I asked Reddit what their favorite Linux distros are. Here’s what they wrote.

12 min readMay 7, 2023

Linux is that kind of geeky operating system, isn’t it?

I should know, though. As something of a Linux user myself for over the past 5 years, I’ve come to appreciate its simultaneous Zen simplicity, and its chaos.

So coming from an environment where Windows with Office is crowned king on almost all home office and business buildings, it is quite refreshing to take some solace from what fellow Linux users are doing with their own systems.

Does anyone remember Windows vs Linux wars?

Yeah, we really don’t need to get into that right now.

Why Linux is great (even though some people don’t like it)

Linux has advantages over other operating systems. That’s one hill I’m going to die on. You can do a lot of things on Linux that are not so easy to do on other operating systems:

Inline security updates that don’t require pesky restarts? Check.
Need to fix boot problems? Don’t worry, we got you covered.
Desktop style? Classy.
Twitch streamers’ ultimate HUD? Well…

We’re working on that.

Right. So it’s clear that Linux can do many things, but it cannot do everything just yet, mainly because there is a lack of motivated manpower to throw at those problems. But those are issues that I am going to have to defer to another post. Because Linux clearly works well for a lot of people, myself included, and so we are going to see exactly what these peole have to say about their Linux setups.

It’s important to note (a phrase horribly abused by AI) that the interview wasn’t a straight poll. I actually had quite a lot of people tell me in detail what they are using their Linux boxes for, exactly what features are the lifesavers for them, and other interesting stuff — it’ll make you surprised.

Here is the Reddit thread of the interview on r/linux.

SUSE and openSUSE

Quite a lot of nice things about these distros, to be honest:

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I’m a long-time Linux user and have been on Ubuntu my entire life since late 2000s. Lately though I’ve had a few annoying bugs with video playback in my Kubuntu installation as well as graphical glitches, or Slack hanging about 45 minutes into a video call. I installed Tumbleweed and it’s been a blessing. I get the latest KDE Plasma without messing around with backport PPAs, all the bugs are gone, subjectively the system is more responsive and fast. Conceptually, not having to upgrade your distribution every 6 months is also great, rolling distros are the future. This is the best Linux experience I’ve had in 15 years.

I definitely hate PPAs as well, they are such a Pain in the Pecking Artery (TM) and most of my uses of PPAs have ended in disaster. Like can we all just finally agree on using 3rd party repos instead?

My all time favorite has always been the SuSE flavor of Linux. I left Windows 98 in 1998 for SuSE Linux and never looked back. I use Leap for a custom designed ham radio station. Which includes device control such as the radios themselves along with other station devices. A complete complement of Software Defined Radio. For this purpose, no Linux distribution comes close to the stability and ability to customize. I don’t use pre built repositories, all software is built from source.
Leap also performs with the same level of stability for running the household. Usual stuff like Hulu to banking.
On the test bench, I have Manjaro running. Which is great for testing, but being so far ahead of the Enterprise. I don’t use it for anything important.

Generally Red Hat is not so much customizable on the graphical side as it is stable (unfortunately) so I can totally relate with you here on that part.

Compiling from source rocks — as long as the instructions for doing so are straightforward.

Fedora

Interesting… no mentions for Red Hat or CentOS. That’s probably for a good reason. A lot of mentions in particular for Fedora Silverblue.

I am a noob when it comes to tech. But I’ve been distro-hopping since a while for now. I have a very weird device list which are actively trying to be incompatible with Linux (most of the times) I own a surface book with integrated GPU and a late 2012 Mac mini, both of which gave me a hard time in initial setup and subsequent bugs. I’ve tried Ubuntu,kubuntu,pop_os!,vanilla os, arch, Garuda, manjaro, mint and finally settled on fedora . Fedora gave me the best out-of-the-box experience on both surface book and Mac mini. I think I finally found peace. Fedora seemed to be stable and fast enough and didn’t give me a hiccup with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or any other drivers and it was fast af for my hardware.

Glad that it works with your hardware!

