Devs help build and polish OS for Pinephone. I really want Linux to go mainstream. Tired of android and Apple.
- The issue is a lack of an app ecosystem with actual AAA apps.
  
  This! I used Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver for 1 1/2 years. The OS itself was anything but perfect but the real problem was definetly the app ecosystem. WayDroid(an android "emulator") optimization is probably the way to go for linux on mobile
  
  Waydroid could fix that gap tho, the same way Wine/Proton does on the desktop

I absolutely hated myself after installing Arch on one of my machines.
Then I discovered EndeavourOS... I still hate myself but at least my laptop works now.
- Holy shit, I installed it on my Lenovo tablet laptop, and everything works out the box... Even the gyroscope! I couldn't believe it. It's the first arch based I've tried and I think I'm hooked.
  To note, I think I tried like 8 other distros before finding endeavor.
  
  The touchscreen working right out of the box is what surprised me.

ZorinOS, had lots of problems with it right out of the box that weren't present on any other mainstream distros I tried on the same hardware.
I didn′t like the look and feel either. For a distro that has a paid version, I would expect a very polished a premium feeling experience, but I didn't get that compared to all the mainstream free distros.
It was ultimately a dissapointing experience all around.
- That's my daily driver. I used the lite version on my old computer and Core on my new desktop. I understand it may have problems on other hardware but for me it looks and feels as good as the promotional screenshots.
  
  Nothing wrong with that, I'm glad it worked well for you! I don't actively hate it, I just was dissapointed with my personal experience.
- Huh, this is the opposite of my experience. I've used a handful of distros over the years (including fedora and ubuntu) but Zorin was the most stable and user friendly by far out of the box. I also think their Gnome theme is pretty sleek.
  
  Glad it works for you :) Fedora has been that for me on most of my hardware.

Red Star OS, a little too much spyware.

This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It's great if you're just getting into Linux, it's absolutely terrible when you know what you're doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it's always so far behind it's not even worth using if you're on AMD. Thankfully they've realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.
- I love Linux Mint: it's perfect for my parents' computer.
- I've never cared for mint because I don't really want my Linux to look like Windows. Which is what mint does.
- Not really an unpopular opinion. My main desktop runs mint, and we're well aware of that being an issue. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make as long as it works. I haven't had enough issues to look for replacement yet. ZorinOS looks interesting, though.
  For servers and work I use other distros.
  
  I love Zorin, probably for more superficial reasons than most. I like a clean UI and Zorin provides that by default, no fiddling. I get that people like customisability and ricing and all that, and if I could design my OS as easily as I could write CSS then I probably would, but I've yet to find something that lets me do that. And even if I do find it, Zorin still looks good and just works, which is most of what I care about.
  
  Yeah there's just not really a big enough reason to move away from Ubuntu unless you're really wanting to avoid snaps (which I completely understand)
- I tried it years ago after years and years of Ubuntu. I installed Mint Cinnamon, it was the shit at the time, #1 distro and all. I wanted to like it but was never able to. After less than 2 years I switched to MX/Xfce and still use it, best distro ever.
  But Mint is really bleh 🙁
  
  How is MX? What do you like over other distros? I see it at the top of the distrowatch list all the time but I've never really found anything special or stand out with the distro.

Ubuntu. I can't stand the way Canonical always decides they know better than everyone else so they reinvent the wheel, only to abandon it two years later. Diversity is good but the history of Ubuntu is littered with garbage that was forced on users and then abandoned.
- I really liked unity 😞

I've had nothing but problems with Ubuntu. There's always some random crash that I don't know what it is but I get a pop up. Sometimes you think you're installing from apt but it secretly is running snap commands.
The OS should never hide things from me. I'm the user and I'm root.
If I wanted an operating system to be sneaky and do things behind my back I'll go to Windows.

I used Ubuntu for years, but the forcing of snap really killed it for me.
Ubuntu used to be synonymous with stability and compatibility. It was always a little bloated and slower than a bunch of others. But that was the price for stability....
It is probably still stable but compatibility has taken a back seat. This is what really annoyed me enough to switch.
I'm on Mint now, it is really nice. Flatpak is much better than Snap, my only real issue is the MASSIVE size of flatpak downloads.

