I labeled some of the lesser known logos. The criteria are arbitrary and I made this based on how much I liked using it.
Note that Fedora Sway Atomic isn’t bad, but I had a bad experience because I was trying to install NIri on it and it clearly wasn’t meant for that. Basically, it’s just not for me.
I wanted to rank Manjaro low because I heard bad things about it, but I think I used it for like a few minutes because I wanted to try Gnome, and I didn’t like Gnome after trying it and didn’t want to deal with uninstalling all the Gnome stuff manually, so I just hopped to another distro.
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I was getting really mad, the I realized what you did there.
~~In all honesty i don’t get it the E for endravourOS on my old ass laptop everything works just fine, even the nvidia card. ~~
How dare you rank Debian at…oh. I see what you did there. Nice.
Wait, where’s Gentoo?
the dark and forbidden G tier
Here’s mine:
- Note 1: This tierlist only includes distros I’ve tried.
- Note 2: Slackware would rank higher now; I made this about month ago.
- Note 3: The “noob” tier doesn’t mean the distro is bad. If it weren’t there, Mint would rank higher.
Aw. Why’s PCLinuxOS on the devil tier?
I always think PCLinuxOS deserves more respect. … But not like that! ;D
For me, it’s the combination of its American base, its lack of disk encryption in the installer, the fact that I’ve never managed to get a usable installation, and the fact that Mageia (another Mandriva derivative) and Salix (a Slackware-based distro with a similar UX) are objectively better.
If you are happy with PCLOS, however, godspeed.
CachyOS in S, based.
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Damn, you’ve tried a lot of different distros. I’ve been using Linux for 15 years but only been on like 8 different ones. Installed personally about 5.
Well, I began in 2019, but I distrohopped a lot.
Noob here.
I tried CachyOS because read good things about it. But wifi only worked during installation. After installation it was a hassle to get WiFi running again.
So Zorin it is for me. Simply runs.
Gentoo in the top tier, checks out
Redhat and Ubuntu are controversial for me. Don’t want them for desktop, but for any professional server I would choose them over any of the others (and preferably alpine for any docker containers running on them)
So, why would you pick RedHat over Rocky or Alma?
Or Ubuntu over Debian?
Genuinely curious, not judging
It’s way easier to explain to customers “these companies have enterprise commitments and long term support available if needed”, I realize that they all essentially run the same stuff but frankly I can’t guarantee I’m always gonna be the one supporting them and it is an added safety net for when they decide not to upgrade for an eternity. Not to mention just about every VPS provider has at least one of those two options available out of the box, they’re frankly the safe boring choices.
Why try so many distros? It’s not like most of them are gonna be substantially different.
You never know, the grass might be greener elsewhere. I will say though, to me that only applies to independent distros. At this point i only bother trying distros that are actually different at their core. Arch- or debian-based distros are all kind of the same to me.
its like racecars
Idk, autism?
The only list I get behind. It is missing NixOS for S tier, but otherwise very logical.
I want to like NixOS. I love the idea of declarative system configuration, but I always found NixOS quite easy to break. It also didn’t seem to like Eduroam much.
Yep. I found that when I used GuixSD too. Never yet mustered the time and effort for NixOS. Much the same deal though, just with less transferable skills learned. And yeah, contrary to the advertised hype of safety in fallback, I found it too easy to break. I say easy… It was still a lot of hard work involved though.
GuixSD wasn’t an option on Tiermaker, but I have used it. I personally found it hardier than NixOS, but the libre-only package selection was quite restrictive and the lack of the non-free
iwlwifidriver prevented me from installing it on any of my boxes other than my 2007 MacBook. I know this is the point, but it’s still annoying.Like 9front and Haiku, I hope to daily-drive it someday; but at the moment it is sadly quite unsuitable for my hardware, workflow, and use-case.
Gentoo is good only if you got a powerful computer.
Official binhost exists now.
