(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

Spectacle8011,
@Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space avatar

I don’t really have a least favorite distribution. I mean, I guess between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, Manjaro, and Gentoo, the least appealing choices to me are Manjaro and Gentoo. Manjaro is just Arch but worse, because the packages are old and likely to cause incompatibilities with AUR packages that need really up-to-date system packages, and I…don’t trust the maintainers to have configured everything better than I could have myself. Just based on history.

Debian has ancient packages. That’s the only reason. I’d just end up using Flatpak packages or compiling from source.

Any other distribution I could use, including Gentoo, but Arch is the sweet spot for me.

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.

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!

gianni,

I agree with this the most. People obsess over the start menu paradigm simply because they like it in Windows. I desire more open mindedness when it comes to looking into alternative ways to interact with your computer, so I align with GNOME.

joeyjr,
@joeyjr@mastodon.online avatar

@gianni Perhaps Fedora and parent. Just because...

THE_ANON,

(Mod) Ubuntu shit breaks more than half the things i want to use.

zloubida,
@zloubida@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t get the hate for Manjaro, TBH. I never had any problem with it, and I used it as my main OS for a few years now.

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

It’s fine. People like to shit on it, usually people that have never even tried it.

I’ve run it for years on many systems and had no issues, which I can’t say with most other distros I’ve tried on and off.

TheGrandNagus,

People dislike it because:

  • There’s no real reason to use it over Arch/EndeavourOS
  • Their holding back of updates for 2 weeks is stupid and can cause breakage/dependency issues when you also have stuff installed via AUR (which doesn’t get held back for 2 weeks)
  • They hold back packages for 2 weeks, citing stability and that they can check for issues then patch before they push, but then they just… don’t do that. Known issues still get pushed.
  • Manjaro repos have had issues with malware in the past
  • Manjaro has on multiple occasions had their SSL certificates expire, with their advertised “fix” being to roll your system time back. This is a job that can be automated, or at the very least should have a reminder for someone in Manjaro to sort out. The fact it happened once is an embarrassment, but the fact it’s happened more times is absolutely inexcusable.
zloubida,
@zloubida@lemmy.world avatar

Once, I listened what some people said on the Internet, and I tried Arch. I came back to Manjaro, but I learned a lot so I’m not unhappy with the experience.

However, to say that there’s no reason to use it over Arch (I don’t know about Endeavour, I never actually used it) is just wrong. Maybe you don’t like the differences, but they are important and useful for someone like me. When I installed Arch, I needed to tinker it for hours before having something usable. I don’t want to tinker, I want my OS to work, even if it means other people made choices for me, as long as I can revert them; that’s what Manjaro offers. For example, I love GNOME, but only with some plugins, like dash to dock. When I installed Arch, GNOME made an update which broke a lot of plugins, included dash to dock; while Manjaro waited for dash to dock to work to push the new GNOME. Some issues may be pushed, but a lot of others aren’t. I prefer to have one big update twice a month instead of having to update and tinker again my OS possibly every day.

Manjaro is far from perfect, no distro is, but for people like me, it works very well, and better than Arch.

CrabAndBroom,

Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they’ve had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don’t agree that it’s “cheating” to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what’s essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.

leopold, (edited )

I very much don’t care for ElementaryOS, but I really don’t think it’s fair to paint it as “Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS”. It’s not just GNOME with some extensions. They made a whole desktop environment and suite of applications for their distro. That’s a ton of work. I think any distro that does that deserves some amount of respect.

ILikeBoobies,

I always confuse it with Sugar

kugmo,
@kugmo@sh.itjust.works avatar

Ubuntu when it introduced snaps, anything red hat, anything immutable

areyouevenreal,

What are your reasons? This is a fairly broad amount of things to hate.

gianni,

“Anything immutable” is bold. Any bad experiences, personally? I don’t think they’ve negatively impacted the desktop Linux landscape as a whole…

bbbhltz,
@bbbhltz@beehaw.org avatar

The distro I came here to mention has been hated on already. My dislike goes to the distros that start off fine, and somehow screw it up.

