What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?

Every couple of years I think to myself "You know, I can't actually remember why I don't like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I've got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they've had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?"

And then I download Ubuntu.

And then I remember.

Ubuntu sometimes gives me Windows vibes.
- Try Ubuntu Mate, it's actually ok. I'm alot not the biggest fan of snaps. I try and get .debs or apt get, where I can. App Images seem a little odd to me, but Flatpack seems alright.
Recommending ubuntu to newbies is the product of either incompetence or malice when Mint, zorin and nobara exist
- I wouldn't recommend Nobara, maybe in a few cases but otherwise it's not the best to enter into Linux with.
Can you expand on that? I've never used Linux as a daily driver, interacting with Ubuntu systems via SSH.
- i don't like how Ubuntu feels (gui) so idk about cli issues
  
  it's not a problem with Gnome btw, it's just the colours are yuck vomit and snap 🗿

Gentoo. No. Compiling all of the things was not for me.

Use flags in emerge was my breaking point

I daily drive Fedora, but I’ve used Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, and more. Once you get used to how Linux works, distro doesn’t really matter that much aside from edge case distros that operate totally differently like Nix. I chose Fedora because I like the dnf package manager.

The only distro I don’t like is Ubuntu. I had to setup a Linux VM at work so I figured Ubuntu would be a good choice for that. Firefox is painfully slow to open because of Snap, so I uninstall it and run “apt install firefox” which Ubuntu overrides and installs the Snap again.

Fuck. That. Deleted the VM and installed Debian instead.

Yeah, over the years they've all become largely the same except for package management and the locations of some config files and system binaries (/bin,/sbin,/usr/local/sbin, etc..). Some attempt to be a one size fits all model and contain everything that you'd want, while others give you the bare minimum.

Most of them.

Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it's surprisingly bad at that.
Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.
Opensuse world - I've only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn't really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn't click and I've left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.
Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I've never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.

I've got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel ~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)

never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with

I highly enjoy using EndeavourOS. But then again, I wouldn't classify it as a spinoff, it's pretty much vanilla Arch, but purple.

Now Manjaro on the other hand... Tried it and understood why so many people don't like it within the first week.
- Mind to elaborate a little bit more about the Manjaro problem? I am driving it since a couple of years without any issue but I keep hearing this… now I am afraid :)
- Now Manjaro on the other hand... Tried it and understood why so many people don't like it within the first week.
  
  I see this a lot and nobody really ever explains, properly, why.
  
  I have used Linux off and on for many years (mainly server OS such as RHEL and CentOS). I have now migrated from Windows desktop to Manjaro KDE. Using it for a year. Had one issue (wouldn't boot after a kernel update), which I sorted quickly. Other than that it's been rock solid.
  
  But this isn't a 'I have a great experience so you're all just haters' post.
  
  I know the stuff about it being a week or behind Arch. I remember something about the maintainers (can't remember specifics) but they seem to be minor niggles that don't affect most people.
  
  Genuine question.
  
  Why do you dislike Manjaro? I also know it's a common theme to dislike it, so any other insight there?
- I've used EndeavourOS but thought it was fugly enough not to use it hah
- A few years ago I wanted to get away from Ubuntu on my desktop PC so I sat down and considered about a dozen of the most recommended Linux distros install images.
  
  My requirements were:
  
  Image should be live so I could test it without installing.
  
  Should work out of the box with everything I could think to throw at it: wifi, Bluetooth devices including controllers, network shares, play music/video out of the box, printing, audio devices on USB etc.
  
  Easy to install and maintain. No need for brain-dead install or zero maintenance, I'm a seasoned Linux user and anyway I don't want to be absurd, but I also don't want to spend my spare time debugging or maintaining the desktop system. I have a server for that.
  
  Recent packages and frequent updates, but stable.
  
  Usable for everyday use, work (mostly Citrix and other forms of remote desktop) and of course gaming.
  
  Rolling release.
  
  Guess which distro ticked absolutely every single box.
I disbelive the debian answer here. Sounds like a case of frankendebian https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

Been usig Debian for home and work and on hundreds of servers for 2 decades and it have been near flawless. Any issues i have had have always been my own fault.
- While debian is the least offensive, I did explicitly say world. Add your buntus, mints, whathaveyou into the mix and shit hits the fan very quickly. Yes, real world runs that bollocks in prod. No, I do not agree with it.
Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.

Ah yes, when Microsoft looked for a contractor to develop FOSS implementations of some Windows technologies to meet demands by the EU and Mark Shullteworth made a big fuss of it until making deals with Microsoft himself...
- What about that time Suse supported Microsoft's claim that Linux infringes on their patents? Ms got enough grounds to sue everyone even marginally related to Linux for over a decade, Suse got a contract to sell licences that prevent Ms from suing companies for using Linux.
- No, it was the "don't sue us and we'll testify in your favour while you're suing our competition".
I need to try Gentoo again. The installer used to be absolute garbage and required a ton of work to get the a usable system if you deviated too far from a normal computer setup.
- There is no installer as such. You copy an archive, extract it and rebuild @world. Anything beyond that is up to you. I'm sticking to openrc - haven't had any issues since libxcrypt news item. Can't even recall what it was.
Gentoo all the way since 20 years, on all kind of devices, going strong and never looked back.

Ubuntu, I hate you. A messy complex windows-esque caricature in the Linux world, where "somebody else" knows better than me and shoves it down my gully.

So there you go, my best and worst distros choice.
- I've only got a few years on Gentoo - how has your journey been? You must've started with stage 1!

All of them, so I'm still on Windows

Basic, but Ubuntu. It's got snaps which are slow and generally suck, plus Canonical

As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.

I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don't wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.

I'm sure you know it by now, but Mint is the "I Can't Believe It's Not Windows!" distro very much on purpose, haha.
- As a person who doesn't want to fiddle with my OS or the terminal, yeah, I love me some Mint.
- It's good for those that want it, but some would rather just having a completely new user experience.
Swapping out KDE/Plasma for Gnome or anything else is dead simple most of the time. The DE isn't locked to the distro, you can have multiple DEs and windowing systems (X and Wayland) installed at once. You can select them from your login manager.
- I wish I knew about this sooner.

Manjaro - used to love it. Now the only distro I actively advise against

Garuda - just too much ( I prefer Arch / EndeavourOS )

Elementary - wanted to love it - just too limited

Gentoo - realized I just don’t want to build everything

RHEL Workstation - everything too old

Bhodi - honestly do not remember - long ago

Ubuntu - ok, let’s expand…

These days, I dislike Snaps. Ubuntu just never hit the sweet spot for me though. I was already an experienced Linux user when it appeared and preferred RPM based distros at the tome. Ubuntu always seemed slow and fragile to me. Setting things up, like Apache with Mono back in the day, was “different” on Ubuntu and that annoyed me. For most of its history, it is what I would recommend to new users but I just never liked it myself.

