Linux
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Void Linux for the arch and gentoo crowd. It's a system that can be assembled more cohesively.
Nix and Guix - the ideas they bring to the table are revolutionary. I prefer Guix due to its use of Scheme (guile). But Nix is more mature and has more packages.
I've used Debian for years but tried Void on a really low spec netbook and it's pretty nice. The install is pretty painless and not having systemd is an interesting change for me.
Whenever somebody recommends NixOS, I just want to spam the comments with Guix. I prefer configs I can understand, and I think lisp makes that easier. Other than syntax, the only thing I see is people complaining about the free-oftware-only. But the recently hyped distrobox solves that (together with the nonguix repo). Yet nobody recommends guix in all these "immutable" distro threads.
In my opinion Guix is the best mix of:
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Arch (rolling release),
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NixOS ("immutable", atomic updates , rollback, reproducible, declarative configs)
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Gentoo (source code based, write your own package definitions for any source code you find),
with some lispy syntax.
NixOS, and hopefully soon SnowflakeOS which makes it more approachable for more casual users.
Another user mentioned Guix, which I'd like to try soon to compare to NixOS.
It's hard to compete with how much there is in nixpkgs though... as much as I... a professional Haskell programmer... hate to acknowledge the realities of network effects.
NixOS has the worst documentation I've come across. It's difficult to describe just how useless it is despite its wealth. It's neither a manual, nor a reference, nor a guide, but all three jumbled in one and that goes for the package manage with its DSL, the operating system built on top of the package manager, and the tooling.
The best description I can think of the documentation of that project is "everything is everywhere". Bless their documentation team volunteers that are trying to figure out the absolute mess it is. They have my utmost respect.
Plain ol Debian
I've been using it on servers for over 20 years. It's a great distro.
It's a community project. Every member of the Debian project has equal rights and vote on major decisions. It's not owned by a large company so it's mostly avoided any controversy due to bad decisions (for comparison, see the controversy around CentOS Stream).
They mostly don't change things if they work fine as-is. The network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces is essentially the same format as it was 20 years ago. (for comparison, see Ubuntu deciding to change how it does things every few years). Probably the biggest recent change was switching to systemd in 2015, but even today they have a compatibility layer to convert packages with sysvinit-style services to systemd, and you can still switch back to sysvinit and completely get rid of systemd.
You can upgrade to the next version in-place - just edit the apt repository config to point to the next version, apt update, apt full-upgrade, and reboot into new kernel version. Most upgrades are seamless (but it's still best to read the release notes).
Most packages include a README.Debian file in /usr/share/docs somewhere that usually includes very brief instructions on how to get started with the program.
It supports practically every system architecture. They still make an i686 build that works with processors as old as the Pentium 4. They also had an i386 build that worked on systems as old as the original Pentium, and only dropped it this year with Debian 12. Supporting an architecture doesn't just mean the base OS - it also includes most of the packages too.
What I love about Debian is there are always instructions regardless of whatever random package I want to use or Linux thing I’m trying to do.
EndeavorOS btw.
Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it's history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.
If there was only a way to get automatic tiling on cinnamon it’d be my favorite desktop by far. Everything you need, nothing you don’t, sensible by default. It’s the right option for most people I think
Excellent - I'm about to install it for my aged mother, because windows keeps moving her cheese.
I want something that doesn't change the workflows once she's learned how to do a task, and that local techs can help her with, and that I can VNC to when I have to.
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
Like Peppermint this is a fantastic distro for anyone wanting to use Debian without the pain of self installing. Plus you always have the latest cinnamon.
It's also good for anyone wanting to get away from Ubuntu all together.
I'd also like to get away from the stigma that mint is only a newbie distro. It's not. It's full fat Linux so pros can use it too, and should. It's very reliable, fast and use friendly.
Above all, it's true FOSS and LMDE is 100% community 💪
All of them, thanks a lot for all the Devs hard work, I've tried and loved so many distros that I can't choose any of them but lately I have been using cachyos which is a clean and fast arch based distro.
Arch. Some of its users take this distro for granted a lot of times but it only goes downhill from here once you start looking at other distros.
Tumbleweed. Solid, Automated QA testing.
Chimera Linux. Security-related compilation flags go brrr. No systemd.
Maybe we'll see SerpentOS sometime before this decade ends but who knows.
On a side note. Aeon 1.0 if/when released, can't wait to see how it all turns out. Especially if they manage to integrate BTRFS snapshots with systemd-boot entries.
Wow. Great to see Chimera Linux on this list, though I do not think it is even out of Alpha yet.
Chimera Linux and Vanilla Linux are two of the distributions that I am most interested in at the moment.
I am also a huge fan of Arch but I typically install EndeavourOS these days. Out of the 80,000 or so Arch packages, EndeavourOS adds only about two dozen more but many of them are great. Installing yay by default is a great decision as well.
Yeah using Arch (btw) cured me of my distro hopping. Although NixOS is looking tempting...