Anything that includes more software than necessary for the system I want. If I need Steam, I'm gonna install it myself.
That's why I don't run one of those many downstream distros that mainly change appearances or improve little things like GUI driver managers etc. For some people that's the reason to use those distros, I might just to look how they achieve the particular feature (e.g. skin, config).
But in general there aren't really distros I don't like, but many which I prefer. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS are all great, especially the more community run distros.

Out of all the distros that I've tried, probably Manjaro. The distro itself is ok, I don't like how kind of bloated the default installation is, but it's not too bad.
However what really pisses me off,among their numerous other controversies, was when they replaced perfectly functional open source apps with proprietary ones...twice. Though the former has since been reversed.

I can find faults in any of them, but mostly hate working with Redhat/CentOS/Fedora. Strongly prefer Debian over Ubuntu, and I strongly prefer Gentoo over Arch. SUSE is an unknown, not sure about that one.
I have a fondness for BSD, if that matters.
- I have fond memories of setting up a FreeBSD desktop while I was in college. It still has a warm place in my heart.
  
  In highschool, I got a desktop from a yard sale (Pentium I) and got an HDD from goodwill, all for $10, just to install FreeBSD. It was awesome. I think I still have the desktop somewhere in storage.
- From memory it has a different layout in /etc, /use, and /opt that kept tripping me up. Simple things seemed harder. I do a fair amount in older versions of Java that caused problems. It's been a while though, so things have likely changed.
- SUSE
  I have a bit of a fear of SLES, purely due to Puredisk using them as their base back in the day (before they were swallowed by Symantec/Veritas/Broadcom/whatever). The amount of time I spent in YaST2 and losing data, again and again, made me genuinely never want to investigate any issues.
  
  I must have played with SUSE at some point, these words bring back horrors I'd long forgotten.

I am growing to dislike Ubuntu.
Simply because its so old, that anytime I try to find a solution to a problem, I'm wading through 15 years of shit, 99% of which isnt relevant anymore due to age/depreciation.
- What makes this weirder is that while all older distros have this problem, none of them come anywhere close to being as bad. This is probably partly because of Ubuntu's start as a noob-friendlier distro, but I don't think that completely explains it.
  
  Being noob friendly is why I chose it.
  I'm not a programmer or a sysadmin, My linux experience is entirely contained to the past 5-6ish years I've used it to avoid using Windows 10.
  Every single problem I've had, no matter how ultimately minor it was, has been a enormous fuckin ordeal to figure out and solve, in large part due to the 15+ years of ancient, non-relevant knowledge.
  So I'm probably gonna end up switching distros soon, since i'm tired of troubleshooting and still have weird, minor shit happening.. Just frustrated a bout doing it because I finally got steamtinkerlauncher working properly, which was an ordeal in and of itself.
  And its gotten to the point I even hate talking about the issues I have, cause someone inevitable swoops in and be like "Well, just run (command) -help" to figure out what to do, and I'm all like.. okay, fucking great. That doesnt help because I dont know whats fucking wrong. Cant use -help if I dont know what command i need to fix this weird problem that no internet searches are showing me any kind of solution or even a hint for.
  edit Sorry, apparently my annoyance boiled over into a rant.
- I agree, I used Ubuntu for years, then switched to Mint/Cinnamon for a few years but finally after 1 or 2 years hated it. I'm on MX since 2016 or something and still love it.

Manjaro feels like a bit of a mess to me and always ends up with problems.
Ubuntu releases too many buggy updates and dumps their idiosyncratic tastes in software on everyone whether people like it or not.

Redhat. Wouldn't touch it at this point. All of my servers are Debian.

Manjaro. Team is really sketch.