Debian Stable - ok, let’s expand

I really like Debian. It was also a little “alien” when I was using Fedora / Mandrake and the like but it never bothered me like Ubuntu. I ran RHEL / Centos as servers so I did not need Debian stability. As a desktop, Debian packages were always just a little too old ( especially for dev ). The lack of non-free firmware made it a pain.

These days though, Debian has been growing on me. The move to include non-free firmware has made it much more practical. With Flatpaks and Distrobox, aging packages is much less of a problem too. I could see myself using Debian. I am strongly considering moving to VanillaOS ( immutable Debian ).

I basically do not run any RHEL servers anymore. At home, I have a fair bit running Debian already ( Proxmox, PiHole, PiVPN, and a Minecraft server ).

EndeavourOS is my primary desktop these days ( and I love it ) but it is mostly for the AUR. A Debian base with an Arch Distrobox might be perfect. Void seems quite nice as well.

I have been an Open Source advocate forever ( and used to say Free Software and FLOSS ). I have used Linux daily since the 0.99 kernels and I even installed 386BSD back in the day. Despite that, the biggest “not for me” distros right now are anything too closely associated with the politics of the GNU project. It has almost made me want to leave Linux and I have considered moving to FreeBSD. I would love to use Haiku. OCI containers and the huge software ecosystem keep me on Linux though.

The distribution that intrigues me the most right now is Chimera Linux. I run it with an Arch distrobox and it may become my daily driver. The pragmatism of projects like SerenityOS really attracts me. Who knows it may be what finally pulls me away after 30+ years of Linux.

What was your problem with Manjaro?
- Apparently there's a lot of hate for the devs/packaging team, people say updates break their systems all the time. I've used it on and off for a while years ago, personally and have had no issues. I put it on my parent's computer over two years ago and they haven't had any issues either.

NixOS… for now. I was on Fedora and was looking for something new. Thought I’d try these new „immutable” distros. Then realised I didn’t know enough about normal ones yet, so I switched to Arch instead. Plus, Nix’ docs are horrendous imo

Plus, Nix’ docs are horrendous imo

I’ve been learning Nix recently and I can 100% agree on this. Their community forum is excellent though.

I ditched Ubuntu LTS for my homelab virtual machines around 20.04 when they started to push snaps, netplan and cloud-init, meaning I would have to spend a significant amount of effort redoing my bootstrap scripts for no good reason and learning skills that are only applicable in the Ubuntu ecosystem. I went with debian stable instead, and was left wondering why I hadn't done that sooner. It's like Ubuntu without all the weirdness.

Ubuntu, felt like I was being treated like a child with the lack of user customizability

then I chose to jump directly into Arch Linux🙃 and saw despair from analysis paralysis, somehow I learned Arch in just a month tho🤷‍♀️

Gentoo - too long compile time, especially on my dated CPU. I prefer my system to update quickly.

Linux Mint - don't like apt, some packages I installed refused to work properly (like Lutris), and the color scheme which is admittedly customizable but I prefer rolling with defaults except when using WM.

Void Linux - after installing it I realized how much I actually missed systemd, couldn't be arsed to symlink services manually. And yes, I realize that's the whole point.

NixOS - realized how much there is to learn with the flakes and separating home configurations and whatever, and just gave up

Manjaro - I tried it twice at the beginning of my Linux journey, and both times the nvidia driver shat itself and gave me different problems that I couldn't fix.

Maybe I've been spoiled by Arch though, as most of my problems probably boil down to "not the same packages", "not pacman", "need to learn new skills that weren't in Arch" and so on. Though admittedly, I did try to explore with an open mind to find a new "cool" distro, but I'd always go back.

Doesn't Void have a tool that does the symlinking for you?
skill issue, skill issue, skill issue, skill.....

/s

NixOS, this thing is written by wizards for wizards, not for mere mortals like me, I'ma stick to my gentoo, thank you very much

This is a first for me. I was able to pick up nixos pretty well but gentoo scares me
- Gentoo isn't scary, take your time and play in a VM - you'll learn to love it's flexibility

Ubuntu. It has become so shitty over time, it's oretty sad.

Ubuntu. Started out great but every release got worse with time.

I've always used KDE, so always was on kubuntu, or mint, but my latest kubuntu install managed to piss me off badly with its systemd taking over. A simple 10 seconds port=number config in sshd_config change now requires 20 minutes of searches, documentation readup, cursing, and jumping systemd hoops

FUCK systemd

Also FUCK SNAP. Absolute horrid garbage.

My next distro will be debian or some derivative, bye bye Ubuntu
- I've learned to like systemd over time, but not snaps and how Canonical handles things.
  
  Debian also uses systemd nowadays, maybe you can try devuan (I think that's how it's called,) which is debian based but without systemd. I only tried it once on a server but came back to debian.

I've been using Xubuntu LTS on my work laptop some 10 years now. All the customization I do is remove snaps and add flatpaks. It just works.

I have RHEL and derivatives on my work machines, where I spend most of my day. I don't like the RPM package system, which they tried to improve upon several times already. I don't like Gnome, is too opinionated for me.

I had a colleague who used Gentoo, to claim superiority. His laptop spent most of the day burning kilowatts with the fans blowing. Not for me. Having everyone build packages from source is very unneficient. "Oh, but the security of building your own binaries! " Well, did you look at the code you're building? No? Well then.

I end up always going back to the DEB ecosystem, with a XFCE desktop. Lately I've been using Manjaro with XFCE and Flatpaks, no AUR.

What's the benefits of using Flatpacks over Docker shit?
- As far as I know, docker for services, flatpak for desktop applications.

Get that downvote finger ready!

Arch.

I know it's what all the cool kids are using, and I keep trying to like it, but I just can't get into it. I'm a slacker for life.

No downvote here my friend. I love arch, but that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. Plug-and-play distros are great too, they just have different strong points.
- Haha, I've been daily driving slackware since the late 90s. I like to tinker and install a lot of stuff. I seem to break anything with an automated package manager and dependency resolution.
I am ok with that. If you would consider keeping the baby after ditching the bath water, maybe give EndeavourOS a try.
- That's actually next on my list to check out.
A wild slacker appears.
- Are you your own dependency manager too?
  
  Some day I'm going to get someone in one of these "what distro should I try?" posts to install slackware and fall in love with it.

Anything arch, basically. Maybe I'm just a too lower tier power user, but I have always returned to Mint. Rock solid daily driver working out of the box. I don't really want to have to tinker with the os, I admit. It should just work.

Fully agree. I once wanted to try it. I took a look at the documentation for partitioning and realized that I needed 2 full days for a working installation and constant access to another PC to be able to read the documentation.. No thanks, I don't care about the hate, Debian/Ubuntu is up and running in 30 mins and gets out of the way...
My personal PC and work PC are windows. I also just accidently removed a lot of my game files, so I figure it's about time to start over. I'm going for kubuntu this time. I figure it's going to be easier to get set up and running quickly without much fuss.