Honestly I've really enjoyed Zorin. It's made life simple when it comes to migrating friends and family to Linux. Specifically the way they handle fonts and scaling in office programs when opening Microsoft files. It's been easy to get my wife to get off of windows after they started bombarding her with adds on her fuckin desktop screen.
Hannah Montana Linux
I'm considering replacing my router with a software router and have been comparing a few options.
I was having a lot of difficulty getting 10Gbps through opnsense. Even after tuning a bunch of tunables, I was only getting 3Gbps or so, with no fancy features like IPS/IDS enabled. It was just a basic out-of-the-box config with my current home network as the "WAN" and a small lab network as a LAN. Something (NAT maybe?) seems to be single-threaded as it was hitting 100% of one core on a six-core i5-9500 (which should be more than powerful enough for this).
While researching I learnt that OpenWrt has an x86-64 build you can run on a computer. I thought it was only for regular routers.
Flashed OpenWrt to a USB stick and tried it instead of opnsense. Out of the box I got full 10Gbps speed, using less CPU power than 3Gbps used in opnsense (~15% per core across all cores). The base system is fast and light, only using 15MB of disk space and less than 100MB RAM. That makes sense given it's designed to run on routers, but in an era where a lot of software is very bloated, it's nice to see lightweight software that does its job with barely any overhead.
Bazzite, a gaming-oriented immutable distro with up to date Fedora packages and kernel, a lot of the kernel patches you'd want for gaming, automatic daily updates in the background, the option of installing the Nix package manager and Distrobox out of the box. They even have a Steam Deck version that works just like stock UI/UX wise but with all the added goodies.
Plus, on rpm-ostree/ublue-os as a whole, it just amazes me to no end you can basically look at deploying a distro as if it's a git repo these days. Wanna try Gnome? Rebase to the corresponding image and reboot, your data is still there. Don't like it? Quickly rollback or just pick the previous entry on GRUB. Incredible stuff, I'm sticking with those if I can help it for the foreseeable future.
I don't think Arch needs more recognition; it seems to be doing just fine. It's been my daily driver on desktop and laptop for years, and on my cloud servers for a little longer than that.
Chimera Linux is doing some novel stuff, rather than the same old reflavoring of other distros; it's one I'm keeping my eye on.
I'm running Artix on a laptop; that's a good one for people wanting to escape the Poettering hive-mind. I'm running EndeavourOS on my desktop, and love it. TBH I should have done it three other way round; Artix is too fussy for a dynamic environment like a laptop.
Void, Slackware, Alpine, Gentoo, Devuan (although I'd like for them to remove even the slightest semblance of systemd), FreeBSD
VanillaOS. Perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but in a sea of distros where the only difference is a slightly different default config, VanillaOS is doing something distinct and different.
dietpi. besides rpi and other sbc, there's also vm images and it can be put right on x86 or x64 pc, too.
All distributions of free, open-source and user-empowering software like Linux are great and deserve recognition. Whether it's simple, new user-friendly distros like Linux Mint that make the transition process from proprietary garbage like Windows as easy as possible or advanced distros that are meant for power users like Gentoo, Arch or Void Linux. But these specifically deserve more recognition in my opinion:
Gentoo. People hate it for being hard to install or because it's source based, but it allows you to customize everything, including build options for programs etc. It empowers users and teaches them a little about how their system works. Gentoo doesn't tell the user what to do, the user is in full control of their system. ChromeOS is based on it, because it offers infinite flexibility and customizability.
Also, Tails OS. It's what keeps many oppressed journalists and activists anonymous and secure, and it's what Edward Snowden used to inform the public about the horrible things going on at the NSA. The same goes for Qubes OS and Whonix.
Artix btw.
NixOS
+1 for Peppermint. I installed it on a thumb drive and always carry it with me while travelling. This way I can boot it on the company laptop to safely steam video and browse social media while not touching the (encrypted) company disk.
I was a Arch Linux fan for at least 5 years. Tried all the main ones except gentoo. Kept coming back to Arch. But now I'm one week into using NixOS. I don't think I'm ever going back. It has completely blown my mind, and fixes every minor thing I didn't like about arch. Mainly how package dependencies work. I'm sure there will be a downside somewhere, but so far the only issue I've had is just trying to learn how to config everything.
TLDR: NixOS. I don't know how I didn't know about it till recently. Seems like it would be a lot more popular than it is.
Guess I should try this in a wm or something. :)
And the best part is: When you're done trying it out and like your setup in the vm, you can simply copy your configuration.nix over to the real machine ;)
I can't say how popular it is amongst Linux users/fans, but Sparky is pretty cool. I had it on my shitty laptop for a while because I need a distro that worked with low ram and storage.
Also, not Linux based, but I'd love to see more work done on the Amiga based AROS. It's hella niche, but I'd work on it if I had the knowhow and skills.
Maybe it's just me, but folks seem to hate ZorinOS for some reason. Which imo, is a perfect distro as is for baby penguins.
Qubes OS
Maybe it has more recognition than I'm aware, but Fedora has been really good to me since 2018!
I stopped looking at PepperMint when the founder passed away. It was a sad day.
Another sad day was when they could no longer keep using LXDE because it fell out of support. Very unfortunate