Ubuntu. It's violating many rules of freedom, and just isn't good. Their DE spins aren't good, snaps aren't good
- The first time I tried ubuntu I did not install it because it felt like half of the screen space was used up by the sidebar, top bar and window decoration so yeah.
  That little detail put me off of installing linux for like a year or so because I did not knowthat you can easily change stuff like that
- I get why they do that, but I don't like the [letter]ubuntus because it gives users the wrong idea of what entails a distro. It leads to them confusing distros with DEs. To me, distos are more about the community and release cycle with some major technical differences like package managers. Yes, having different default settings and programs play a role in this as well, so you could be justified in saying MX Linux isn't the same as Debian Stable, but I don't think the [letter]ubuntus deviate that much from just installing the corresponding DE on Ubuntu.
- Hard disagree. Their GNOME implementation is great, the distro is stable and snaps are fine. It's just not quite as libre as some people want.
  
  If only snap isn't forced, it will be great for ubuntu...

For me, it's Ubuntu as well. Canonical continuously integrates stuff to make the whole distribution more complex and hard to maintain. Without going into much detail, Ubuntu always tries to do things where there is a good standardized way different. Why the heck do we need yet another containerized GUI application environment (I'm looking at you, Snap!); Why do you develop lxd, when there is systemd-nspawn, docker and podman?!
- Not a fan of lxd, but to be fair, not a fan of systemd'isms either.

Ubuntu desktop version, it's slow and buggy and the devs push ads and snaps and other crap.
- I never saw an ad in Ubuntu.
  
  Really? It's even in the apt update command when you update your system.
  Stuff like this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1434512/how-to-get-rid-of-ubuntu-pro-advertisement-when-updating-apt

Hannah Montana for being so bloated
- Hater. Hannah Montana Linux is a masterpiece
- I cannot tolerate Hannah Montana Linux slander

No longer using Ubuntu at all because they force snaps down your throat. While I do like snaps on the server environment, (I think a lot of the haters out there don't see how nice they are on servers), I prefer to use Debian and then to just install snapd on my terms.

Fucking Arch and Arch people.
I don’t want to set up my whole shit manually from terminal, I want something that works. Go for help on the forums and they’re the most head up the ass unhelpful condescending clowns since Mac users. No, as it turns out, when my driver didn’t work and I asked for help, I do not know how to recompile my armpit hair from source. Bad suggestion.
EndeavourOS is what Arch should be.
- Once upon a time I was into RC helicopters. This combined with working offshore as a bachelor and living in a tiny apartment with a jurassic era (but reliable) car meant that I had a pretty decent income and not a whole lot on which to spend it. So once in a while I visited my local RC store just to browse and chat with the people there and if I stumbled across something interesting I might buy it.
  I was not that much into the building part of the helicopters, but I saw it as a means to an end. Something I had to do to be able to fly it. The flying part was the end.
  One day I was visiting the store, this clerk I knew showed me this kit he had. Brand new, pre-assembled, perfect craftmanship had gone into putting the kit together. Governor controlling the engine, ability to negate the pitch, extra strong servo for the cyclic controls. She was a beauty, and if it wasn't for the fact that I was, at that point,saving up my money for something unrelated, I would've bought it.
  "You guys pre-assemble kits now?" I asked out of curiosity. "Oh no, we don't have the time for that" the clerk replied. "But this one customer" he began "he buys new kits, builds them, and sells them back to us at a 10% loss"
  My brain short circuited. Why?? The flying part was the reward. Why would you not fly it? Well, in retrospect I understand it. The guy liked building complex machines. He had no interest in flying the kits. He loved the building process and the craftmanship that went into it, and once he had assembled it as perfectly as could ever be done, he was finished with the kit, and on the lookout for something new. He had the time to do what he loved, so why not. Rumor has it that he could spend an entire day with a tachometer and an IR thermometer just to get the fuel mixture perfect, whereas I used to do that in 10 minutes and call it "good enough".
  I never met the guy. But he sounds like an interesting character. If he ran Linux he'd be running arch. Not from the bragging rights, not for its usability, not for (insert common reason here). But simply because he loved the craftmanship that went into setting it up.
  
