What is the very best Linux Distro? - best to make a poll about that

Best Distro

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Stop fucking around and install Debian.

Seriously.

Everything else is either functionally or absolutely downstream of Debian.

In theory, Arch is a bit better, because they remove all of the otherness that is Debian, in favour of unadorned upstream packages. In practice, this breaks things.

The other day, I installed Ryujinx to play Mario Wonder prerelease. I was shocked at how streamlined it all is now. I had to add an MS repo, but then I just pulled one package, which pulled all dependencies. One command and it built. One more and I was running.

You don't get this anywhere else without the retardo solutions like snap, etc. that build parallel distros on your PC.
 
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Highly depends on application, of course. But if you're an engineer, RHEL if you need to pay for service, Rocky if you don't. RHEL is the distro pretty much every commercial enterprise application targets as its base platform, and the one every company producing high-end hardware tests the most rigorously. If you need to use products from anyone like Synopsys or Ansys, especially if you need to maintain a cluster of some kind, RHEL and its derivatives will give you the most performant, trouble-free experience. SLES is distinctly second-tier. Anything Debian-derived is borderline untested, although there's been some uptake of Ubuntu LTS (Notably, Ansys has started supporting it). Using a rolling-release distro is just asking for trouble.
 
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I use Arch. I've tried to use Debian Testing but the Debian installer is ridiculously janky for me and it always seems to fail whenever I try it.
Miller said:
Arch
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Endeavourniggers don't get archbtw privileges.
 
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It depends on your use case.

For a server, Ubuntu LTS or Debian is good if you want something free. Back in the day CentOS was as well.

For a home network, I run trueNAS scale on my basement server which uses Ubuntu as an OS and KVM for virtualization.

For a desktop, I prefer mint with cinnamon. It's easy and there's no reason to waste time working with bleeding edge software. It has access to all of the Ubuntu packages.

For a garbage laptop, single device controller, or a thin client, I prefer Ubuntu Server Minimal with a lightweight DE and a TurboVnc/NetGL stack installed. Plus a network stack if I want to remotely access the device controller.

One last thing Ubuntu/Debian specifically have issues with installing third party drivers due to apt-keys being deprecated. This makes installing the latest version of CUDA and TensorRT a pain. I'm not sure if this is easier to do on Fedora.

Edit:I just learned about Rocky Linux after posting this. My post should not reflect Rocky as being inferior to a Debian based Distribution. I have never used Rocky so I don't know. Also Alpine is an option used in environments like docker or raspis. Never used it as well.
 
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I use KDE neon because I like KDE and it's built on LTS Ubuntu releases so I don't need to fuck around with updating my system all the time.
 
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The Ugly One said:
Highly depends on application, of course. But if you're an engineer, RHEL if you need to pay for service, Rocky if you don't. RHEL is the distro pretty much every commercial enterprise application targets as its base platform, and the one every company producing high-end hardware tests the most rigorously. If you need to use products from anyone like Synopsys or Ansys, especially if you need to maintain a cluster of some kind, RHEL and its derivatives will give you the most performant, trouble-free experience. SLES is distinctly second-tier. Anything Debian-derived is borderline untested, although there's been some uptake of Ubuntu LTS (Notably, Ansys has started supporting it). Using a rolling-release distro is just asking for trouble.
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It's important to note that RHEL is if you need to pay for service. Not if you actually ever need service, just if someone says "hey, we need paid support". The actual support if there's a problem is garbage. It's marginally useful if you have no one on staff who can spell Lineux but for any actual problems it's going to take a while for them to get you a solution, if ever.

I can't even count the number of times I've talked to someone who had sent in a support request to RedHat and was telling me about the problem. I'd ask them for the logs, go away for a couple hours and come back with the solution. Then they'd tell me they were on week 2 or 3 of waiting for RH support.

Then you figure out the fix, send it to RedHat, as a paying customer, and it's going to be a month or two before they even acknowledge it and consider making the fix in their product.

Needless to say I make great money off RedHat customers.
 
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I'll always be the basic bitch that shills for Pop_OS. I have Arch installed on a second drive but by the time I had Arch ready to go I had a project started and rolling on Pop. I hate tinkering with my computer or ricing and shit like that. I just want to code and Pop's UI and shortcuts they have by default just click in my brain.
 
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PixarsTedKennedy said:
I'll always be the basic bitch that shills for Pop_OS. I have Arch installed on a second drive but by the time I had Arch ready to go I had a project started and rolling on Pop. I hate tinkering with my computer or ricing and shit like that. I just want to code and Pop's UI and shortcuts they have by default just click in my brain.
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Some people just want to write C programs without wanting to kill themselves from abysmal toolchain support. When I used Windows I had to use msys2 and other crazy shit just to write a fucking makefile. I think even Python is somewhat painful on Windows.
 
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