That said, I also run endeavor os on a little netbook tablet I have, so I'm dipping a toe there as well.

Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn't install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn't worth the trouble.

Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don't want to waste space on flatpaks.

Arch: I need reproducible setups. Also bleeding edge is not for me.

I have to give credit to their documentation though!

Most distributions are fine honestly. Ubuntu is clearly not my thing. Not a fan of Redhat-based distribution either. I wanted to appreciate OpenSuse as they've been supporters of KDE for a long time but wasn't comfortable with Yast.

Apart from that, Manjaro is awesome, Arch amazing, Debian brilliant, etc.

You don't need yast for anything.
but wasn’t comfortable with Yast.

I don't even remember how many years it's been when Yast was actually needed. It's optional since quite some time. Even installing the OS itself could technically be done through Calamares but I don't think that's worth the effort.
- Good to hear, my impression of OpenSuse was from 10+ years ago, I should have said so.

Honestly everything besides Debian and Arch after distro hopping for years.

NixOS. If I’m going to invest that much effort to configure a system I don’t want to have to put up with systemd.

Same here. I really wanted to use it but it doesn't offer much over Universal Blue

If i really need reproducibility I'll use nix on my home
I've found nixos is perfect for me since I like how precisely I can configure it.

Oddly enough, I've had a decent chunk of my only barely technical friend group switch to it for the opposite reason. They all just copypaste snippets of config between each other, and if something breaks they just go back a revision. I doubt any of them spend much time configuring anything. It really is the perfect idiot proof distro and I don't normally see people talking about that side of it

I've been using Debian since 1.3. Haven't really ever needed anything else.
I did "experiment" a bit when the decision to go with systemd was taken, but in the end, most distros went with it and it really isn't that big deal for me.

So it's just Debian. I need a computer that works.

I miss Debian sometimes, but systemD irks me.

PopOS and Ubuntu - really just found that I don't like gnome. Nothing against it, I know some people love it but it is not for me. This would likely apply to any gnome distro, but those were the two I tried and immediately moved on.

Honorable mention: Manjaro because "it just breaks™" but it wasn't something I noticed immediately and initially liked the os...

You are aware that you can have multiple DEs installed at once, right? Also many distros have multiple different choices for the default DE. I haven't used it for probably over a decade, but I'm sure Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu, still exists.
- I am aware the DE can be changed, but it was just an honest answer to OP's question. I downloaded like 8 different distros and put them on flash drives and tried them all out and that was what caused me to move on. I didn't have kubuntu downloaded to try, probably because canonical seems to treat them as entirely different distros.
  
  ie, some distros have the DE options when looking at the download page or have you choose during the live boot which to use and include multiple in one iso. Ubuntu makes no mention of those separate downloads unless you explore their site a bit further than the download page. It's a minor difference but makes a difference when you're grabbing a handful of isos to try out, you might miss it and assume the one iso has all the options available when it doesn't, or that it is the only option they provide.
  
  As for PopOS I actually did look into changing to KDE and the popular wisdom at the time on message boards was that changing to KDE would possibly or likely undo most of the benefits of the tweaks and changes system 76 made. I don't have any idea if that is even true, just what came up when searching a few years back.

Manjaro. Because it blank screened in the first update after installation. Never touched it again.

I wish I had learned that quickly. I dealt with it for like four months before just going straight Arch.

Ubuntu - Loved it in 2006-2012ish but I jumped ship when Amazon appeared in search. Great place to start my Linux journey at the time.

Manjaro - Only distro to ever break entirely on me. I didn't care enough to try and figure out why.

Tried endeavor and stock arch but they weren't my cup of tea. No real issues with them though.

Fedora - I liked for a few years but abandoned after the RHEL drama this summer. Seems to be going the way of Ubuntu. Maybe that's just my opinion.

I use and like Solus a lot but they didn't update anything for 2 years until this summer. I use it on my gaming PC and an old laptop for web browsing but nothing important. It's always been solid for me, I just worry about it going extinct. They do have an updated road map and seem re-energized though. I also think it's a good beginner distro because you don't have to dive into terminal much, and a good distro if you are a pro, but kind of bad if you are an intermediate user because there aren't a ton of resources on it that bigger distros have.

I mostly use Debian these days. Stable on my server. Testing on everything else. I don't see me abandoning it anytime soon.

NixOS. Every simple update (nixos rebuild switch) was just eating RAM & CPU. I managed to brick it when updating to 23.11 and couldn't find a way out of the mess I created (even with the saved snapshots) so I said adios.

Arch: Arch

Ubuntu (and downstreams): Canonical

Enjoying Fedora. Find Debian (and downstreams) pretty solid as well.

Ubuntu Reason : Canonical

Over the years I have tried most mainstream distros. I have never seen a reason to use anything other than Debian. Never had it break due to upgrading, I have never tried Nix, Alpine, Gentoo, or Slackware, not many other others I haven't tried since I started using Linux in 2000.

"Not exactly Linux", but FreeBSD. Gave it a couple tries but gave up when I realized its minimalism is a placebo at best and its "super security features" can (also) be achieved on any other standard Linux distribution.

Got any alternatives to setup OPNsense without using FBSD then?
- Alpine + terminal :D

To all gentoo detractors.... 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours...) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ

I remember jumping from Ubuntu (my first distro) to a Gentoo stage 2 install in 2005. I was using it on my desktop so I needed a GUI. I was using either a high end P4 or an X2 Athlon. I attempted to compile KDE and all the deps. It would compile X for about 10-20 hours... and then the compilation would break with a seemingly obscure error message.

I tried a few times and never did get a GUI built.
- Today on Intel i7/Xeon with 16gb ram I go from a stage3 to full GUI (plasma, no libreoffice or such) in a few hours.
Yeah I remember trying it out on a k6-2 400 MHz (maybe? I don't remember if that was it's rated speed of it it was with the bus at 112mhz) and it was days of downloading sources and even more for compiling. I think there was a bootable CD bundled with some zine that allowed you to have something running on your machine
Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags... Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn't do that again.

I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.

Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.

Gentoo: I hated constantly compiling and configuring. It was incredibly time consuming. If I was compiling for uncommon cases it might make sense, but I am dealing with a pretty standard dev machine.

NixOS: The configuration is kind of a pain and never really got the extra features you get beyond package management working correctly.

I refuse to believe there are people who use Gentoo seriously. There is no possible way it's not just a joke about how goofy a true stallman-esque approach to FOSS is.
- I'll give you one reason for using Gentoo: option of no systemd.
  
