Original question by @POTOOOOOOOO@reddthat.com
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.
Hannah Montana Linux
What made Hannah Montana Linux so good (as a joke, and as a distro), was that it was actually good. XD Good fun. Good stuff. :D
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
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.
All the good parts of Ubuntu have long since been integrated upstream. And Debian’s release cycle has increased a lot so you’re not stuck with old versions anymore.
Can’t say it’s the best, but I love Alpine. It’s light, fast, versatile and easy to use, runs on anything, and despite it being used mostly in containers and VMs, it makes for a great desktop distro aswell. :)
No one talks about how Alpine has been doing immutable and atomic installations since way before it was trendy.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Immutable_root_with_atomic_upgrades
Any Arch-based distribution gives you a ton of control to do whatever you want with it as long as you know what you’re doing. Having used Linux myself for 5 years, nothing beats Arch-based for me. Sure, I started with Manjaro (a big mistake for a beginner in my opinion), though I used around four or five distros (including the now defunct Arco Linux while editing for CoculesNation on YouTube), and stuck to CachyOS (same with my producer, actually).
Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement
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For a long time I considered Gentoo the best, because I know my things around there. A month ago I said goodbye to my last Gentoo installation in favour for Debian trixie (the next stable release). Gentoo was too time consuming despite the binary repo.
If it would be my job to maintain a Gentoo system I would gladly accept, but there should be a need for it by the users. Otherwise I would just recommend Debian stable or Fedora.
My favourite is Debian over Fedora, because I often don’t need the latest versions of a software. And there is flatpak.
Tried CalculateLinux or any of the other Gentoo respins?
Toorox was the best Gentoo respin. Nothing more than a pure straight gentoo respin. Sabayon was superb before they started to try too hard. Redcore started to try too hard too. Calculate did a little bit of try-hard, but managed to retain enough modest sanity to remain good (at least, still true of the last few times I saw it). Even Funtoo started to go a little wonky.
But if you ever start to think Gentoo’s too easy and not taking up enough of your time, you can always go the other way, and jump ship to Exherbo.
I have seen at least one person moving from Gentoo to Exherbo. Would I leave Debian behind for it? No, not currently, but maybe there is time for an experiment in the future.
I’ve tried Sabayon briefly, but not seriously. At the time, it was interesting to have more pre-built binaries. Looking back now, the Gentoo binrepos are the better solution, I think.
Oh, and also…
Would I leave Debian behind for it?
No need to leave. There’s BedrockLinux, or just distrobox.
~ for the latter of which I was shown this article (titled “I stopped distro-hopping because this tool lets me run everything at once”) earlier today on libera.chat from someone who know’s Bedrock’s been my daily driver for over a decade, with Bedrock being how I ended my distro-hopping, and DistroBox being another way to end distro-hopping. ~ We’re now ((at least) two ways) past the days of having to pick just one distro. ;D
I should generally make more use of things lile podman and systemd-nspawn. Thx!
I guess running Bedrock Linux inside podman wouldn’t work, I guess. Not sure how well nesting works with containers.
Hrmm. While I’ve never bothered with containers, I don’t see why bedrock wouldn’t work in a container. Could be easy to test… set up a container with whichever distro, and try run the BedrockLinux hijack installer script on it… Don’t blame me if somehow it escapes the containment and eats your whole system … (~ I don’t see why/how it would ~ should be safe ~ but like I say, I don’t have experience with containers.)
I’ve tried Exherbo more times than I can count, but never managed to make it my daily driver. It really needs that kind of commitment to make the best of it. With Exherbo, you’ve really got to go from 0 to >9000, with nothing between, becoming a developer of it straight away.
And yeah, +1 Gentoo+binhost. Though I do miss the USE=“-*” approach to gentoo (like I did in 2011(ish)), adding things only as needed, per package. Great education. And keeps the system very tight to just meet needs, and no more.
