Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It's very up to date, yet it's somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven't had any problems finding software, yet it's not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.
NixOS for me. It's a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there's also an entire distro based on it.
Yeah I've gotten into Nix recently and it's slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I'm on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I've got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol
OpenSuse tumbleweed
OpenSuse Tumbleweed without a doubt!
Gentoo. It's amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.
There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.
+1 for Gentoo - Portage can be fun in a weird way. I'm more of a "just work" type of person though, so I've stuck to Arch, but the time I had with Gentoo was pretty great and the new binary package format might bring me back. I do have a 7950X nowadays so I wonder if that'd fly through Gentoo on bare metal.
Another vote for openSUSE Tumbleweed
Alpine.
I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.
So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.
I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!
I'm enjoying OpenSuse Tumbleweed loving rolling release and stability
Custom North Korean linux. Preinstalled missile tracking software.
NixOS is not based on any other distro because it has its own package manager which is better than all the other distros'
Yes, that package manager will surely be the best one and not just be another one in the zoo.
The whole system is built using it, so every time your system will be the same when building from the same configuration. Even if you such to another computer, you will download locked versions of all packages and get the exact same system
In Ubuntu installing and removing a package doesn't even guarantee it's cleaned up
Can it still be a favourite if I haven't touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.
Guix
Guix is the future, definitely my favorite Linux besides Mint and Fedora.
PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.
Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed
Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it's one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that's for a good reason. It's installer isn't that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora's installer any day. ( I haven't tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )
Artix is well... arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.
I discovered this on Lemmy, clearly there is no going back
Wait until you hear about biebian
I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.
Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.
I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).
I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it's not there.
I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .
The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that's very intense, let's say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials
If we allow derivatives, I'd say SteamOS despite being Arch. It's putting Linux in non-technical people's literal hands and it's not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It's almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It's been a really long time since we've last seen a fundamentally different distro that's got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they're still very package oriented. We've been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It's incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they're atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.
I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Read in an New Zealand accent this is classic Sales.
Mint.
Can't believe no-one mentioned voidlinux yet. It's very tasty.
On the laptop I got less than a week ago for college, I've been having fun using Mx with KDE. It's been pretty good so far on my galaxy book.
Alpine was the most interesting for me. It goes against the tendency of complicating the systems. I have to use Arch because everything can work on that distro.
I'm currently using Arch (btw), but I have been hearing the distant call of NixOS lately...
DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.
NixOS, would like to try Guix
MX Linux only because I have it on some very old 32 bit laptops and it supports 32 bit. I don't really know why I keep those laptops around but they are functional.
Another NixOS user.
Endeavour OS?
Tiny Core OS, because I want a super light distro to run from memory when trying to access computers where the data is still there but something went sour with the OS
Guix since 2 years now. I use it to provision all my systems and having a unified configuration in Guile is just a joy
Linux Mint
Kubuntu
Alpine
I'm really happy with Manjaro. I thought it would be a detour from Debian on my laptop, but I've been running it for like 2 years now.