(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

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?
Father_Redbeard,
@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml avatar

Any DE that looks remotely like Windows. My journey to Linux began with a seething hatred of the way Microsoft does pretty much anything. Including the Win10 UI. So when I jumped ship I wanted something completely different. I tried Gnome on a couple distros but ultimately landed on Pop!_OS and really like it!

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

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.

joojmachine,

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 to better 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 this weird solutions that only they use.

RalphWolf,

I’m going to say Gentoo Linux. It’s a good learning tool and I suppose maybe a tiny bit faster if you actually custom-compile everything for your hardware from source, but that’s a crazy waste of time.

kzhe,

VanillaOS looked really promising but it was terribly buggy when I used it.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

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”.

AbidanYre,

Also, support is only provided for 18.04LTS.

astraeus,
@astraeus@programming.dev avatar

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.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Debian is a great desktop distro if you get your software using Flatpak, as anyone should be doing in every distro.

drndramrndra,

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.

muix,

Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.

drndramrndra,

No hate for canonical or suse, just redhat?

EponymousBosh,
@EponymousBosh@beehaw.org avatar

My least favorite is Linux Lite. It’s supposed to be a lighter, simpler version of Ubuntu but I don’t think it accomplishes this at all. It’s very slow for something that’s supposed to be lightweight, and still includes Snaps, which are also very much not lightweight. Plus its software center is just bad, which is not great for something that’s marketed at Linux noobs. Linux Mint XFCE or SpiralLinux are better options for a Linux noob who needs a lighter distro, IMO.

An improvement I’d suggest: obviously, ditch Snaps. Another would be to take a look at what Bodhi Linux does and have the “software center” run in the browser. I don’t know how good this is security-wise, but it definitely speeds things up from the UX side of things.

rtxn, (edited )

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.)

Shamot,
@Shamot@jlai.lu avatar

I don’t like Ubuntu because of their forcing method to use Snap package manager.

I don’t like Manjaro because of its poor dependency management. Many dependencies are not declared, so that if you update a package, it won’t update the undeclared dependency and it won’t work any longer. You have to update everything or nothing, and when disk space becomes low, updating everything at once is impossible.

yianiris,
@yianiris@kafeneio.social avatar

partial upgrades on distros without hard linked dependencies is a disaster caused by the user.

You should never have a system with less than 20% free space, but I mean system, not /home, not /var/cache/ of /var/cache/pacman,
Make partitions and mount things separately, especially /home

In a pinch you can live without man-pages remove /usr/share/{doc,man,html}/*
and on /usr/share/locale/* keep just the ones you use

When you need a man page reinstall the pkg.

@Shamot @gianni

yianiris,
@yianiris@kafeneio.social avatar

I assume that Manj follows and doesn't improvise on sys dependencies. Definitely not poor.

Arch-archives by date, means you can build a system exactly as it was fully upgraded on a specific date, and the system works just like it used to.

Other systems that may carry 3 versions of the same library because different sw use different versions are the ones with the problem. Except for redundancy and space the system is not very coherent..

@Shamot @gianni

taladar, (edited )

RHEL and other extremly long term support distros that have a significant user base because they hold back a lot of software features, network protocol features and moves to new dependencies that are required to work on the oldest and the newest supported distro for any given upstream software project.

Also, any time I have to learn something about a quirk in a version of software in use there it is basically wasted life time because the knowledge is already outdated by the time I obtain it.

jerrythegenius,
@jerrythegenius@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Oha,

Manjaro. Its just Arch but worse

akincisor,

I never figured out why, but I couldn’t get any version of suse to work properly on my computers. I’ve been with Debian (sid) for about a decade now, so not the most up to date criticism here.

rodbiren,

I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

Anyways, I’m sure I’m crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can’t even get games to benchmark higher.

moonpiedumplings,

Did you test with different kernels? Them using a custom scheduler that prioritizes desktop applications might cause background things to run slower.

Plus, the use of ananicy (cpu/ram limiter) limits stuff like that as well.

I use cachyos because they set up zram, anf uksmd by defualt. That’s ram compression and deduplication, and it’a pretty powerful in my experience. If you’re using cachyos, then uksmdstats and zramctl can give you an idea of how much you are saving.

rodbiren,

I used the default v3 kernel that Cachy installs by default. My guess is the workloads I have are Ram I/O bound and that just doesn’t mesh with the scheduler. I’m literally rooting for it to be faster because I want caring about scheduler and optimization to matter, but freaking stock Linux Mint ran the loads faster.

Falcon,

Cachy is a great live usb because it has zfs.

sirico,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

I’d agree with Manjaro, It was my first I kinda know Linux distro after brown Ubuntu and Mint at the time it really worked well, but then package desyncing started affecting my installation followed by the first of many controversial behaviours from the team. It’s one of many Linux distros that hasn’t progressed much in the last few years, like elementary, and the idea it is easy to arch is false when you end up having to babysit updates because testing isn’t as up to par as something like Fedora or Mint.

Garuda is a distro that has swung from a do not install to prob the best “Welcome to arch” distro for me. Their focus on tooling is getting up there with Mint & Suse BTRFS manager being a shining program of the project. More so, shows how utterly pointless Manjaro has become and badly managed the project is.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #