I keep seeing people mentioning NixOS, what’s so unique about it that people like?

Can’t up vote this enough, Nobara is great for gaming.

EndeavourOS, it just works really well and never breaks. The only time I had an issue was when I was using the Zen kernel and it locked up installing league of legends and watching a YouTube video at the same time. Using the mainline kernel though gives me no issues.

How is MX? What do you like over other distros? I see it at the top of the distrowatch list all the time but I’ve never really found anything special or stand out with the distro.

Yeah there’s just not really a big enough reason to move away from Ubuntu unless you’re really wanting to avoid snaps (which I completely understand)

This is gonna be an unpopular opinion, but Linux mint. It’s great if you’re just getting into Linux, it’s absolutely terrible when you know what you’re doing in Linux. The old package base and kernel just kills me sometimes. I get they want a stable base and use the lts versions of Ubuntu, but my goodness it’s always so far behind it’s not even worth using if you’re on AMD. Thankfully they’ve realized this after so many years and are releasing an EDGE iso with updated packages and kernel and LMDE is getting a version upgrade.

This is good information! I tried to give OpenSuse an honest try, and while I would recommend it over RHEL any day in enterprise environments, I just don’t like it as a daily driver workstation.

What do you think flatpak and snaps are? They’re at the very least containerized applications. Why would I install distrobox when I can literally install the same apps without having to screw around with installing a third party tool from a GitHub repo? That just seems like more trouble than it’s worth. Not to mention you have to trust the GitHub author which really is no different than trusting the AUR package maintainer.

Fedora is ok, idk what it is but I have never had a good experience with Fedora. If you need to install anything outside of the default repos it can be a major pain and while yum is ancient and rock solid, it’s replacement with dnf, is terrible and slow. OpenSuse is also rock solid but I didn’t like the install experience and while yast is good, you’re still limited by the repos. Also OpenSuse is getting rid of, I think it’s called leap or something, which I think tumbleweed uses as a base. It’s unfortunate but I think the best option for most new Linux users is simply the latest Ubuntu. I hate snaps as much as the next guy, but their packages are fairly up to date. Outside of that you have the niche distros like MX and Garuda, but even those are just Debian and Arch. The other option is LMDE by the Linux mint team but idk how often that’s updated.

Every time I use Manjaro something horribly breaks. It’s odd though because I daily drive endeavour now and it’s been rock solid with no issues other than my own stupidity in partitioning my drives. I would stay away from Manjaro personally and use endeavour if you’re dedicated to arch. If you want a rolling release distro then rhino Linux just released their first major version and it’s a rolling release Ubuntu distro. Either way my opinion is the same, Manjaro was good for it’s time, but it’s been overshadowed and buried by other arch distros that are way more stable.

Package base is always up to date since it’s rolling. The AUR is absolutely fantastic and gives me any obscure application I could ever need. You ever tried installing the marathon trilogy with alephone on fedora? The AUR makes it a single button install. I’m currently running endeavour OS plasma, such a smooth experience.