  Gentoo is one of the few distros which still offer a systemdless setup given its nature of high configurability. You can tell the system-wide config file to exclude systemd support in every package it attemps to compile.
  
  I hope you or anyone who just enjoys their linux machine running fine and happily, now be able to see what freedom can mean in the open source universe. Cheers.
- I used it on an old potato chip of a Pentium 4 (this was nearly 20 years ago). It took days to compile what I wanted, which was a basic system plus KDE. I don't know what was going through my 17 year old brain. But hey, it walked me through some details of a Linux system that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Now I would recommend Linux From Scratch for learning and a nice, stable distro with a large, supportive community for a daily driver.
- I can see it being ok if you cross compile for something like an old power pc mac. Even then there are still some distros that support power pc (Maybe bsds too?).
- I use it, been using it for a while. Both my desktop and laptop run it. I like it a lot and find it really easy to use. Amytime I find an issue I can pretty quickly fix it and keep my system clean. Games run great, my music production software is great, it's fast, and just overall very enjoyable to use.

Ubuntu, after the third consecutive release that broke previously working hardware. That was a while ago and I haven't tried it recently, but given snap I'm not really inclined to.

Ubuntu, because snaps break shit and don't work right a lot of the time, also they left people hanging with 32 bit support which isn't great (for being a Legacy OS for weak computers it's not a great look for them, or all the Linux distros that followed them).

There were a lot of problems with Fedora and CentOS, none of them as bad as Ubuntu though. Most were either instability or software availability due to lacking RPM versions of the software I needed.

Arch itself hasn't given me many problems but it is ideologically problematic for a lot of reasons (mainly the elitism) and it is also a rolling release which isn't great if you don't like being a guinea pig and getting software before all the bugs have been ironed out.

Alpine. It’s powerful and fills a need in a specific use case. Just not my need, nor my use case, and that’s OK.

My docker usage is mostly testing and validation that when I run the code on the actual hardware, it will work as expected. I tend to want the container to match the target environment.

Alpine's great for builder images, though

I tried arch btw.

But didn't like it.

Alpine. I actually really like it, but it just doesn't fit any of my use cases.

NixOS .. loved the idea but doing configuration all the time for every little thing became too much of a headache.

Ubuntu

Fedora. Just feels like I'd be moving to the dnf ecosystem for no reason.

ZorinOS. I tried to install it on my spouse's computer with all modern, well-supported AMD hardware. Had nothing but problems, to the point that the computer was barely usable. WiFi broken, GUI was laggy, repositories were buggy. When I finally got the system somewhat stable, I didn't like the interface at all. Styles were bland, icons dull, everything just seemed clunky and awkward.

For a distro advertised as a beginner-friendly and pay-for-polish system, I was very dissapointed.

Might have been a fluke, I don't think my experience is standard for Zorin, but it was a really terrible first impression and I never suggest it to Linux-curious folks. Mint or Vanilla Fedora are my go-to for newbs.

NixOS.

Cool package manager but constantly breaking compatibility with none nix package managers really annoyed me. (Ghcup, mason, etc...)

Also how difficult they made compiling software from source. I could live with nix packages if I could also compile the programs I need from source.

Great server os. I don't understand how people use it as a daily driver

Its not for everyone imho as a NixOS user
- Wdym "not for everyone"

elementary os. Installed it, and noped right out of there the same day. On paper, it should be great. Maybe the execution was flawless for macfans, but it was not for me. I do appreciate how they tried to make an easy transitional Linux for macfans, though, and I do not regret the donation because of that fact.

All but Arch. Find commands much easier to remember and me having dyslexia and ADHD my memory is shocking.

I put commands in a bash script, with a parameter for each one, and it lists them all if I don't give a parameter. So for example it goes "arch upgrade" instead of having to remember "pacman -Syuu".
- i do similar too, also found ble.sh helps alot especially with navigating my system. i also expand on the bashrc by adding custom commands like
  
  installed() { pacman -Qs "$1" | awk -F/ '/^local/ {print $2}' | cut -d' ' -f 1 }
  
  its apt as i forget witch packages i have installed
- I use paru and the default is "paru" with no parameter for the upgrade. But I am on your team here: I have to Google every single time the -Q params for all the queries and I have been using arch for almost 2 decades now: "who owns this file?" "what are the deps of this package?" "Which packages are installed?" "Which packages I explicitly installed vs dependencies?" Not a single one of them is intuitive to query with the pacman command line for some reason.

Ubuntu, tried to install vim 8 when it released, too bad they only update major package versions once every 2 years. Find myself some random dudes repo, great it's vim 8, too bad it was compiled w/o python support... Installed Manjaro (arch based) and never looked back.

Windows 🤣

Daad, please stop

Any distro that uses apt. I'm ok with Fedora and Arch.

The first time I installed Debian on my desktop I didn't do my homework properly. This was a long time ago. It didn't take long for me to realize just how out of date many packages were and that was a deal breaker. I have since used Debian successfully in different contexts, because I knew what to expect. I still wouldn't install Debian stable on my desktop because I prefer to have a more up to date environment. Might try Debian sid one of these days though. But yeah, Debian, great distro, but you need to know what you're getting in to.

The great thing about Debian is; it has a gear-shifter.

Whether stable or sid, it's still debian but you can go from "rock solid, reliable" to "most recent with several updates per day" in the same ecosystem and just by changing the repositories, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, done.
I use debian now for the first time in years. But the new version just released, so we'll see how long it lasts

I have liked Ubuntu based distros until they release a major update. They are aimed at beginners and they work fine for that. If you use one to the end of support, the updater will say that your software is up to date because there are no new updates.

You have to check the website to find out you've reached the end of support, and to get instructions on how to update.

That is an awful user expierence for beginnners, and a great way to have users using vulnerable software without knowing about it.

I've switched to rolling releases for this exact reason.

Linux Mint. There was just too much crap on the desktop

Haha it's all good, but it sounds like selling the house to avoid cleaning a table.
- Well I ended up building my own house from scratch (in terms of this analogy). I don't use any DE at all haha

Ubuntu. It's just macOS but not as polished

How do you mean?

Fedora. Dont get me wrong it is a great Distro but i did not really felt at home when using it.

Mint, Endeavor, Zorin, Ubuntu, probably more I'm forgetting. Landed on Pop!_OS and am mostly happy so far.

pop!_os That's what I run for desktop I like flatpak better than snap and it has some other nice enhancement over Ubuntu. For my servers I still use Ubuntu.

RHEL, SELinux sucks and I hate it.

I get it. It does have a learning curve. This being said, I would argue that without selinux Linux can’t really be meaningfully secure. It’s worth learning. Seljnux exits elsewhere too. I deploy Debian with selinux and it works well there as well.
- The problem with SELinux is that everyone rushed to push it out, alongside packages affected by it without support for it. So it was a crapshoot whether or not you'd have something working each time. That is better now, but was initially a colossal pain in the ass for about five years or so.