I used gentoo on not-powerful-computer, because it was not a powerful computer. Did not care about the compile times. Cared about the performance when I was using it. Even did a ```USE=“-*” setup once or twice, to keep it even more lean on resources, and more focused to meet needs and no more unecessary fluff and bloat than that.
I used to run it on my Raspberry Pi 5 without complaint.
Some stuff did take a while to compile, but the trick is to do other things — like make some tea, go for a walk, or watch TV — instead of staring at the terminal the whole time (I am 100% serious; this is not sarcasm).
Need to add Qubes os as S+ tier
no hannah montana linux??
That’s at least two tiers above S, obviously
So high it wouldn’t fit on your screen
“High” in every sense
Huh? … Why’s that a Debian swirl and not a Devuan ping/swoosh thing on that top row with void and artix?
And go on, throw gentoo up there too while you’re at it. ;)
…
Then that’s the standard 4 I first put in my bedrock linux.
Artix, Devuan, Gentoo, Void.
Solid.
I use fedora workstation but it’s so boring because it just does what I need and I never have any problems 🥲
I might give Debian a spin at some point
I wish it wasn’t built on Wayland.
What’s wrong with Wayland? Havnt noticed any problems
I use Anydesk for work and Rustdesk for personal and the lag is so bad. Also added the hot keys and super button doesn’t transfer to the remote computer.
Debian + nix home-manager is hard to beat. Confining my bleeding edge software to be rootlesson top of a bulletproof distro is very much the same – boring (in the best way). Plus the latest apt in debian 13 just feels nicer than dnf to me somehow.
I enjoy linux mint a lot
I’ve been recommending it as the beginner’s distro for years. Default DE is very windows familiar, install is easy, out of box experience is great, built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck. There’s nothing really wrong with it unless you need newer drivers or something
Only Linux Mint Debian Edition is built on Debian. Linux Mint (main) is built on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a Debian distro too. Either way mint is a Debian distro.
There’s the Linux Mint main distro build off Ubuntu and a separate Linux Mint Debian distro build directly from Deb.
Specificity is useful, especially in the context that you said “Mint is built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck” - well actually, not directly. It’s built on Ubuntu, which a lot of people complain has a more bloat and thus less stability than Debian.
Personally I’ve not had issues with any of the three, they’re all good, but there are differences. Mint includes a number of packages that Debian does not (PPAs, Snap, Wayland infegration), because it’s inherited them all from Ubuntu. Mint is 64-bit whereas Debian supports 32/64 and other architectures, because again… Mint (standard) is based on Ubuntu, which is 64-bit only.
I put LM on my n100 HTPC and hasn’t done a thing more besides updates. It just works…
Here is mine:
Mint
Haven’t really tried anything else or it was 10+ years ago.
Haha! You beat me to it! Great ranking. I 100% agree with where you’ve places each/it.
Previous Manjaro user here. You can place it in F.
Why is OpenSUSE at the bottom? I’d heard good things about it. EndeavourOS is my current OS but I’m always looking for a new distro.
It’s in the “Unranked” tier because OP hasn’t used it enough to have an opinion.
When I used it decades ago, I was a kid. It seemed pleasant enough for me back then. On one hand, I’d say “works for children” is an endorsement. On the other, child-me never tried any of the advanced stuff I’d care about today.
Thanks for that. I’ve permanent donkey-brains and overlooked that entirely.
Void and NixOS in S tier is based, my two favorite distros. Because of me using void though i kinda miss using Runit when i want to use a declaritive system like nix. I’m working on a gnu guix config in a vm now to see if i can use that as an alternative instead. It’s not runit per se, but who knows, maybe i’ll still like shepherd better than systemd.
Yep. Void’s been surprising me for over a decade, since it was still “new”, at how well kitted out it is, and what a joy of simplicity and cleanliness it is. Rarely any hunting down the superfluous complexity of a package’s name-extra-words-after-the-program-name. A real joy. Very few complaints. Big love for VoidLinux.
