Okay why is your distro the best?

I use Arch, btw, but I don't consider it the best (yes I do.) I could easily transition to Fedora, for example (I would never do that,) and be completely happy (I would rather continually hit my head with the metal stapler gun on my desk.)

Does what I want and gets out of my way.

Bazzite just works, it runs every game I have with zero fuss, it's easy to run Windows programs / emulators / local LLMs, AND it's basically unbreakable.

I can't claim it's the best, but it's the best for me right now.
- On a gaming laptop I'm using Aurora because KDE Plasma btw (:
I haven't bothered to actually search or troubleshoot yet, but since I'm here - have you had any problems with power management failing to automatically turn screens off when idle?
I don't get consistent behavior there it seems (AKA it leaves them on when it shouldn't), but that's I think the only significant oddity I've found in the ~7 months or so I've been running Bazzite. And like I said I've done basically nothing yet to try to solve it, just wondering if you've seen it. I have the issue on a desktop and a laptop, using entirely different monitors (not even same brand) FWIW.
- I haven't had any problems like that, but I generally don't leave my screen on. So perhaps I would have this issue, but just never notice it because of how I use the device.
  I'm very conscious of energy use, I almost always manually set my laptop to sleep if I'm leaving it idle for a while.

Debian. It works so well that I never even looked at different distros during the last 20 years or so...

To each its own in accordance to their needs. Debian is great unless you want to add proprietary stuff like GPUs. That's the whole reason so many distros (e.g. Ubuntu) raised to fame and gained popularity while being based on Debian... That, and the fact that until recently Debian installation guide was not updated and called to download an ISO to be burned in 1-2 CDs... that was so f*ing unclear. Of course you can use a pendrive, but if the guide talks about CDs... that's just confusing to newbies. None pointed that out, but to me is like being even less friendly than Arch :P Just my opinion. That said, I have been using Debian based distros for most of my time, even today (desktop PC with MX 'ahs'.)
- Debian's documentation can be pretty awful. The Nvidia Driver install guide in particular could use a revamp.

It isn't, it is the least bad

Which technically makes it the best, doesn't it?
- No because best implies it's good. Least bad doesn't transmit the same message as best.

Mint is Ubuntu minus everything that makes Ubuntu annoying. That's why I like it.

I considered to go back to Debian but... eh, I'm too old and impatient for that. Nowadays I mostly want things that work out of the box.

Do things not work out of the box on debian?
- From what I remember, there was always some rough corner. Such as the wi-fi, or the graphics card. Sure, Stable was rock solid, but you always needed something from Testing; and Testing in general was overall less stable than Ubuntu or Mint.
  This was years ago, so it might be inaccurate as of 2025.

Hannah Montana Linux

No further arguments needed.

I don't know that it is objectively the best - but its the best fit for me right now (LMDE).

NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.

maniacally laughs while trying to avoid eye contact with 19k lines of nix config
- Out of all the ways that I have tried in the past, to reproduce not just the initial state, but also the ongoing changes of a disto (ansible, saltstack, chef, bunch of Shell scripts) — nix is by far the shortest. With all of these technologies I would never have dreamed to do this for a single Maschine. But now it’s not only possible, but actually gasp enjoyable!
  Mind you, if that is not the problem you want to solve, maybe install just the nix package manager in addition to your distribution, and learn to enjoy it without having to run your whole distribution this way.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best

I've been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.

It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband's laptop.

It's allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I've switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).

I'm convinced it isn't.

Mine's the best, because it fits with what I want. Might not be your best, but it's mine.

This week alone I've used Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora. Its Arch. By a short way, and mostly thanks to the wiki. Tbh they are all converging, and I go with KDE variants when I use a GUI and no distro does too much to customise it

Because it was my first distro that got me away from Windows. And yes, it's Mint.

It's extremely stable, and countless other distros are derived from this.

It works, has the packages I need and they are up-to-date

Void made Linux fun again for me. It gets so much right with the rolling release model.

Nobara: It works well most of the time and has pretty much everything needed for gaming preinstalled. I had a bad update once that prevented booting past the command line though. Now that I'm more experienced I'd probably use a more mainline distro and install the gaming stuff myself.

It's decent, but screw using someone's personal distro. Glorious literally dropped every scrap of his default de config, and switched to another. No transition, no migration, just deleted everything and went on with his day.

openSUSE Slowroll and Secureblue are my favorites ATM. Slowroll for gaming, Secureblue for mobile device. Both are hardened for security because that matters to me.

How about Qubes? if you have the specs, you get sandboxes (VMs) and all distros are available into 1. Heck, you can even have windows VMs...

And if you don't have the specs, just use any linux and install distrobox (docker) !

An alternative to distrobox is toolbx

I use NixOS, btw (don't you see that glorious gif?). It's the only distro that is actually different compared to other distros. It's not just another package manager, another ubuntu skin, or a different desktop environment. If you learn how to configure it, you can easily redo breaking changes or install an exact copy of your system on a different device. You can configure all you want and you will never ever have to worry.

Also has better flex than Arch users.

It's super cool to be able to copy a single or maybe two configuration files from one box to another, sync thing your home folder and have an exact copy.
It's super cool to temporarily install things with nix-shell. I have little environments set up where I write python or rust or edit videos and if I'm not in that environment none of those commands even exist.
Updating in vanilla is pretty straightforward. Update your base channel, rebuild. But if you install say home manager as a flake that doesn't update the same way. And then if you do it as an environmental install it doesn't update the same way. And then it's totally possible to do an update get a new version of your web browser, But your auto starts or your PWA's point to the old version of the web browser. My personal favorite is when I update signal. It upgrades the database. Field binary is no longer capable of running but is still the default for some reason. I have to look up the command expunge it from the store, simply finding it in the store isn't trivial.
Most distros have gotten easy to the point of being boring. We don't suffer that fate in Nix.

BunsenLabs Boron - Debian 12 with Openbox Window Mgr - no desktop, no icons. The machine is not burdened by having to run a heavy desktop environment. All navigation and execution is done with mouse (right click), keybindings or command line. Linux without the Windows artifacts. On my HP i7, boots to login in 19 seconds.

Because I can hit "next" a couple of time and have a working install

Because it lets me use a list of packages instead of needing to remember what to install, has every package I need and let's me use them without installing them, and has a good rollback system to go along with cutting edge packages.

It works for me.

Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement

CachyOS, cause its Minimal and "Fast"(maybe) ik i can try out normal Arch but I dont wanna rebuild my system everytime I mess something up + Arch based distro its better then Arch Install(in my opinion)

My distro is the best because I don't have the patience to try them all to see which is actually the best for me. Until my distro decides to do some silly decision that makes me think I should try another, I will stick to it.