hi r/linux users, what do *you* look for in a distribution?
Posted by SDG_Den@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 72 comments
Hi all!
I'd love to hear the top 3 things you look for in a distribution as well as what you're currently running, i'm curious to see what the broader opinion is on this topic.
for me, the top 3 is:
- broad software support
- easy to tinker around with
- latest features
as such, i'm on arch (cachyOS). on my laptop, i am running void as the minimal install there got my laptop down to running 400mhz idle consistently, saving a lot of power.
ballshitter900@reddit
Confidence that my distro wont get discontinued after only a couple years of using it
solomazer@reddit
loudtourney_2882@reddit
Package manager quality matters way more than people admit, and it's the main reason I've stuck with Arch for years now. Pacman is just smooth, the AUR is insane, and when something breaks you can actually figure out why without digging through ten layers of abstraction. I get that stability is important and Debian people aren't wrong, but there's a real difference between a distro that's stable because nothing ever changes and one that's stable because the maintainers actually know what they're doing. That said, your Void setup sounds legitimately smart for a laptop, I've heard the runit init system cuts through a lot of bloat that systemd just kind of carries around by default. The software support thing is huge though, because at some point you'll want to install something obscure and if your distro doesn't have it packaged and the AUR equivalent is missing, you're building from source or dealing with flatpak, which feels like cheating. Basically I look for a distro where the community and package maintainers actually give a shit, because that's what keeps things working when you need them to.
Azazeldaprinceofwar@reddit
Rolling release. My days with Debian gave me enough headaches about out of date packages to never go back. Also pacman just has a much cleaner cli in my opinion then apt so I prefer to stay in the pacman ecosystem (ie Arch based)
DoubleOwl7777@reddit
SomeRedTeapot@reddit
Whatever NixOS is, apparently
spikyness27@reddit
Stability, stability, stability
mmdoublem@reddit
Found the Debian guy!
danrtavares@reddit
Esse sabe o que é bom.
spikyness27@reddit
Boring is good
danrtavares@reddit
Sim, chato e funcional.
spikyness27@reddit
Actually rhel/alma in corpo land and Ubuntu at home.... Which is weird because Ubuntu used to blow itself up back in the 1x days.
charge2way@reddit
Exactly the same for me. Although I do have a spare laptop with Fedora/Plasma on it because I've been getting rusty on RHEL since I use headless Ubuntu LTS so much for my personal stuff.
dougs1965@reddit
Yes, yes, yes.
Debian stable on all the baremetal servers and production VMs. Going to be spinning up some test vms with Debian Testing in a couple of months.
Stable on the daily driver laptop, testing on the little travelling laptop.
bjmnet@reddit
Stability Hardware Support
ibeerianhamhock@reddit
Nice default UI, stable, good for my use case.
I'm a dev and gamer. Bazzite is amazing for home use for both of those use case. It's on all my boxes at home.
For hosting I want something stable and boring. I usually choose Ubuntu minimal.
Drostina@reddit
Two conditions:
Stability & relatively up to date
So... Fedora
shogun77777777@reddit
openSUSE tumbleweed is another good choice for this reason
theluggagekerbin@reddit
I've been using fedora for a while now after being on Ubuntu for close to a decade and it's amazing how little I have to "fix" the system at all.
hypespud@reddit
Yup same 😎💎
CapitainSailor@reddit
Init system, package manager, broad software support
shogun77777777@reddit
Why does init system matter to you?
BoyRed_@reddit
sketched8@reddit
my brother just another me
jumbo_shrimpz@reddit
Exactly!!!
GumblyDorp@reddit
low ram usage, but pretty ui
NeedleworkerLarge357@reddit
Only NixOS does that.
nicman24@reddit
Zfs modules and having easy packaging. Cachyos is where I settled from red hat lmafo
xonxoff@reddit
Debian…
QuickUnion9052@reddit
My starting point is that if you already know Linux, the base distros of Debian, Arch, Fedora, and OpenSUSE are all probably fine for most people.
I'd say most other distros are trying to make using one of those base ones a bit easier out-of-the-box. Some have sensible defaults. Some have nice GUIs utilities. Some install Nvidia drivers easier or otherwise optimize for your hardware (like Cachy and Gentoo do).
I'm on Debian. That's the most conservative one and it still works fine for me.
At some point, I'll switch to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I think it's openQA and Backups will make it super easy to use as a rolling release distro.
unconceivables@reddit
Rolling release, the latest versions of all software, and as much of the software as possible in central repos. I hate having to deal with third party repos that are never updated to support the latest versions of the distro, breaking everything when I update. I've been running Arch based distros for years (currently CachyOS) with no stability issues, so I don't really have any interest in any other distros.
For servers I'm only interested in containerized applications, and I'm definitely not interested in maintaining the OS itself anymore, so it's Talos Linux all the way.
Emotional_Signal7883@reddit
Cutest penguin
sonicwind2@reddit
One of the reasons I orginally went with Ubuntu was due to the broad and active community support in every way imaginable.
Imaginary_Natural516@reddit
Stability, ease of use and security
Hrafna55@reddit
Stays out of my way as much as possible.