PS, Runit is niiiiice. :)
artix mentioned!!!
as an artix/gentoo user, where would you place gentoo?
I “tried” installing gentoo once but i didn’t know what a tarball was at the time so i can’t really rate it. the documentation did help me a lot with OpenRC on artix though.
i did hear nixOS is also source-based in a way, but i’m not sure on the details.
Worth revisiting now. :)
You want the USE flags. *enticing gesturing*
Yes, NixOS and GNU Guix are both technically source-based, but they pull from a binary cache server by default to prevent it from building everything. You could disable it, but i don’t really see the point since as far as i’m aware, nix and guix don’t have the use flags stuff like Gentoo has.
I switched from Arch to Fedora recently and so far I like it. Faster than any distro I’ve ever run on this laptop.
I wish I was competent enough to install and maintain void 🥲
Maybe someday
Today might be that day. Give it another go. :)
Void has an install script
What does the install script set up for you? I’d be trying to install gnome and get audio working. Last time I tried I got networking set up even though the ncurses installer couldn’t handle setting it up for me, and I got gnome installed, but wasn’t able to get audio working when I gave up and installed fedora cause I wanted a working computer (I broke my old laptop and was learning on the replacement, so I kinda just wanted it up and running)
I meant the TUI thing. Guess you are out of luck with your hardware
Why did you try so many different distros? For me it was RedHat first, then I switched to Debian(because “no corporations” sentiment, technically RH was ok) somewhere 20 years ago and use it since then.
I thought this was pretty normal for Linux nerds. I’ve tried loads but I keep coming back to openSUSE.
It’s absolutely normal and should resolve itself eventually.
Why do hikers travel to different mountains to conquer?
Because hiking is the goal for hikers, changing scenery is just to make things less tedious.
What’s the reason for changing distros? (Except of course for the distros that offer completely different approach like switching Debian-Gentoo-LFS might be of some interest)
I think for some its fun, and they get to see different ways things can be set up
I was curious
Everyone has different needs and preferences. Finding something early on and being able to stick with it is great, but many don’t find that right away, or things change with their needs or the distro.
Plus it depends also on how long you stick around each time. I know I dipped in and out of dual booting for a long time, only now in the past year settling in well. And each time I tried Linux again, lots had changed so I couldn’t just go back to what I used before.
Isn’t part of being in the Linux culture to experiment with things, even if it’s just the window manager, settings, or particular apps?
Isn’t part of being in the Linux culture to experiment with things, even if it’s just the window manager, settings, or particular apps?
Actually no. We proud that we can not to reinstall OS in decades. That we have /etc and ~/.config dirs. Linux from the user standpoint is very conservative. Everything that worked 20 years ago, still works. Just some things became more trivial in setup.
Of course we have some “civil wars” here and there, like PulseAusio, X Window, etc, but those are few and not very interesting to the end-user.
So you’re saying diversity is a bad thing? That seems very anti-Linux. The very fact that you can choose not to change for so long instead of being forced to accept the next version is diversity itself.
I am not saying that. I am saying that diversity for the sake of diversity is done by a tiny amount of crazy kids. Only extremely rare “alternatives” are staying alive. Most people respect stability and use soft that is decades old(not old versions, but soft that was founded decades ago).
That goes back to my point, that there’s choices out there with Linux, from the OS distro on up to the applications. That’s not being different just to be different, it’s trying to fill niches where there are needs. And things change, even the tried and true sometimes go obsolete for newer approaches. Stagnation is a killer. But if it works for the needed purpose, then great.
I just don’t get the internal arguing within Linux. Embrace even the “crazy kids”, after all that’s where Linux came from.
When I started my Linux journey I switched distros every weekend. But later I found Qubes OS and been using it for 8+years now…
Void, Debian and Artix being in S tier is just based.
