What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.
Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.
Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.
Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.
Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.
On the other hand:
Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see “I’ll give Slowroll a try.”
PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.
Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.
The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.
Good summary. 👍
I haven’t noticed much difference, Debian has always been the go to distro if you wanted reliability and repositories that cover almost everything. Debian has always been an excellent choice for productivity. It’s not by accident that Debian for more than 20 years has been the distro with by far the most derivatives.
By that standard Arch is the only distro that has achieved something similar, and it may be somewhat telling that SteamOS switched from Debian based to Arch based. Arch is way smaller in scope, and more nimble and easier to maintain. But AFAIK they do not have the democratic process Debian has, so I’m not sure it can really be called community based distro like Debian. Arch has more of a top leadership.
Debian is probably the most true to the Free and Open Source ideals among the big distros.
Oh yeah, there’s a big difference now in distro conversations.
Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around “best distro for me”, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; “of you’re going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the source”.
But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. It’s strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.
Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about “bleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in between”
Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and it’s easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.
Now people will regularly say “use Debian, it’s solid and reliable” and not follow up with “you’ll have to deal with old packages though”
That’s the thing though you really don’t have to deal with old packages. The ones that count are in the backports repo and for everything else there’s is flatpak. Plus I think the reason steamos switched from Debian to arch was the methodology changed from being mutable to immutable and making it more for a handheld vs installed on many systems. It had nothing to do with the quality of the distro.
I’m not discussing quality of distro here, but people’s changing perception of Debian over the years. The way that people currently use/suggest/recommend distros has put Debian more in favour than say 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
It’s always been good depending on use case, but people currently are recommending it more for general use than has been typical before. And I think it is, as you said, that some of those past limiting factors are not a big problem anymore. I did suggest that in my first post.