(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?
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

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.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

Whats wrong with apt?

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Nothing at all, the main issue is that with graphical applications developers have an hard time to package things for all the useless distros out there and some other distros like Debian on stable will only haver older versions of software. Flatpak solves both of this issues.

ursakhiin,

I just now discovered why people are hating on Ubuntu pro by receiving a note that Ubuntu will not provide security updates for some apps it came with unless you activate Pro.

I think I’m done with Ubuntu on any personal machines.

astraeus,
@astraeus@programming.dev avatar

Yeah I didn’t offer much input on personal devices because I did use Ubuntu for awhile as a personal environment and it’s fine, but could use work. I think personally I like Debian better, but if I want a clean GNOME experience Fedora is probably the move.

Pacmanlives,

Currently using Bookworm and KDE as my desktop right now. Works really well! If I need more up to date software I use Distrobox and run whatever distro’s version of software I want. I have both Debian Sid and Arch Firefox versions installed on my machine right now just to see if it worked and it’s flawless. I mostly just run apps from SID container and it exposed the app to my desktop wonderfully. Really the only way I will fly these days.

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.

umbrella, (edited )
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

I don’t have many issues on Ubuntu like you imply. It’s the reason why I stick with it despite snaps.

dingus, (edited )

I was an Ubuntu fan many moons ago. Then I fell in love with Mint when it was just all around a better version of Ubuntu.

Then I ended up with a new Windows laptop for years and forgot about Linux entirely. But this year, I’ve actually returned to Ubuntu. I like how it has a fresh and different look and it still performs well on my now aging laptop. Mint is always my go to recommendation to others, but I just wanted a different look than your standard Windows-like look that Cinnamon has. I was initially turned off way back when, when Ubuntu switched to Unity, but now a difference in look appeals to me. We’ll see if I get annoyed with Snaps or not. So far, everything has been running smoothly.

If there was a GNOME fork of Mint, I’d likely be using that. I get that you can technically install whatever desktop environment in whatever distro you want, but for compatibility sake, it’s best to roll with what your distro comes with.

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.

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.)

gianni,

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

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

CrabAndBroom,

Yeah I was gonna say Manjaro too. I used it for a while while I was heading towards Arch but wasn’t feeling fully confident to go full Arch as a daily driver yet, and it was nothing but trouble for me. I found that it tried to prevent me from breaking things, which is not necessarily bad, but it would also break things by itself and then this feature would prevent me from going in and fixing them.

I much prefer it when the OS just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want, even if it’s dumb lol

someonesmall,

I’m using Manjaro daily for +5 years and had one or two package conflicts, never any boot problems. I don’t understand where all the Manjaro hate is coming from…

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.

Snoopy, (edited )
@Snoopy@jlai.lu avatar

Unpopular opinion :

  • Arch, i installed it long ago so i can’t remember anything except that i spent lot hours for its installation.
  • Reason : spend a lot time reading the wiki without an easy installer…even Ubuntu was better but i wanted a challenge and a better uderstanding on linux.
  • Some AUR package didn’t work.
  • Why Arch ? To get the lastest os and package as i had a recent gaming laptop.

So I changed and prefered manjaro with its ui for linux os, graphic card…but some thing were broken…than i settled Pop-Os for 3 years and distrohopped again for immutable os : Vanilla OS and Fedora Kinoite. :)

Another distro :

  • Ubuntu
  • reason : snap and various decisions.
Falcon,

I enjoyed arch for how straight forward the install was.

Gentoo however, every time I do that from scratch it’s with X, Westland is NetworkManager that give up (my recommendation is oddlamma installer)

Snoopy,
@Snoopy@jlai.lu avatar

Yeah Arch is straight forward but is require an amazing amount of focus and concentration. :)

I should try gentoo as my next challenge, i guess i won’t like it but in fact, i enjoy those challenge and trying new stuff. ^^

wuphysics87,

You need to learn how bullets work, my friend.

Snoopy,
@Snoopy@jlai.lu avatar

Bullets in markdown ?


<span style="color:#323232;">* like this ?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* or like that ?
</span>
wuphysics87,

As in what does it mean to itemize. In this case to make an unordered list.

Snoopy,
@Snoopy@jlai.lu avatar

Sorry, my english comprehension is rusty. It is an unordered list. I used it to improve readibility on phone and separate topics.

If the topic is mixed in a paragraphe i would have a harder time to quickly retrieve informations. Here you can read Arch and ubuntu and why in a single glance.

aniki,

Ubuntu / snaps

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