Suse, every time I've tried it I've just been like yeah, nah after running into some weird issue.

Just curious what issues you ran into? Asking as a suse daily driver for about 20 years now, but promise not to proselytize.
- It's been a while so I'm not entirely certain. I just know that they were unique to Suse and no other distro gave me the same problems.
Like SD cards suddenly being read only, then, as mysteriously as it started, they're read/write again (sometimes while mid-operation)? Yeah. I have that.

I literally liked parrotOS, but I had other priorities and abandoned it forever

Every single one of them until I hit arch. It just seemed to click and I enjoy the rolling release.

I attempted to try Garuda Linux (cinnamon) on a mini PC (Ryzen 5800H based APU), but graphic artefacting was a constant issue as soon as the install started.

After several tries I had to abandon ship and wait till a new release to maybe try again, if I remember. Not exactly "Nope, this one's not for me" as I had yet to properly try it.

Otherwise, I tried Crunchbangplusplus and just gave up for being a bit too minimalist or not yet ready for prime time as I kept geting issues after issues and did not have the patience to wrangle the whole OS for everything from getting network working to audio and screen issues on my system.

Anyways, it is always fun to try new systems/apps/protocols and see where thing are headed towards.

Wow I forgot about #! . That was a neat distro.

Anything that isn't debian-like. I'm just very used to It and can't make myself learn anything else.

Ubuntu. I hated not being able to customize certain things and it had some interesting bugs on my hardware. Switching to a different distro solved those issues

Was that an Ubuntu problem or a GNOME thing?
- I have no idea. This was more than 5 years ago. Fwiw I now use Arch (sans Gnome) and I'm very happy with the experience.

Vanilla OS. I loved the idea of having access to so many packaging formats and package managers at my fingertips but maintaining the system, managing everything and keeping in mind all the things that I'm doing was just too much work for me when I just wanted a system that I can use without any hassle. I know immutable distros are quite the buzz these days but it just isn't for me. That was also the time when I was trying to find an Ubuntu based vanilla GNOME distro

Tried Vanilla OS and immediatly screamed in my head "what the f**k??" when trying to access an encrypted hard drive.

LUKS was stripped for some very odd reason
- iirc the devs have added Disk Encryption support and it'll ship in the next release (Orchid). I can imagine how confusing and frustrating that must've been!
  
  Maybe I'll give Vanilla OS another try when Orchid releases

NIXOS is definitely not for me. The documentation sucks and there are less cumbersome ways to restore a system.

As someone currently suffering on NixOS, this is very true
I tried it out, and it was so cumbersome to install packages that I gave up. I understand its application in servers, but for home computers it's a pain in the ass

Manjaro. Probably because I tried it with GNOME which isn't for me either.

Arch\Endeavor, I more preferred the polished experience of Fedora Silverblue and Debian\Mint.

Void Linux with musl. I wanted to try setting up a distro with Musl, but many things I use daily simply don't work with it, and the hassle of troubleshooting everything was a bit too much. I went back to Fedora Workstation, and I'll likely stay on it for my workstation (though I'll switch to Fedora Kinoite when Fedora 40 releases). I also use Fedora Server for my personal server, since it's very familiar to me, and there's not a huge point in switching to CentOS anymore with the recent changes, so I'll probably just stick to it.

I use Void Linux glibc, I wouldn't daily drive musl either, although there are ways to run glibc apps.
but many things I use daily simply don't work with it

Out of curiosity, what doesn't work? And do you mean with musl or Void in general?
- I'm talking mostly about musl, but Void with glibc still requires more work than a "just works" distro. As such, I didn't see a point in trying Void with glibc, because the biggest benefit I saw to switching was for musl. It's great for some, but not for me, just as I wouldn't use Gentoo. There were a lot of things that didn't run, I don't have a full list. I know for a fact that Steam (or any Steam games) wouldn't run, I'm fairly confident that the OnlyOffice suite wouldn't work, I believe that EasyEffects wouldn't run which was a big problem, since I use that for system wide equalization, and for my microphone filters. I probably could have figured out how to set everything up with bare PipeWire, but it's basically the same story for everything: it just requires way more work. My VPN (Mullvad) isn't compiled for musl, nor was the Nextcloud client, and many things I use every day. Those are just the things I remember having issues with off the top of my head, and it may not have only been musl that was the problem, but it's very likely it was.

Never tried regular Arch after trying Black Arch, so not sure if they're the same feel, but after realizing the work it would take just to be given the capability to resize windows in the UI instead of just coming with drag and resize out of the box, Black Arch was a huge no go for me... Which kept me from wanting to touch regular Arch, lol. That being said, I go nope to Ubuntu the most. Gentoo is my favorite and is what my server has been running for the past decade without any kind of issue, but for laptop and daily use, I use Mint. Been on that one for about a decade now too... Used to use Peppermint (that still a thing?) and Suse the most before those.

I find this reply kind of confusing, you're comfortable with Gentoo on a server but installing a DE with pacman was too much? Black arch slim comes with xfce, that should definitely allow you to resize windows lol.
- My comment on arch is just related to the use of black arch for a regular desktop or laptop machine, not my server (no desktop environment for the server). Was mostly trying it to compare it with Kali, actually.
  
  Black arch does come with xfce by default indeed, but resizing windows isn't available right away. At least it wasn't when I tried it a couple of years ago. It required changing a bunch of configurations manually for whatever reason.

KDE. Not a distro, but I can't get on with it. Too much screen real estate used by flashy things, and everything moves. I want instant transitions not a shwoosh. It's probably all toggleable, but I don't want to fiddle with it for every install or release.

Debian, don't like apt.
Arch, breaks too much.
NixOs, just don't need the tools it provides.
Any fork of a mainline distro because it's never as good as the root.

I used arch for a while, but got sick of running repairs every few weeks. I use Gentoo now, it's stable and good. I have a fuck ton of ram and a good cpu, I also take advantage of binary packages from time to time. I don't really need to install new things that much after having done the initial install.

For the record, Arch breaking at all is probably entirely on you.
- The arch breaks were always related to keys. I would run an update and there would always be an error related to the keys. Never had a breakage due to confs.
I used to distro-hop until 2017 when I started using Gentoo as my main distro. I did not have the same experiences as you with Arch but I tended to avoid the AUR. Ultimately Gentoo has kept my attention by being more flexible rather than having negative experiences with Arch.

I suppose I still distro-hop a little bit on an old laptop I've got but that one alternates between Debian and OpenBSD; also its primary use is a terminal for SSH'ing into my Gentoo desktop from the sofa.

Probably the only distro I've had a truly bad experience with is Manjaro. The additional repo that it comes bundled with creates more problems than it solves. Also - although this never affected me personally - the story about developers asking their users to reset their system clocks to accept an expired PGP key is an absolute scandal.
out of curiosity, what was breaking in arch for you?

