Great wiki

The AUR

I was distrohopping for like a year or two when I first got into Linux desktop. As soon as I installed Arch for the first time that stopped. Now the thought of a distro pre-installing packages gives me the heebie jeebies. You don’t get to tell me how I sync with NTP servers!

PKGBUILDs

pacman goes brrrr

I do real work. Dont have time to waste

• Very stable, and can run the bleeding edge through Snap/Flatpack/Appimages, Distrobox, or VMs/Containers

• Community run distro

• Compatible with more devices than many distros

Low resource footprint — smaller than EndeavourOS on my laptop. Stability is fantastic. Bookworm practically just came out, so the packages are all much newer than they were in Bullseye, making it a viable option for someone who wants an uneventful Linux distro that fades into the background and lets you get stuff done.

I love debian because it’s always there for you.

Lightweight.

• Extremely customizable

The new release bookworm solves most hardware/software problems

The big advantage IMHO, is the out of the box BTRFS set up that lets you simply roll back to a non-broken state, right from the grub menu, should an update break your system. I haven’t had to use it yet, but it is a huge source of comfort knowing it is there.

Also, many people coming to opensuse remark how much snappier it is than other distros.

I had to scroll waaaaay down to find this. Mindboggling how underrated this distro is!

It’s incredibly well put together

It’s rolling and reliable

Security by default. Firewall is set up blocking ports for UDP etc. so you are protected out of the box.

Everything just works

It is up to date so you can often get newer hardware working due to newer kernels.

YaST

Easy to set up, very helpful community. If you liked Manjaro or think Manjaro is sketchy but like the idea of a slightly pre-configured arch, check it out.

This, basically Arch but quick to install with all the most important things installed and ready without being bloated.

It’s arch. It just happened to be the composition i had my previous arch setup as. Yay for AUR stuff, KDE Plasma for DE. Includes a couple of useful tools and makes for a very solid OS.

Anyone who has been in the Ubuntu sphere of things with Linux, should take a moment to try arch. EndeavourOS is perfect for these people.

Same. I’ve done the vanilla Arch thing and it’s alright, but the quality of life enhancements that come with EndeavourOS make it a great daily driver.

It’s the only distro I could get DaVinci Resolve Studio, Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4k, and my Radeon RX 6750 XT working with, consistently.

Stable

Only FOSS software and repositories unless otherwise enabled

Cutting edge application releases so I get the newest toys after they’ve been decently tested

Uses the latest tech in linux e.g wayland and pipewire.

Applies patches for better programs work under Wayland (SDDM with git patches before long awaited 0.20.0 release).

Easy and fearless updates

Rollbacks

Single command to compile & install packages from many git repos

Very good with containers and VMs

Can turn basically any distro into nixos in minutes

Dependency Hell, begone

Reproducible

declarative configuration

Ez dev shells

immutability

You get it for the low price of loosing all fun/motivation in setting up, customizing and mintaining machines with other distros

A great selection and amount of packages and modules to build/install/enable

Home Manager + Stylix

Overlays

Makes me feel cool again 😎

A cool logo, meaningful rolling release version names and stickers

• Packages are kept up to date so it’s often the first distro to support new hardware, APIs, etc.
• AUR provides a huge library of software that isn’t often in package manager repos.
• Rolling release so you don’t have to deal with repository upgrades every 6 months to 2 years.
• btw

My current isn’t vanilla arch, but Endeavour OS, because as an unexperienced user I wanted to have the least trouble while installing, … I regret it ever since, because I began with a Plasma desktop and ended up with i3, mainly because of tiling, problems with some utilities, keyboard switching, etc. In the end, I still love the system, one can get quite minimal with it.

My favorite too. For me on other distros I was typically running into bugs that I’d find had already been fixed upstream months previously - and then I had to either live with the bug or do some hack to manually install the newer version. Somewhat related to this, but as Linux gamer it was also frustrating to have the older Mesa drivers all the time because it couldn’t support the older kernel version the distro shipped or something.

A lot of proprietary software is easier to install here

I can use the same OS on my servers

Shit just works

I don’t have time to fuck about, I use ubuntu mate because it gets out of my way and does what I expect it to do.

I love the stability of LTS

It’s easy to use

easy enough to use for me (I’m a linux newb) and I can setup steam on it!
edit: forgot to mention I can get hibernation working on Ubuntu when I couldn’t figure out how to do that in Fedora

I love the dock

For when I can’t get stuff to work on nixos 😅

Because it just works. Because it’s based on free Debian and not corporate RedHat. Because mainstream Linux needs a flagship distro and that distro needs to be used and supported.