(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?
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.

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.

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about a quirk in a version of software in use there it is basically wasted life time because the knowledge is already outdated by the time I obtain it.

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.

isVeryLoud,

Manjaro always broke on me. I can’t even trust them to keep their SSL certs up to date.

Sorry Manjaro devs, no hate, I just got burned way too many times by this arch-not-arch frankendistro.

tcrash,

Been on it for the last two years. Never broke. Idk what’s going on

Joe_0237, (edited )

OpenSUSE, awfull default software selection on desktop, and pushing users hard to use an “everything configuration tool”.

tslnox,

I tried Tumbleweed on my old main PC. When I finally got around to upgrade it, I immediately wiped it and got back to my beloved Gentoo (for which the old PC was getting a bit too slow)

Now I have Leaf on the family PC, because they pretty much only need Firefox and occasional LibreOffice and I’m lazy to try to find a different distro.

pathief,
@pathief@lemmy.world avatar

After spending a ton of time migrating CentOS machines I have to say anything red hat related.

luca,

Also Fedora too: really polished Desktop experience, great choice of DE’s, many Spins for every taste, the installer is somewhat insufferable, overall a great distro, but I just can’t get myself over Red Hat (and the logo makes me feel like I’m working on Facebook OS).

KarnaSubarna,
@KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml avatar

RHEL - for obvious reasons

joeyjr,
@joeyjr@mastodon.online avatar

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

neo,
@neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space avatar

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

lseif,

Evil Linux Suprise™

idk why people even use it. too scary for me.

kzhe,

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

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) ?

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