  I hate Arch's installation process but love AUR, and having always up-to-date packages. The new archinstall script that comes with it is actually really straight forward. Also, I install a complete, bloated gnome desktop environment, set up everything once and the resulting OS is really user friendly.
- This is such a weird take for me, and it's popular enough of a take that it makes it weirder.
  Arch is, by default, a barebones distro. The whole point is you start from nothing with very few defaults and learn how to get everything up and running yourself.
  Complaining that the way arch works sucks cos you don't want to do that is bizarre.
  Imagine complaining that Linux From Scratch sucks cos you have to do it from scratch.
  Endeavor OS exists, it's what Endeavor OS should be. You can just use it, no one will complain. The Arch folk might be less inclined to help with it, but that's why there are Endeavor OS folks to talk to.
- You realize EndeavorOS is 99% arch, right? You don't hate arch, you hate the idea of manual setup.
  Also, glad you use EndeavorOS! I use it too and it's the only distro I've daily driven for years now.
- There's an installer ISO called Calam Arch Installer that uses the calamares installer (I think this is what all the Arch based GUI installer distros use - Garuda, Manjaro, etc). This one installs vanilla Arch though.
  If you want to run straight Arch but don't want to deal with Arch's painful install process, this one is for you. I've used it on all of my Arch systems and it has been reliable.
- endevour is the manjaro of arch-based distros

Well look at that, no one seems to mention opensuse/Tumbleweed.
Great sign 👍🏻
Fedora also unscathed.
Two of my favorites, if not my absolute favorites.
- There are only two distros in the world. Those that people hate and those that no one uses

This thread has basically devolved into "Ubuntu hate circlejerk party", as expected. I guess I just hate the distro I've spent the majority of my time on Linux using getting constantly dunked on and am a bit sad watching its inevitable death by snap. (Insert Thanos meme here)
- I've been using Ubuntu professionally and as a daily driver for more than a decade now. I've tried the other major ones but Ubuntu is just no fuss. I can stand up a fresh system in 20 minutes and there is an enormous support base. I just don't have time to be a Linux hipster these days.
  The only thing I can see which might win me over one day is Nix.
  
  Same here. Ubuntu user for a loong time. Tried others but Ubuntu is just easy for me.
- I see more manjaro than ubuntu.
  Ubuntu had so many years as the "default" that people have some old perfect version of ubuntu that they liked better. Some early version from the gnome2 days, or else people who loved unity.
  For my part, the last time I tried it, there were snap and apt versions of so many apps, that when you had an issue it was hard to troubleshoot because there would be two sets of solves. That was enough to get me to bail. I wonder if that's still an issue.
  
  Probably to some degree... But on any other distro, the same is almost certainly true today too. Only it's between... rpm/aur/deb/etc and Flatpaks instead of snap.

Ubuntu: Too many ways to install apps. Arch: I installed everything from aur. I should've used flatpaks.
- If I run apt install firefox, I expect a deb, not a snap
- I much prefer the AUR and native system packages to flatpak. It's the big advantage Arch has over other distros, just how much software is natively available due to the AUR. There are a few cases where flatpak works better but generally I prefer all my apps to share one set of up to date dependencies.
  
  Sure but flatpacks are sandboxed which is much more valuable imo. Aur is easy, i celebrated that you can just yay and install anything.

Ubuntu brings a ton of awkward and shit memories from the course we had on it in secondary school.
Admittedly, Linux Mint is the only distro I have used in a personal capacity.
- Well mint is a Ubuntu distro

Just the Oracle Red Hat clone, because, well, Oracle. Also those distros that disappear spontaneously because they were mainly maintained by one person only.
- This. Leave it to Oracle to fork a perfectly core enterprise distro and make it suck.

A question that begs for a hot take. I love it! Manjaro has always made zero sense to me. The power of Arch is in its rolling release cycle and your ability to customize it from the ground up. Both of which you lose when you downloads someone mix of Arch. It always seemed like a flavor for people who want to run Arch but just don't have the ability to read the documentation to actually run it.