I've tried both LMDE and Debian itself, but I think I just ended up frustrated at the age of software in the repos and how much stuff relies on Ubuntu specific stuff.

Way back in the day I was an Ubuntu user, but then everyone simultaneously decided that gnome 2 was too old and that touch interfaces were the priority. So I now use Mint and Cinnamon.

Debian relies on Ubuntu?
- Wow, I worded that poorly. I meant that a lot of software not in the repos (usually proprietary apps) provide a .deb download tailered for Ubuntu rather than base Debian.

Ubuntu. I just don't like how they do things. I cant even maintain a repo for the machines i host without putting aside multiple terabytes of space. So to me they cant even make it reasonably easy for me to help them and be self reliant on their ecosystem.

Mint, actually. I tried it and found it too similar to windows and not customisable enough for my liking.

It pains me to say this, but voidlinux, though I'm still not in the stage of "this one is not for me", it has potential and hopefully I can sort all the issues I've encountered so far.

I've tried multiple distros, and also used artix for a while so I'm used to not using systemd but man void is really another thing, this isn't the first time I've used it, I tried it a year ago and gave up, recently I decided that I'm up for the challenge and began using it again, here's what has happened so far:

Well right now I'm dealing with the pc freezing when quitting the user session, for some reason I need to exit i3 before logging out, otherwise the system freezes.

Also I wasn't able to get a clean boot screen even though I had the typical kernel parameters quiet, loglevel, etc, it even prints info on the login prompt where I should be putting my username, though I managed to mitigate this a lot by passing a kernel parameter that tells it to use another tty for the boot messages.

file-roller is broken, I can't compress some directories to 7zip, the weird thing is that it only happens to some directories and not all.

Though the very good news is that they fix issues very fast, puddletag was broken and they fixed it in like 2 hours after I reported the issue.

Edit: It is not just file-roller that is broken, it is all of 7zip on void, I can't compress with xarchiver either

Fadora or ache are pretty good

I used Ubuntu for a few years, and always felt that it works well and was super easy to set up. But it also seemed to use a lot of disk space. This was of course not ubuntu‘s fault, but my inexperience. But I never had to look under the hood, so I didn’t, and I ended up installing a bunch pf bloat, some of which ended up causing minor issues eventually.

I decided to try arch, and get more into configuration and learning linux. It was quite a ride, and I am happy to have gone through with it. I’m still learning, but I have so much more knowledge & control over what the PC does and how it does it. I also have a lot more room for games and such.

Ubuntu

Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn't update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I'm liking that a lot more so far...

Manjaro ships with a LTS kernel, which is marked "recommended" in the kernel selection tool. By default you don't have to do anything, don't ever need to use the kernel selection, and you won't experience any problems, it works like any other distro.

The issues you described are caused by selecting one of the non-recommended kernel versions. It's assumed you know what you're doing if you do that.
- Exactly I really don't get the argument there. Manjaro's handling of kernel selection is brilliant. Multiple LTS kernels, a recommended one, bleeding hedge and experimental ones. There's something for everyone and it's super easy to use.
- Idk what was wrong then, but I constantly had issues with packages being out of date due to the kernel and not wanting to update. Dependencies were constantly a mess. I'd rather just have normal Arch or Antergos/Endeavor

Fedora Core. It had so many problems updating. That would have been in the mid 2000s so it may have improved since then.

PopOS and Manjaro are two I never liked.

I had a huge problem with Arch because of the rolling release deal. I just can't handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day, even with automation.

When I install an operating system, I want it to just work, and I want their repositories to have lots and lots of software. Most distros do this, but none do it as well as one of the major Debian-family distros like Ubuntu or Mint. Fedora is quite nice as well, and I could probably daily drive it without issue, I just see no reason to change over to it since Ubuntu has me totally covered. And it is basically like this for me with every other distro: I have to think, "why would I switch? What benefit would it provide me over what I have right now." The answer is always "nothing important," so I stick with Ubuntu.

I considered using Guix because its package manager is truly a revolutionary new technology. But using it as a package manager, I can see a lot of the packages and default configurations just aren't quite to the point of "just works" yet. Still, I hope someday to switch to Guix as my daily driver.

just can’t handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day

Then don't. You can just as well choose to update once per week or whenever.
- Every day is something of an exaggeration, but if you don't keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break. And this gets to be a problem, especially if I don't keep a computer always on, or if I keep postponing updates because my laptop is not connected to the Internet at the schedule time. There are a dozens reasons why I miss regular updates, but the point is, it should not bork my system if I do miss updates for a while.
Why do you think you need to update packages on Arch every single day?
- Why do you think you need to update packages on Arch every single day?
  
  It was just a bit of hyperbole regarding the amount of mental effort it takes to keep your system up to date, I don't actually mean every single day. I mean if you don't keep Arch up-to-date on a regular basis, packages tend to break, and then you need to re-install the OS or jump through a few hoops to repair the broken packages and their dependencies. Diligent regular updates is not a terrible mental burden, but a burden none-the-less, so using point release OS like Mint or Ubuntu are just easier.

After using Arch based distros for more than a year when I use any Debian/Ubuntu based distro it really feels like they aren't for me, at least when it comes to daily driving. I still have a laptop with PopOS that I use for school, stable distro is a better option in my oppinion for that usecase because I use it twice a week (unless it's summer or winter in which case I don't use it at all).

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed--coming from Arch, it just felt so refined and ready to go right out of the box. Then I started installing programs and ran into dependency hell--now on EndeavourOS with the AUR which is great

Additionally, the combination of terminal + GUI to do things just felt wrong

I am curious how you ended in dependency hell on TW. I switched from arch to TW about a year ago. I love it so far.
- One program that comes to mind is Protonmail Bridge. I first tried installing the RPM via Discover, and it silently failed every time. Next, installed it from the terminal and got an error about missing DejaVu fonts--no problem, I'll just install them from here, but unfortunately I was getting the same error. I tried to "install anyway" ignoring dependencies--failed again!
  
  Another issue trying to install the linux-surface kernel. The GUI package failed to install (again, silently), and command line packages kept failing since the linux-surface kernel was on 6.6.6 and the rolling release kernel was on 6.6.7--eventually I chrooted in from a live USB, removed the kernel, and replaced it with the linux-surface kernel, but the fact that it kept failing with a "success" message was confusing! Then I had to compile iptsd--on Arch I'd 'pacman -S git meson ninja gcc etc.', and searching and selecting package groups via YAST (and hoping my compilation worked) just felt clunky.
  
  I did manage to get everything up and running eventually (save Protonmail), but at that point I'd messed up my installation to the point where I had to start over, and I just loaded up EndeavourOS instead.
  