Fedora Silverblue.
The first serious, long-term use of Fedora I’ve put time into. I was skeptical at first, but firsts are always bundled with skepticism, human autonomy after all. Since Silverblue/Ostree encourages use of containers, I can set up a container based on the Rawhide releases of Fedora, while keeping more sensitive projects that call for older libraries inside of a RHEL container. The atomic, immutable base is described by a Jorge Castro as having a “fresh feeling”, I can testify that is true after every update. I was able to layer dependencies and tricky drivers without encountering entropy in the long-term.
Speaking of, do consider taking a look at ublue.it for a glimpse into the future of Fedora Ostree, that’s where all the bees are buzzing about bootable containers. Overhauls to the Anaconda Installer ISOs are going to accommodate the use of docker files. We’re expected to have a stable implementation of such ISOs by Fedora 39.

I’m fully onboard for containerization of processes. It’s long overdue. Imagine if you could have related services of the same Linux package or feature running inside a container instead of as separate processes? That would be huge.

LAMP stacks could be ran in containers instead of as three different services and a dozen binaries.

Same thing for MEAN stacks for “controller” apps.

I truly can’t wait to see what cool ideas people come up with these things. It can be used for much more than just individual packages.

Fedora Silverblue, I really like to be on the cutting edge, but as a scientist (physicist) cannot afford to lose my data or to lock myself out of my computer because the latest update breaks on me.
Fedora had the ultimate balance of cutting edge and stable, with a trusted party behind it that is known for reliable and sane decisions while Silverblue gives me a rock solid foundation that is basically indestructibl. Currently I’m on Fedora 38, but if things break a stable Fedora 37 image without any loss of data from my current set up is literally just a reboot away.

Maybe I should install Silverblue on any new boxes I get.

Currently running Fedora 37 + Sway WM. Such a nice combination. I have tried other distros, but Fedora just feels like home to me!

It seems to be everyone’s home actually. Well almost, because…

Arch Linux

I just couldn’t resist, could I?

There were a lot of Arch supporters in the interview, which is great. They like the wiki, huge selection of packages, community… that kind of stuff. Not pasting any of them here as there are way too many of them and this post is getting quite big.

Gentoo

Again, I couldn’t resist, could I. Apparently, people are mainly installing Gentoo linux for fun, cool hobby projects. Sounds like a lab of Gentoo installs on exotic hardware would be very fun indeed.

Again, too many short comments about it, so no quotes here.

Debian

Debian is truly the fan favorite of the Linux community, more than pretty much any other distribution. I can probably explain this by saying that solutions like Fedora’s Silverblue and (if any) openSUSE’s equivalent to that are quite recent, so Debian is how the establishment has been making its solid systems for a long time now.

While there was some rapport for pop!OS, Ubuntu Budgie, even Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, it was Debian that is the most respected in this thread:

I just want to say that I really like your website and its vision.
I am a commission writer who exclusively uses debian on a cyberdeck I built out of a briefcase. I use the window manager i3wm along with vim as my text editor. I use tor for all of my web browsing. I have always loved Debian because of its stability. I have currently ran my machine for 35 days without needing a restart. This allows me to keep all of my work spaces open without having to remake them. I prefer Debian to other distros because it works on everything without the need for much hassle. Thats good for me because just building my writing machine was enough of a hassle.

Why thank you! And like I said: Debian is one iron-solid distro. If we compare Debian to the other stable distros then we see that the other distros are like various metallic alloys alloys while Debian is more like steel.

(and in case you didn’t get the reference, do visit my blog https://notatether.com were I write about technology and finance.)

After much hopping for several years Debian 11.6 stable with KDE.
I kept coming back to Debian. Stable and the ability to use Flatpaks opened the door for newer apps if I was interested. I fell victim for reading Redditors or YouTubers about other distros for a bit and realized no matter what they said, Debian is perfect for me.
Where I struggled next was the desktop environment. I loved the idea of tiling window managers but never had the patience to learn it on my main machine. XFCE was always my next favorite. I have a one set way that I like my desktop and XFCE was great at customizing it but I felt the appearance just needed more modernity and I didn’t want to continue learning customization options. At some point I just want to do my thing on my machine.
So as of late I went to KDE and I love it. I am able to get my setup perfectly set for me and there’s more of a modern appearance that I like.
With that said I have a 12+ year laptop that I want to put Debian with i3 on to tinker with. Will start with LXDE or LXQT that has openbox pre installed and then install i3 so I can have a light light DE in the very early stage of learning the wm’s.

