That was fun taking the survey & was even reminded that Cubes OS exists. Gonna give it a try.
Thanks for sharing ❤️
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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Ran through the questions with both realistic and idealistic answers and was recommended Debian in both cases. Am indeed a Debian user.
What people often overlook is that Debian has an incredible broad range of use cases it is well suited for: It has a beginner-friendly graphical installer, it works for desktops and servers as well as embedded systems, and it also has a rolling release version which is attractive to software developers.
And if you have questions you can always look into the Arch Wiki ;-)
Wow, I can’t believe it narrowed the list down to 30.
Lol I ended up with Debian > Rocky > Arch.
Idk how to feel. I was a longtime Debian user but actually prefer Fedora + Arch.
I got OpenSuse. I currently use bazzite and I've tried popOS and mint. I guess I could try it.
It has a learning curve for the Graphical Package Manager, but YAST GUI is awesome. The automatic snapshots are great; if any thing you do breaks the system you just boot to w previous snapshot in the advanced boot option, then if it is allworksing as expected issue a sudo snapper rollback command to make your current snapshot the default.
The automatic snapshots are great; if any thing you do breaks the system you just boot to w previous snapshot in the advanced boot option, then if it is allworksing as expected issue a sudo snapper rollback command to make your current snapshot the default.
That is really a good feature especially if you like to try out things, change stuff and tinker around.
What makes OpenSUSE Tumbleweed also a very interesting alternative for experienced users is the quality of a fast rolling release together with automated testing and QA, which I think no other distribution has. Together with a community which takes security serious, this gives you a both very up to date and quite secure system.
Yep, I ran Leap from 2017 till 2024 same system, updates were so stable you could depend on them. And nVidia hosts its own repo for Leap and Tumbleweed. I moved to Tumbleweed when I changed hardware, so for the past year it's been solid
I don't generally recommend opensuse. The package management always made me go back to arch or debian. I would recommend trying it if you have a spare pc or space for a vm though.
The package management always made me go back to arch or debian.
Well, why? Do you have concrete reasons?
That's a poor statement to make without giving any evidence. I use both Debian and Opensuse for decades in production environments. Both have very mature package management tools. Can't remember that they have failed me ever. Back in the days Opensuse's early zypp had problems, but that was solved in 2008.
Some more criteria which I think are meaningful:
- How often are you willing to upgrade or re-install your system ?
- How reliable does your system need to be ? Would it inconvenience you or even be a risk for your livelihood if it stops working tomorrow morning for a few days until you find time to fix it?
- If some software package has a breaking change, do you want to see the consequences of that change (a) invariably together with the next minor software update, or (b) only with the next mayor system upgrade of which you can chose the timing?
- How quick and experienced do you want to have security updates applied? For how long do you need security updates ? (btw this point is an important difference between Debian and Ubuntu, as in older Ubuntu LTS releases security updates are reduced!)
- is security of your system and privacy of the user data a top concern for you?
- are you an open source software developer or do you have otherwise a strong need to run the latest software version - and how old would be the oldest version you want to tolerate?
- do you want to be, in an easy way, to be involved with the open source development community?
I am thinking this could be neat for people new to Linux to help them select a first distribution.
A few more points:
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There are a lot of choices
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There are also a lot of different valuable qualities.
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Consequently, there are no distributions that are "good" or "bad".
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It is nice to try out things! And trying out things will change what appeals to you.
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That said, perhaps you don't want to try out too many things now, instead right now you'd prefer something that just works....
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Also, your needs and your capabilities will change over time. If you are a young student who wants to learn programming, a pc gamer, or somebody who likes to learn and understand Linux in detail, they might be different from when you are a busy parent or a young professional which just needs to write job applications!
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So, what matches your needs best will likely also change over time.
Finally, the choice of distributions is not an either-either or black-and-white thing. You can run Linux, and on top Windows in a Virtual Machine (basically an entire simulated computer). You also can run another Linux distribution in a virtual machine, which matches a specific use case.
Fairly accurate
To me, it gives Devuan, OpenSUSE, Rocky, Debian, Artix and Arch.
What I have used in the past 27 years is S.U.S.E., Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE Leap and Arch (the latter for some years dual-booting with Debian until NVidia shit broke both after a Debian dist upgrade, but that was only once in 13 years). I never had a stability issue with Arch.
What I currently use is Debian as daily driver, with both Guix package manager on top of it for programming, and Arch in a VM (with Guix for programming with dependencies). And importantly, I only use fully supported hardware.
I could imagine using Arch as a daily base system, or using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as a base or in a VM. But I don't have strong incentives to switch the base, Debian works incredibly well for me and I know how to configure it.
It would be way more useful if it limited the results to three or five.
reminded me i wanted to test artix
~~RHEL~~, OpenSUSE, ~~Devuan~~, Rocky Linux, ZorinOS, ~~Knoppix~~, Debian, Mint, ~~MX Linux~~, ElementaryOS, Kubuntu, etc.
When I'm looking for a distro (which I'm currently doing) my core concerns are:
- Comes with KDE Plasma pre-installed (or Xfce failing that, I may be better off with Xfce but I want to try KDE).
- That any money I'd give to the project would not end up in America.
- That any money I'd give to the project would go towards organization doing most of the dev work.
- Minimal software set to limit the chance of a malware-infected update.
- Gets critical security patches quickly, ideally as close to straight from the horses mouth as possible.
- Strong security by default, and a strong security culture.
- Monetizes the home user in some way.
EDIT: I went with OpenSUSE Leap (to replace OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which wasn't working for me). Video encoding works properly now. Doesn't meet all my conditions but probably nothing would.
Just use arch
It never proposed GNU Guix to me. Quite unfortunate, that's my daily driver and I love it.