  I'm sure a lot of these issues stem from a lack of understanding of Tumbleweed itself, and when I get another desktop I'll be happy to try again. I did love the setup process though--super polished KDE Plasma, and everything that was possible with the stock kernel (even autorotate!) worked out of the box!

Wasn't a fan of Ubuntu, RedHat, Debían...

I guess I'm just a Fedora person? I'm on KDE right now, usually Xfce. Idk I'm enjoying my KDE experience.

Mint was pretty smooth. No complaints.

Honestly, depending on whether you count it or not, LFS. I have not tried Gentoo yet, though I want to one day, for the learning experience, and yet I already know that compiling everything is not something I enjoy.

I can get by with OpenSUSE and Void (kinda), I've used Debian for a few weeks, I've used Fedora for a month or so, I've used Ubuntu for a bit, I've tried PopOS for a week or two, I've used NixOS for a few months, and I've used Arch for most of my time on Linux.

Currently I'm on Arch, but I don't like rolling releases that much. At the same time, I am also not a fan of immutability, as there are some programs I need that cannot be installed on an immutable distro, so that's why I'm on Arch. Why am I only using these 2? Because they are the only distros that have all the packages I need (excluding the specialist software that I need for university). By the time I discovered Distrobox (which would solve this problem), I was already on Arch. I've also done some changes to my setup and as such, I'll need to wait for some new features to make their way into program releases and into the NixOS Stable repo with the following release. Until then, I'm on Arch.

Gentoo is useless for learning how things work. Back in the 00s when I still had time to hang out at events it was always quite ridiculous at what kind of basic stuff the gentoo crowd got stuck at - and with the tooling 15+ years more polished now I'd expect what is actually going on is way more hidden than back then.

If you do want to understand how things work just build a minimal system - either on spare hardware, or qemu/kvm. Don't go with systemd, or other fat userland options - that just makes you compile a lot of dependencies not adding value for learning.

Use some lean init (or just write one yourself), and some lean shell.
- How would you recommend I go about building a system? Should I start with LFS as a base/inspiration?

I’ve messed with a decent amount, listed in my post. Most distros weren’t customized the way that I wanted them to be or I didn’t like the looks so I prefer Debian and Arch for simplicity’s sake depending on the use case and going from there.

Ubuntu gnome. Wanted to install a gnome add on (hibernation button), searched how to do it and learned there's a section in the gui store but couldn't find it. Searched for that and turns out they removed the add ons section from the store in the latest version and I need to use a browser. Tried to install it from a browser and it still didn't work. Tried the other browser and failed again. Searching for that discovered that the pre-installed browsers are snap packages and can't interact with anything else 🤦

Instantly switched to kubuntu. It had the hibernation button out of the box

Pop os. I just couldn't use their desktop (even though I think it's good, it's just not for me)

I have tried a bunch of them: Manjaro, Fedora, Opensuse Tumbleweed, Mx Linux, EndeavourOS, Arcolinux, Debian, currently LMDE. But Fedora, the spin with XFCE not the default one, never convinced me enough to keep it., is the one that never convinced me enough to keep it.

Ubuntu when they first switched to Unity. I had been running Ubuntu for 2 or 3 years at that point, but I was already thinking about switching to Debian at the time. I hobbled along for a few weeks on that first version of Unity, but I didn't like what I was seeing. I took the plunge into Debian, thinking, "If I'm going to have to learn something new anyways, I might as well try switching."

Literally all of them have shite color management and fractional scaling that blurs everything. It's an eyesore.

I really, really want to use Linux for multimedia consumption but I can't.

Shite, I was looking to move to Linux specifically for starting up a machine for multimedia and retro gaming. Never heard of this issue before.
Yet color management seems to have negative priority for Wayland while the Wayland push is strong at present. Shit or not, at least X11 has basic color management via ICC profiles; Wayland be like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- KDE wayland has added ICC support in the KDE 6 beta. (and basic HDR).

Gentoo. But it took a few years

In 2007 I tried Ubuntu and it was weird, then again in 2008, no! In 2009 I found Mint and was really happy, until they stopped supporting KDE. Then I tried a ton of distros, Xfce, no. Lxde, no. open suse, no. fedora, no, lots of others, no. I finally found Kubuntu and I have been on it ever since. Even tested Neon lately but hated it.
Kubuntu does what I want it to do.
Linux always seems scary at first, but once you learn enough, it's super easy.

Yeah, did you find mint easy to use? I'm in Ubuntu and thinking about switching. I just worry about driver support, cause everything works on Ubuntu for me. I try and apt get everything I can TBH.
- I really liked Mint at the time, but only the KDE version, and would never have left if they hadn't stopped supporting it. They had great nVidia support. I no longer have nVidia on any of my computers because it's just annoying to fight with that mess.
  Plus Linux as a whole has better driver support than it used to.

Puppy Linux
AntiX

I hopped to many distros and found Ubuntu to be my home.

Mint => Desktop looks dated and ugly
POP! OS => Unstable for Ubuntu distro
Rest of Ubuntu forks => nothing special about them
Arch Linux => Too bleedy edge
Debian => stale packages (Really solid distro though but dated version of Gnome)
Ubuntu => Really solid distro (It is a great balance between stability and bleeding edge)

Debian => stale packages (Really solid distro though but dated version of Gnome)

Did you try using the testing or unstable versions of Debian? Testing is still more stable than some other distros. Packages need to be in unstable with no major bug reports for 10 days before they migrate to testing.
- I forgot to mention that I did try Debian testing. I did like it came with a recent version of Gnome. However, I did had a few problems with it:
  
  I personally found it updates more frequently then I like it. I found that the user interface for Gnome changes often.
  
  If I want to install MySQL workbench, it does not have a download link for Debian at all.
  
  I did got a weird crash bug with Krita on Debian testing. I am not sure if it was Debian's or Krita's fault.
  
  I did found Debian testing to be slightly unstable. I decided, I will give Ubuntu a shot again and was happy with that decision.
Fedora => opposite of debian. Bleeding edge, but that means you have to spend an insane amount of time updating or it will reach EOL in no time
- Fedora annoys me (even though I've been using it for like 2.5 years on my work laptop) because a lot of packages that would be in extra in something like the Ubuntu (and it's derivatives) or Arch (and it's derivatives) is in a separate repository that you have to add.
- you have to spend an insane amount of time updating
  
  How slow is your internet connection?
  
  or it will reach EOL in no time
  
  Sure you don't confuse Fedora with non-LTS Ubuntu releases? According to https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/ each release is supported for 13 months which isn't 10 years of LTS but hardly "in no time" either.

GNU Guix. Need to do an Ayahuasca ceremony sometimes and try again with a much more radiant mind.

PopOS!

It's supposed to be good for gaming, but a lot of its packages (including the video drivers) are outdated af because it's based on Ubuntu, so you may have to wait months for a mesa patch that makes a game playable while on Arch I can just install mesa-git and play.