I’m a big KDE fan here. LXDE not so much. XFCE is tolerable as in I dn’t mind using it but it’s not something I’d put on my daily driver.

Some miscellaneous replies I got:

I probably have an interesting story to tell since most people seem to come to Linux with the perspective of a Windows user and most mac users don’t even try all that hard to turn Linux into a more mac like experience as that tends to be a very difficult mountain to climb due to almost every distro and creator basing the distros functionality and hotkeys around Windows paradigms even if they are able to make it look nicer or more consistent like macOS.
Unfortunately that is where distros like ElementaryOS tend to fall apart once you get past its aesthetics. It just doesn’t pull enough inspiration from macOS imho — while other distros pull a lot more of their own inspirations from Windows comparatively.
All that preamble to say that of all the distros I have tried Ubuntu Budgie is without a doubt one of the most mac like, it just works, type of experiences I have ever had with any distro that nails the usability and functionality of the OS — even if the theme, and overall aesthetics miss the mark by just a hair, which is easily fixable by the user and a little custom theming. Same cannot be said for fixing core functionality issues with other distros or ElementaryOS.
I even have created my own spin of Ubuntu Budgie where my sorun.me script sits on the desktop after install and the user can then see the entire distro transformed in about 5 minutes into the base distro I prefer — which includes mac like hotkeys for the distro. Had I not experienced GalliumOS a few years back, maybe several now, I would not have started to use Linux Desktops as a serious OS for personal use, but it did teach me a lot about how fit and finish matters — no matter the hardware and software and they had just done such a good job with that it was hard to put it out of my mind, so I chased after it ever since. I went to using xubuntu and replicating what galliumOS had to even KDE Neon thinking I might be able to do the same, Xubuntu got closer than KDE did due to overheating and general bugginess with KDE Neon — but Ubuntu Budgie was just such a different experience compared to those 2 and everything else I had been trying. It is hard for me to imagine a better Linux Distro existing for general desktop and user use.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/

Now somebody should make a huge Linux distro that feels just like an iMac or macBook.

MX Linux
I have distro-hopped for a while and have experimented around with many distros, but in the end, it was MX that had everything. Rock-solid workstation stability (since it’s based on Debian Stable), tons of in-house built system management tools, a natively supported Advanced Hardware Support kernel, very easy tools to make your very own flavor of MX, and an incredibly helpful experienced dev team. Stone-cold professionals who know exactly what the hell they’re doing.
I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like MX is the best for every single Linux purpose, but I WILL say that MX is the best for MANY Linux desktop purposes. Other distros will have other strengths that MX doesn’t have, but at the end of the day, when you’re tired of screwing around and need to get stuff done, MX is just the best. In summary, it’s the distro for professionals who know what they want and also don’t need or care for flamboyant wild changes and bleeding edge system-breaking updates. They need a boring fully predictable well-performing system that works all day, every day, end of story.

I’ve heard of MX Linux before but I never knew it was this popular. Go figure…

I was a long time Windows user. Right now my daily driver is Fedora 37 KDE on Lenovo ThinkPad T14s. I had used PoP OS for a considerable time and before that I used Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04. I also run a local server on my Raspberry pi 4 which runs Raspian Lite. I am a Research Scholar and hence I use servers in my college which runs CentOS and RedHat as well. For our personal server in the lab we use mostly Ubuntu.
As for my favourite distro, it would be Fedora although Debian has everything that my research field requires so I am not sure exactly. I did a full Arch install successfully but it was too much hassle for me to fix everything and so I would give it a try some day when I have some time to spare.

I think this comment stands out the most and that is what I’m going to be discussing in the closing remarks.

Do people need a mixture of distros?

What would the industry look like if we had a shapeshifting distro that could be calibrated by the to behave like Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, MX, Slackware, Arch and other distros?

It is very clear that a lot of Linux users work with many distributions on a regular basis. So having the ability to transform one distro into another would make it a lot easier to get stuff done without multi-booting or buying a bunch of machines.

It would also make upgrading to a new distro a lot easier as you’d be able to upgrade sideways, backward, diagonally, and so forth, not just forward from “Ubuntu 18 to Ubuntu 22”.

I think this would make a huge coup in Linux because most installers right now just wipe the root partition and start clean, if you want to replace your current distro for another. But this idea would make Linux much less fragmented as everyone would be able to swim between distros.

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