Anything other than Debian or RedHat/CentOS/Fedora. Why? Every other distro bring nothing to the table. For a desktop Debian+flatpak will get you the latest apps and for servers Debian will be stable as a Linux can be. RedHat has its particular use cases.
- You can't install a proxy daemon as a flatpak, but you can install it through Nix

Arch
(I use Arch btw)

I don't like Canonical and Red Hat, so I wouldn't use their distros out of principle. On top of that, I don't like Snaps, and Ubuntu's customizations done to GNOME.
From Fedora, I don't like Calamares. The rest is great.
Manjaro doesn't play nice with either upstream nor downstream and has GTK apps that don't follow GNOME's design guidelines, this last point also applies to Endeavor OS.
Vanilla OS is unusable for me, AB Root is hard, and I can't follow any online guides, tutorials or scripts. But their UX/UI is drool worthy. Blend OS has Waydroid out of the box but it's immutability is hard for me.
Debian is awesome but I don't like it for my work / gaming rig. Old kernel and packages. Best ever for servers.
All Ubuntu derivatives are old for me, so no. But I liked Zorin the best.
Deepin, I'm afraid of Chinese gov backdoors. Most probably paranoia.
I settled on Crystal Linux (arch based), has the nicest UI but they don't provide a GUI for package management, and they have handled their repos irresponsibly. It's more of a hobby distro, but a beautiful one.

I don't particularly like Arch.
I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).
It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.
Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.
I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)
I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.
Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.
Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.
- Noooo. You find -Syyu less intuitive than "upgrade"? How dare you.
  I agree with all yoyr points. Arch has its place but is not for me.
  
  You aren't even supposed to double the y unless you just installed the system or you feel like it's not picking up on updates.
- Absolutely understandable, personally I prefer the AUR since I don't ever need to download and compile the source code anymore, since everything I need got an AUR package.
  I also had bad experiences with apt, mostly that their release are too slow/I get stuck on an old release (my raspberry pi's python version is still 3.7, which caused problems since I was using a python 3.8 library). That's probably on me for not knowing how to upgrade my release, but I switched to Arch before learning how to fix this
  For the pacman flags, I simply use yay, the AUR wrapper instead, yay do a full system upgrade, and yay python will show me a list of packages that have similar names to install. Still not as clear as apt, but at least there's no weird flag letters to remember for most use cases
  
  Ah, yes... Good ol' library mismatches. Definitely not a point in Debian's favor.
  Well, at least for Stable. In Sid, different ^(Toy) story.
- I think the users are off-putting. Can get very blunt in the forums.
- What determines the importance of a distribution?

For me it's Ubuntu. Whenever I tried it it was buggy and crashing. It kinda feels like Windows of GNU+Linux.
About Manjaro, I like it. I kinda feel sad seeing Manjaro get so much hate. The only thing I disliked was the accidental DDoS of AUR. But so far it's been working relatively well for me. I use Manjaro with Plasma.
And my favorite is Linux Mint. It just works, and it does so reliably. Also the Linux Mint community is really nice.
As such, I donated to Manjaro, Arch, and Linux Mint. Not much, but at least something.

Of all the main stream distros, I never liked Arch. I've been a big fan of and have used Debian and Fedora for years for different uses, I love all the work openSuse does for their GUI configuration, and I respect Slackware and Gentoo for what they are, though I've never use them myself.
Arch always gave me the impression that its fiddly, fragile, and highly opinionated. I think the AUR is a bandaid; its explicitly not supported, yet everyone says its the best reason to use Arch. If I want packages built from source, it just seems that Gentoo does it native to the whole OS and package manager. Nix does too. If I wanted closed-source binaries, flatpak seems like the way the ecosystem is moving and is pretty seemless for my uses. Keeping them with static libraries independent of the OS makes sense to me for something like Spotify, especially since disk space concerns are irrelevant to me.
Opinions on and around Arch are everywhere, both good and bad. I just have never found a situation where I see any benefit to using Arch over Debian for its stability, Alpine for its size, Gentoo for its source building support, or Nix for its declarative approach. So I have grown to loathe its atmosphere.
- Interesting that you feel Arch is opinionated. After using several distros I finally settled on Arch because I felt it was not opinionated compared to e.g. Ubuntu. I have to choose and install every part of the system myself, and I like how that gives me a clean system. I like to use the Awesome window manager, and with other distros I would always end up with a different desktop installed next to Awesome. Can you say how you feel Arch is opinionated?
  