ConkerKnackers@reddit
The thing I look for are easy to find and fix features when things do go wrong. This is why i'm liking CachyOS so far, when I've had two update failures, I've went through the Hello screen buttons to to sort it and fix the problem. I like speed for my gaming PC but I also like stability for my other machines, so I've been leaning towards Mint for that. I would like to try out MX Linux for another machine when I get off my lazy ass and do it.
thephotoman@reddit
After you use Linux long enough, you realize that most distros are similar enough that it doesn’t matter which one you choose in most cases. Sure, you have purpose-specific distros (for example, distros for wifi routers), but when it comes to setting up a daily driver, the differences just don’t matter that much.
There are no distro-specific ecosystems. Most applications will run on most suitably recent distro releases.
Ethameiz@reddit
OUR, stability, community
blokfluitjes@reddit
Lightweight/clean
Customizable
Reliability
EvilVim@reddit
Stability and usability. That's it. I don't "rice" my setup or whatever that is.
DFS_0019287@reddit
For me, the top 3 are:
So for me, Debian ticks all the boxes and my entire fleet of machines runs Debian (or for the Pis, Raspberry Pi OS which is essentially Debian.)
hubert_farnsworrth@reddit
Portage. If a system has portage or not.
novafunc@reddit
Currently using Fedora Atomic.
durbich@reddit
It needs to be popular enough and actively maintained by a group. I need a distro that will be easy to find info for and be sure it will not be abandoned in the near future
Bubby_K@reddit
Doesn't matter if it's Gnome or KDE or XFCE or anything else, I just want a browser + system utitilies
I don't want an office suite, or an app to record my voice, or a place to write down my contacts to, or view my Fonts for some reason, I just want bare minimum desktop environment
A thumbnailer that has ALL the codecs, so it doesn't matter what file it is, it has a thumbnail preview
An immutable option
oldrocker99@reddit
One laptop has Garuda KDE Lite, a minimal Arch installation without even a web browser installed, and the other has CachyOS. I want Arch, which I have found stable and fast.
Inner-Bridge-5241@reddit
Immutable Modern Large package selection:
RakuOS
nicksterling@reddit
It’s changed in recent years. I always wanted the latest so I was on arch. Now I’m more focused on stability and rollbacks so I’m leaning toward atomic distros like ublue.
Classic-Rate-5104@reddit
It should work. New features aren't my first concern. So, i use Debian Stable. It today always works like yesterday
Monolithx64@reddit
Same here.
Plus I think everything I ever need can be installed with apt
LasnajaB@reddit
Stability - devuan(debian based) No systemd Xlibre
matsnake86@reddit
udi503@reddit
Easy installation
danrtavares@reddit
Eu prefiro maior variedade de pacotes e que seja estável. Não usar o wayland é essencial. O Linux Mint está me atendendo muito bem.
s0litar1us@reddit
Rolling release, I don't like dealing with major distro wide updates. I like having one install and then updating it as I go.
And I go with arch because I would rather build up my ideal setup from the start than tear apart someone else's ideal setup to then replace it with what I prefer.
Federal-Gecko@reddit
Stability
I don't feel compelled to spend hours tweaking the OS, I'd rather tweak customization settings.
Developer access (Tools, lang support, etc.)
black_n3xus@reddit
to be called Debian 😀
MelioraXI@reddit
Something that works and not getting in my way.
rosmaniac@reddit
Runs the tasks I need to run reliably with minimal changes until a major version upgrade is necessary; version inertia is not a bad thing as long as needed security fixes are consistent. Preferably not owned by any one company that can unilaterally change things against community input; community inertia is also not a bad thing.
I'm running Debian. There is significant overlap time-wise between stable and old stable, giving time to do an orderly transition of important software that may not necessarily run on the new stable for a few months. (Yes, I'm aware of ways to get old software to run on newer distributions and newer software on older distributions; I've been running Linux as my primary desktop for nearly 30 years. I've run Fedora; I ran Ubuntu years ago for a while; I ran CentOS for a long time. Now unapologetically running Debian.)
UnExpertoEnLaMateria@reddit
I want it to work and give little trouble, and for when I come across any problem or I need to do something I don't know how to do, I want it to be documented or broadly used so there is information from other users. Also I want it to be solid, with regular development so it won't be abandoned, with a trajectory that backs that up. Also I want it to be suitable for different use cases.
So, I use Debian.
JagerAntlerite7@reddit
Stability.
Orthopraxy@reddit
Exact-Teacher8489@reddit
Documentation, downstream fixes, filesystem that gets set during install for my root partition.
Mr_Lumbergh@reddit
It depends on what I'm doing with it.
Kasper_Franz@reddit
character
Odd_Chocolate8438@reddit
Software support and stability which is why I am on Ubuntu LTS.
Sbatushe@reddit
software availability, support, community, dev vision, stability, freedom to do whatever you like to. Gentoo has all of this.
Litewallymex3@reddit
speed, lightweight, flexible
TheDarkerNights@reddit
At this point, familiarity. Which means either Arch or something RHEL-based for me.
Additional-Sky-7436@reddit
1) It works. 2) It has enough modern features that I'm happy with. 3) Broad software support. 4) Regular reliable updates. 5) Stays out of my way.
Salted_Fsh@reddit
package manager, broad software support and preferably minimal
Minute_Department_92@reddit
I just care about things being simple. They don't even need to be easy, just simple.
I can't live in a world without pacman and aur. I don't even know if I care about anything else