(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?
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.)

gianni,

This is a balanced take in my opinion. Also an Arch user. Distrobox has helped remedy things somewhat.

shrugal,

For me personally: Something like Arch. I want to spend as little time as possible on installation and configuration, and I don’t want to have to read update notes or break my system. But I get that it’s great for some people, and their wiki is just next level!

In general: Ubuntu. It feels like I read something about Canonical causing trouble every other week, and don’t even get me started on snaps!

Rozauhtuno,
@Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Completely agree on both points. Canonical always acts against the spirit of open-source whenever they get the chance.

And while Arch is great, I prefer things that work out of the box.

Inui,

Just to share my experience, I used the archinstall script so I have btrfs snapshots and didnt have to put together everything myself. I almost update every day because it gives me a dopamine hit and nothing has broken in the last year and a half since I switched off Windows. I’ve had fewer issues than when I tried to Fedora with the Nvidia card I already owned. It could definitely be a case of ‘works on my machine’ but I think reports of Arch breakages are overblown.

I had to hold off on updating my Debian 12 server due to a severe bug just a month or two ago.

vortexal,
@vortexal@lemmy.ml avatar

I know it’s probably an odd choice, but ChromeOS. It has the potential to be not just a good starting point for new Linux users but also a distro that could allow Linux to be a lot more accessible to people who aren’t as technologically capable. The main problem is that, similar to android, Google prevents ChromeOS from being used as a proper Linux distro. Right now, it might be a good alternative to Windows and MacOS but as a Linux distro, it’s just not worth using. Especially considering that Linux already has some options available for running android apps, such as Waydroid, that work pretty well.

kib48,

I really think Google has no idea what it wants ChromeOS to be anymore, they’re just kinda shoving in shoddy solutions to its problems so they can say “hey we can do that too!”

soon they’re gonna introduce Steam and I look forward to that being a big shitshow lol

vortexal,
@vortexal@lemmy.ml avatar

Have they ever? ChromeOS’s original “app store” was just Chrome’s extension store. It’s been awhile since I’ve checked but Google doesn’t (or at least didn’t) officially support running android apps in ChromeOS Flex. Instead of focusing on getting more apps running on ChromeOS, they’re actively working on Google Play Games for Windows (which also hurts android). For which I think I saw that there are games that work in Google Play Games but they don’t work in ChromeOS for some reason. I’d imagine that there are a lot of other weird things but it’s been a while since I’ve actually used it.

It’s just one of those things where, ChromeOS has the potential to be a good competitor to Windows and MacOS (and maybe even a good Linux distro) but for some reason Google does nothing with it to make it worth using and actually seems to be actively harming it.

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.

Cwilliams,

Agree. The tradeoff of building everything from source just doesn’t pay off

Hellmo_Luciferrari,

Ubuntu: It’s not a lack of features that pushed me away; it’s more about the way things are going. I am not a fan of snap packages. I have run into odd issues trying to use them. I used Ubuntu server for my Dell Poweredge and I shut it down until I can find a suitable replacement. I struggled with it respecting my DNS settings which in turn killed my reverse proxy setup.

Manjaro: While I love Arch and some of its derivatives, I can’t stand by Manjaro. I thought it would have been a good OS to use since I was familiar with Arch, but it had enough dependency issues where updates broke them. Funny enough, never have I had a dependency issue with just plain old Arch.

I use Arch btw. But besides the meme on it, I legitimately eo use arch and couldn’t be happier.

Grass,

Same. Both started out good but kept becoming more and more… not good. If nothing else Manjaro taught me how to chroot from a live distro to fix catastrophic failures. Ubuntu really ruined my week when they decided to try becoming a smart phone with the very touch centric looking UI at the time when I didn’t have time to revert or change distros, which is what finally pushed me to run servers headless and use ssh. Last I tried none of the phone like de’s are particularly intuitive as touch interfaces either.

Hellmo_Luciferrari,

I use KDE on Arch on my Lenovo Yoga 7i, and I don’t particularly use the touchscreen as much as I would have thought. Though for Waydroid it does work fairly nicely.

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, (edited )

I don’t hate them, but this hits hard. They are THE most influential distro for people outside of the community. They have by far the biggest user base and community, but instead of using this to collaborate with other distributions and specially with the freedesktop folks for the improvement of the commons, they have this culture of downstream work that rarely get the effort needed to be upstreamed. It’s usually “it’s good enough for us, so that’s where we’ll leave it”, and they end up with these weird solutions that only they use.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

It’s usually “it’s good enough for us, so that’s where we’ll leave it”, and they end up with these weird solutions that only they use.

Exactly. And to make things even worse then you’ve people upstream (Debian) or sidestream (other distros) that eventually decide to implement whatever they did but properly and then they go there, pick it and replace their original implementation.

muix,

Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.

drndramrndra,

No hate for canonical or suse, just redhat?

wigit, (edited )

Had to scroll way too far for this.

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.

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

Bandicoot_Academic,

Probably PoP_OS!. There isn’t anything wrong with the os itelf, my problem is rather that its often sugested as a beginer friendly distro which in my experience it absolutely isn’t. The amount of issues I encountered while trying to use it almost drove me away from Linux as a whole. (It was the first distro i tried) The time I spent trying to make everything work was comparable to Arch.

I realy like the idea and the DE they ship by default is one of the best ones I’ve seen (it’s like GNOME but in my opinion much better) but the bugs make it a terrible suggestion for new users.

Presi300, (edited )
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

Pull out your pitchforks, debian.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good in a VM or a server, but it’s the worst Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had.

  • Apt sucks, it’s the worst package manager imo (and I use Gentoo). Slow, bad a dependency resolution and apt-autoremove nuked my system both times I tried to use debian.
  • It’s old. LTS is only good for servers, you cannot change my mind and I don’t see a reason to use sid or unstable, when I can use literally why other distro with a better prepare manager.

And it just does some bizarre things, like not setting up sudo with the graphical installer…

neo,
@neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space avatar

Manjaro, because we’re here on arch to use the AUR, and that breaks Manjaro basically every time.

yum13241,

I agree with you.

I don’t hate Manjaro’s developers, but they simply do not know what they are doing. They over promise and under deliver.

Drito,

My worst experience was on Linux Void.

The iso has an encryption key problem. I tried the distro one year after, the same problem 😆 . Its the only distro that has that kind of problem. Once the problem is solved thanks to the forum, the shell didn’t switch the language properly, the “-” prints a wierd character, most keys on the that row was wrong. Maybe all the praise for that distro comes from non-french speaking people, so they didn’t saw the problem.

I know, the DE versions of the iso should works nice, but Void is advertised as minimalist, I want my WM. If this is that hard to switch the installation to french language, why Alpine is able to provide a correct installation experience (not easy, but correct) ?

smackjack,

I don’t think I’ve ever used Ubuntu for more than a month. I just don’t like the way it looks, how locked down everything is, and how hard it is to customize.

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