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.
Yeah I didn’t offer much input on personal devices because I did use Ubuntu for awhile as a personal environment and it’s fine, but could use work. I think personally I like Debian better, but if I want a clean GNOME experience Fedora is probably the move.
Debian is a great desktop distro if you get your software using Flatpak, as anyone should be doing in every distro.
Whats wrong with apt?
Nothing at all, the main issue is that with graphical applications developers have an hard time to package things for all the useless distros out there and some other distros like Debian on stable will only haver older versions of software. Flatpak solves both of this issues.
Currently using Bookworm and KDE as my desktop right now. Works really well! If I need more up to date software I use Distrobox and run whatever distro’s version of software I want. I have both Debian Sid and Arch Firefox versions installed on my machine right now just to see if it worked and it’s flawless. I mostly just run apps from SID container and it exposed the app to my desktop wonderfully. Really the only way I will fly these days.
Don’t forget that Ubuntu was the first distro to both sell user data to Amazon, and show you ads in the terminal. But it seems like everyone forgets about it as soon as canonical goes “whoops, our bad, we didn’t think you’d mind, it’s opt in/out now”.
On top of that I’ve seen allegations that they’re illegally collecting data from Azure Ubuntu users to send them spam about Ubuntu enterprise.
I don’t have many issues on Ubuntu like you imply. It’s the reason why I stick with it despite snaps.
Also, support is only provided for 18.04LTS.
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 / snaps
I’m about to piss off a lot of people.
It’s Arch and Arch-derivatives. And I’m saying it as an Arch user, btw, and I actually love it.
Between the Big Three (Fedora, Debian, Arch), it is the least likely to have an official package for somewhat niche applications. If something is not available as a flatpak or appimage, I have to compile it from source or an AUR PKGBUILD, but we all know the dangers of doing that. Some software will just assume that it’s running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.
That being said, it would take a lot to make me switch to a stable point-release distribution. Arch’s advantages more than make up for the sub-par software support.
(actually, I lied. Fuck Canonical and *Ubuntu. And IBM.)
Some software will just assume that it’s running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.
Name to blame, please.
Twingate Connector. The installer script only works if the OS uses either the APT or the DNF package manager, otherwise it exits. Fortunately it has many deployment methods, including Docker. I ended up using the systemd unit in a Debian container inside Proxmox.
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Just use Distrobox my friend.
I use it on Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) and I install Arch- and AUR-software all the time.
In that way I can access everything I want and still enjoy the comfort of my unbreakable base.
Another plus is that if I should break my Arch container, I can just remove and reinstall it without affecting my host. The performance is about the same as with Flatpaks, so, negabile.If you like Arch, then just use Ubuntu/ Debian/ Fedora/ whatever as container image and never stress yourself anymore with PKGBUILD
This is a balanced take in my opinion. Also an Arch user. Distrobox has helped remedy things somewhat.
Ubuntu because they’ve the ability to great things and end up just delivering a buggy and mangled version of Debian with proprietary crap, spyware, snaps wtv. After all we’re talking about the distro that had ISOs on their download page with a broken installer multiple times.
I don’t hate them, but this hits hard. They are THE most influential distro for people outside of the community. They have by far the biggest user base and community, but instead of using this to collaborate with other distributions and specially with the freedesktop folks for the improvement of the commons, they have this culture of downstream work that rarely get the effort needed to be upstreamed. It’s usually “it’s good enough for us, so that’s where we’ll leave it”, and they end up with these weird solutions that only they use.
It’s usually “it’s good enough for us, so that’s where we’ll leave it”, and they end up with these weird solutions that only they use.
Exactly. And to make things even worse then you’ve people upstream (Debian) or sidestream (other distros) that eventually decide to implement whatever they did but properly and then they go there, pick it and replace their original implementation.
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…
Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.
Had to scroll way too far for this.
Hey, they at least prioritise contributing upstream. Canonical is much worse.
No hate for canonical or suse, just redhat?
Suse would get more hate if they stopped working with opensuse. Canonical provides their stuff publicly, except for long term support after five years, but that decision does get hate.
Suse would get more hate if they stopped working with opensuse.
And that doesn’t extend to Fedora and free RHEL licences? Or all of the FOSS projects redhat is funding and contributing to? No demerits for Suse helping MS pressure the entire Linux community for over a decade?
Canonical provides their stuff publicly, except for long term support after five years, but that decision does get hate.
You can still get the redhat source code with the free licence, GPL ensures that. You just can’t act like Oracle, reskin RHEL, and sell enterprise support for it.
Meanwhile there are businesses that literally don’t release any of their improvements to FOSS software because it’s running on their servers and so they don’t have to. Now that really goes against the core ideology of GPL 2 which is: “I give you my code, you give me your changes”.
Publicly traded companies almost always make shitty capitalist decisions. Now, remember that canonical sold user data to Amazon, played ads in the terminal, and that their IPO is still in the works.
A limited number of free licenses. Fedora is far upstream, the SUSE/openSUSE relationship is different. Plenty of people were mad over Novell and Microsoft, that is ancient history today and suse has gone through at least two different owners since then.
People can disagree with Red Hat and also disagree with those businesses. Not an either/or. People have hated on Canonical forever. Some people hate any corporate distro. Red Hat is just the latest to make shitty decisions.
My least favourites are probably ubuntu and manjaro, not so much because of the distros themselves but the organizations behind them being a bit dodge.
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
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.
It’s Pichai’s handiwork from what I understand. He was in charge of it before becoming CEO according to Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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.
fair enough.
Ubuntu: It’s not a lack of features that pushed me away; it’s more about the way things are going. I am not a fan of snap packages. I have run into odd issues trying to use them. I used Ubuntu server for my Dell Poweredge and I shut it down until I can find a suitable replacement. I struggled with it respecting my DNS settings which in turn killed my reverse proxy setup.
Manjaro: While I love Arch and some of its derivatives, I can’t stand by Manjaro. I thought it would have been a good OS to use since I was familiar with Arch, but it had enough dependency issues where updates broke them. Funny enough, never have I had a dependency issue with just plain old Arch.
I use Arch btw. But besides the meme on it, I legitimately eo use arch and couldn’t be happier.
Same. Both started out good but kept becoming more and more… not good. If nothing else Manjaro taught me how to chroot from a live distro to fix catastrophic failures. Ubuntu really ruined my week when they decided to try becoming a smart phone with the very touch centric looking UI at the time when I didn’t have time to revert or change distros, which is what finally pushed me to run servers headless and use ssh. Last I tried none of the phone like de’s are particularly intuitive as touch interfaces either.
I use KDE on Arch on my Lenovo Yoga 7i, and I don’t particularly use the touchscreen as much as I would have thought. Though for Waydroid it does work fairly nicely.
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!
Just to share my experience, I used the archinstall script so I have btrfs snapshots and didnt have to put together everything myself. I almost update every day because it gives me a dopamine hit and nothing has broken in the last year and a half since I switched off Windows. I’ve had fewer issues than when I tried to Fedora with the Nvidia card I already owned. It could definitely be a case of ‘works on my machine’ but I think reports of Arch breakages are overblown.
I had to hold off on updating my Debian 12 server due to a severe bug just a month or two ago.
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.
Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they’ve had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don’t agree that it’s “cheating” to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what’s essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.
I always confuse it with Sugar
I very much don’t care for ElementaryOS, but I really don’t think it’s fair to paint it as “Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS”. It’s not just GNOME with some extensions. They made a whole desktop environment and suite of applications for their distro. That’s a ton of work. I think any distro that does that deserves some amount of respect.
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.