  I feel it is highly opinionated because they only officially support a fairly small amount of packages. They're not particularly more up-to-date than say openSuse Tumbleweed. A Debian netinstall is equally a barebones system I can install exactly what I am looking for, and don't need to fiddle with third party repo's like the AUR. As far as I know, almost every distro will let you do a barebones headless install, then build up your system yourself. Arch is certainly less opinionated than Ubuntu, but that's not a big accomplishment these days.
  If I were to desire a highly specific environment where I wanted to exactly manage each program's dependency chain myself, Gentoo seems like a much better tool for the job. For example, Arch officially requires systemD, Gentoo does not. As far as I know Gentoo makes no assumptions on how your system is setup, from preboot to Wayland session.
  I could just be out of date, as I use NixOS as my workstation and server OS, using Debian for some older servers I haven't migrated yet. I get the impression from Arch, the few times I have used it, is that its niche is appealing to a particular kind of user, rather than being a good solution to a particular kind of problem. That's not bad, its huge reason why its popular. Other distros do the same thing as Arch, sometimes better sometimes worse, but Arch is selling an aesthetic, rather than a tool.
- I am very conflicted about Arch. I similarly disliked it for actual use, because it's so unstable. On the other hand, the arch docs are a goldmine.
  I think it just depends on what you want to do with your system. Do you like to tinker? Arch (and similar distros) are great. Do you just want things to work mostly out of the box? Use an Ubuntu flavor or an Ubuntu derivative.

I thought Linux was about choice
http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/
[Edit] Sorry I've just picked up Sync and the UI has apparently confused me. I was trying to respond to this comment.
https://lemmy.world/comment/2287892
But I guess I messed up.
- http
  
  It's a static site with a single page, HTTPS does nothing because the domain name is still exposed.
- Of course, you can have that opinion. After all. linux is about having a choice.

Ubuntu. Snaps are a buggy mess. I know you can remove them but I like sane defaults. Snap drives me insane. Mint, PopOS, Debian are better choices for a stable distro.
edit: I also don't like Fedora and CentOS. The installers tend to be very buggy for me.
- When I learned that snap has a hardcoded requirement for a snap directory polluting your home directory, and that the devs answer is basically to shrug their shoulders, that was enough to turn me into an anti-snap zealot.

CentOS. We were stuck on an old version at work. The OS is already designed to use old packages for security/stability, so imagine how outdated they are on an old version. It was a nightmare getting new software running on it. That coupled with the other news surrounding CentOS and RHEL, I'm not touching those anymore w a 10 foot pole. I wish it just crumbles and Debian takes over. I have had amazing success with like 20 years on Debian and it just gets better and better.
- Not sure you can really blame an OS that is out of support and that you should have upgraded to the new version years prior. I used CentOS in an enterprise environment for close to 10 years and really had no problems, except when we tried to shoehorn new software onto old versions it had no business being on instead of just upgrading.
  I remember the upgrade from CentOS 6 to 7. It changed a bunch of stuff including making systemd the default init system. I'm assuming your company just wanted to avoid doing that work? But at the same time most other distros were switching to systemd so you would have had to do that work regardless.

OpenSUSE, mostly because they differ too much from other distros, often even without any (obvious) advantages.
For example a lot of file paths (config files and such) are different, and when being used to other distros (or just following a guide from the internet) it takes longer to find it (I know there is Yast but I'm not a huge fan of that tool either)
Also, Manjaro
- My only real gripe is their default sudoers config.

- Debian is my hometown because back in, I guess 2014?, I had a computer that just sucked. It was like 1GB RAM, I think a single core CPU. Debian was like the only distro that actually installed. Ubuntu, Mint, etc. didn't even finish the installation
- A minimal and stable distro, kinda expected

Arch and any arch based distro. It's overused, deb is better and the absolute chads will always be distros like NixOS or Guix System. There is no use for an unstable, beginner-unfriendly, distro where you constantly encounter dependency hell.
Of course I'm just being edgy, every Linux Distro is good for the sole fact of it not being Windows.

Easily manjaro, so many headaches