I also don't like the Gnome interface and the fact that it casually encourages installing proprietary software, but that's not relevant given its target audience.

Yeah, I get it, it's a distro for novices so obviously it won't go all freetard on you for installing nvidia drivers, but the fact that it's so outdated is absolutely inexcusable and can drive users away because games that are marked as playable on steam may not even launch.

The first distro I tried to daily drive on my desktop was Pop!_OS because everyone told me it's the distro you "need" if you have an Nvidia card.

I'm sure it works fine for most people but I just had A LOT of issue, weird audio issues I had to fix every other time I turned on my system, some games refusing to load properly unless I forced them into borderless fullscreen.

Then one day it just refused to boot, even tho I had booted into it that morning and did nothing more than go on Youtube for an hour before work, Timeshift didn't work even tho I had manually made a handful of backups.

Went back to Windows for about 2 months before trying EndeavourOS and despite peoples warning that Arch systems will break if you look at them the wrong way, I've found it way more stable on my system and any issues I have ran into have been easy fixes.

i run arch on my surface

my dell runs kubuntu, but i plan to move it to arch as well (after i back up my data)

i liked it for a while and suddenly had tons of issues with snap, especially with firefox, and webusb breaking constantly on chromium (i use android flash tool a lot)

Not too ick someone's yum, and this ventures outside of Linux.

I dislike the BSDs. Great for getting pf, and not being a homogeneous shop, but just different enough to be difficult outside of one specific use case.

Gentoo was similar. It may be different now, but a pain on the Xbox.

Mint was too dumbed down and ugly.

Ubuntu is useful, but likely harmful with it's constant pushes to commercialize everything.

Redhat is needed for work, but the commercialization drives worse quality. Documentation seems purposely bad to drive training courses.

(Yes, I like Debian.)

I used Linux Mint for about 1.5 years before transitioning to Arch Linux. For me, the transition was to learn more about Linux and to try something new. Thus far, I'm really liking Arch. There have been a few issues that have popped up here and there, like getting Bluetooth devices to connect properly, but the Arch Wiki and forums often have the solution. You just have to spend time reading the articles or the forum responses.

As for other distros, I've tried Zorin, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pop OS, and KDE Neon before settling on Linux Mint.

Any distro that's based on an existing one but changes or adds very little to it. There are so many dead Ubuntu and Debian reskins

MicroOS. I didn't switch from losedows to still have my PC restart on me while I was working. Also, it kinda broke and was annoying to configure, and had way too little documentation.

Did you use this tool ? Simplifies ignition/combustion https://opensuse.github.io/fuel-ignition/edit
- Isn't that just for the initial install? I was talking about post-install configuration

Fedora. Fedora is solid, but coming from arch I felt it was lacking so much in the way of the package repos and doing things like secure boot was more effort than it was worth.

Opensuse. Did absolutely nothing wrong but I just didn't vibe with it. Went to fedora and I vibe hard with it

Garuda. I tried it because it's supposed to be "gamer" oriented. I thought it meant it would make it easier/smoother for gaming. What they actually meant was it felt like being locked inside a gaming PC with flashing and spinning RGB lights everywhere. No fucking thanks.

Zorin OS, which was the second distro I ever tried, I hated how outdated their repos were since they were using an older Ubuntu LTS repository for packages. It was quite painful to install software that would otherwise have worked out-of-the-box on Ubuntu. I hope this is no longer the case today.

Fedora, as someone who uses mostly Arch and the AUR, I couldn't get used copr, flatpak, and dnf. I rather just use yay.

Gentoo because while it was fun to try I sure as hell won't be waiting around for my stuff to compile.

Void linux.

I used arch for a couple years, then crux for over 10 years, so I though Void would be a great distro when the systemd drama occured. Tried that, and noped the hell out of it...

creating/maintaining packages is a pain
the dev team was awful with newcomers
system couldn't handle more than a couple weeks without updates
it's an arch wannabe that doesn't admit it, making it a worse alternative

Its a meme at this point, but I tried to install arch. Ran into display issues during install and couldn't progress. Gave up and did Ubuntu instead.

I know there's supposed to be some helper stuff out there now to make it go smoothly, but don't think I am motivated enough to retry ever.

I game a lot, so I need the latest drivers. So anything with a slower release schedule than Manjaro is a no go for me.

I feel like I'm a chronic distro-hopper sometimes, but no matter how many times I try, I just can't settle into OpenSUSE for whatever reason. The OBS feels a bit more of a wild west than the AUR.

Ubuntu. The whole interface paradigm puts me off.

anything with GNOME or xfce. modern cinnamon is ok ig but KDE plasma just makes anything bearable for me

manjaro.

tails

I liked tails more than any other Linux distro lol.

EndeavourOS - I have tried Arch as well but EndeavourOS is just nicer out of the box. The AUR is awesome, and I generally find answers for any problem more easily than I did for any other distro.

I think you misread the topic.
- There was another section, but it sounded bitter so I just posted the positive bit.

Anything that's not Ubuntu, because it's the "mainstream Linux", so guaranteed I'll find anything I need there.

Garuda. Looked pretty and tried it for a day or two and noped out. Went back to Manjaro before I figured out how to install Arch without the installer

Gentooo, the only reason I' use it is so I could bring up systems on old architectures. Besides that it really isn't worth it.

OpenSuse. I found the installer to be a pain in the ass and weird, and the package manager was slow as molasses.

And I'll use Debian as a server, but any distro that requires me to add PPAs as a daily driver can just go away. Fedora has a huge software library, and Arch has the AUR, which has it's own security issues but at least I can read the PKGBUILDs before I install. PPAs are just a security nightmare to my way of thinking, I can't go around keeping track of each one and the current status of whoever owns that domain these days.

Arch

Reason: arch

Thats a pretty bad reason
- Okay fine, I bite for once
  
  There are two KISS principles for me
  
  Easier to use for everyone, I.e. simple to use
  
  "Fuck convenience, fuck ease of use and fuck you"
  
  Arch subscribes to the latter, use endevouros if you want the former

Linux mint waaaaaaay back when it first launched.

All of them except arch. It just strikes the perfect balance between being easy to pick up after a bit of reading and keeping its simplicity. Paired with vanilla gnome its uwu gang. I also looked at manjaro and stayed well clear of that, vanilla is so much simpler as I don't have to worry about conflicts caused by man jar roe randomly holding back packages for no reason.

tails

Tails is one of those things where you aren't supposed to daily drive it unless you are a paranoid weirdo.

After Debian removed wifi, bluetooth, mouse and added lags after simple “sudo apt upgrade”, it became not for me

They didn't do any of those things and apt upgrade does not lag on any system I know of.
Sounds like you had a corrupt installation.