Honestly, I remember using Manjaro ages ago. It had an official Openbox spin (not a community thing). I had already used Arch but I didn’t even check to see what it was based on when I tried. I thought, “green is nice” and it was. It very quickly became less nice. I didn’t use it after that, but I’ve heard plenty of hate since then.

I’m going to put another one out there just for fun.

Distrowatch’s n°1… MX Linux

Nothing wrong with it, but the fact that it is number 1 (I know their ranking is just for fun and based on page hits) and doesn’t deserve it is the issue. It works great, when I used it I didn’t like how there was a second application for installating certain software. I think I used the Xfce setup. Again, it’s fine, but if a first-time Linux desktop user sat down and installed that, it might not be the best initiation.

Popular and highly ranked distros give Desktop Linux a bad name sometimes is what I’m saying.

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.

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

I use Fedora as my primary desktop distro. It’s a sturdy base with relatively up-to-date packages from the repos. It doesn’t really push technology I consider undesirable, like Snaps. Even though I have to rely on RPMFusion for a number of proprietary parts, due to Fedora’s free software stance, I don’t have any particular qualms about that. I also increasingly use Flatpaks anyway.

When I used to use Reddit the /r/fedora community was helpful and welcoming.

One downside is because the kernel changes frequently, and I (sadly) own a Nvidia GPU, akmods runs very often. Another downside is sometimes that frequently changing kernel can cause issues. I think in the past year or two I’ve had two distinct occasions where a kernel upgrade caused my mounted shares to not mount correctly. Reporting an issue to upstream also takes quite some involvement, as I discovered when I had to create some Red Hat account to report an issue about the packaging of some software in a beta release of Fedora.

So all-in-all I would say Fedora is a strong distro. It is probably not the most beginner-friendly one, though, given how you have to dip your toes into RPMFusion and related challenges. It used to be worse, since DejaVu used to be the default font system-wide and you had to install a fonts package from COPR to make the system actually look pleasant. Since then they switched to Noto, which makes the font situation MUCH better.

On servers and VMs I use Debian because I do not have the patience to maintain a faster moving Fedora multiple times over. This is exacerbated by the awful defaults of Gnome, which I have to bend into shape with extensions. When Fedora 40 releases later this year I fully intend to reinstall from scratch since KDE Plasma 6 will be available.

edit: i misread the prompt and just talked about my favorite distro that i actively use. whoops.

My least favorite distro could be Manjaro if I actually used it, but it is Ubuntu because of how close it is to being a great distro. Snaps really soured me to that deal. Snapd and Snaps make it difficult to use in VMs, too, because now you have to over-commit resources for something that could and should be smaller and simpler. Debian stays winning, as usual.

mikesailin,

NIXOS. It has a very steep learning curve without acceptable documentation and once I climbed the learning curve, I realized that it was very different from the Linux that I love.

fogetaboutit,

I hope you dont give up on it for too long, I think it’s a great OS once you get the hang of nix. To this day, its the only OS I trust where I could install anything I want and can still rollback without worries. Also I can make sure that my installation is the same as others, which means other people can literally just copy paste my config to test.

MiddledAgedGuy, (edited )

TL;DR: Ubuntu. Because I want choices.

Ubuntu. And I’ve felt that way for a long time, so it’s not something recentish like snaps.

I don’t want my distro to decide what DE and software I’m using for me. They used to have a minimal iso which gave you, as the name suggests, a very minimal install. But now their minimal image is meant for containerized stuff and if memory serves comes with some extra cruft for that purpose.

I got annoyed and I left. And every distro I’ve tried since, even if I didn’t stick with it, I liked better.

To add some constructiveness, as that’s just complaining. That can be a good thing, just depends on the user. If they want the crafted experience Ubuntu provides, then it’s a good pick. It’s just not for me.

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.

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