I do not consider Arch the best. Artix is better because is is systemd-free. I have not switched yet.

Mint is Ubuntu minus everything that makes Ubuntu annoying. That’s why I like it.

I considered to go back to Debian but… eh, I’m too old and impatient for that. Nowadays I mostly want things that work out of the box.

Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement

Mint baby, it just works.

For a long time I considered Gentoo the best, because I know my things around there. A month ago I said goodbye to my last Gentoo installation in favour for Debian trixie (the next stable release). Gentoo was too time consuming despite the binary repo.

If it would be my job to maintain a Gentoo system I would gladly accept, but there should be a need for it by the users. Otherwise I would just recommend Debian stable or Fedora.

My favourite is Debian over Fedora, because I often don’t need the latest versions of a software. And there is flatpak.

Debian (stable)

Stable, secure, it just works, has one of the, if not THE largest software package repo of all Linux distros, has lots of third party support for proprietary software and drivers that are available as .deb files or through official PPAs. It also is not backed by any corporation, but is a community developed distro. You can install it on pretty much everything.

The only downside I would say is their shift into using Systemd. They shouldn’t have done that. It was forced through undemocratically and I think that was a big mistake, even though they are trying to limit software dependencies to it. There’s a fork called Devuan that I’ve been considering where you can pick your init system. (SysVinit/runit, etc) I honestly miss SysVinit. It was simple, easy to understand and easy to maintain.

Because it was my first distro that got me away from Windows. And yes, it’s Mint.

I’ve been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.

It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband’s laptop.

It’s allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I’ve switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).

Does what I want and gets out of my way.

CachyOS with NiriWM. Cachy is Arch with none of the install drama. The performance tuning makes it blazing fast on older hardware. Installs with no bloat.

Niri is superior to Hyprland in my opinion because it’s a scrolling tiling WM that is super intuitive and fast.

For server workloads, however, not much beats pure Debian. It’s stable, well supported, and has a huge package library.

Because I can hit “next” a couple of time and have a working install

I use Arch, btw, but I don’t consider it the best (yes I do.) I could easily transition to Fedora, for example (I would never do that,) and be completely happy (I would rather continually hit my head with the metal stapler gun on my desk.)

I get to say “I use arch btw” :P

Void made Linux fun again for me. It gets so much right with the rolling release model.

I use Arch since approximately 2006 or so. I like its stability (yes!), performance, rapid updates and technical simplicity. It never stands in my way and it’s fairly simple to understand, administer and modify. It’s probably the most convenient OS I’ve ever used - sure it takes time/effort to set it up but once you’re past that it’s smooth sailing. It also doesn’t change dramatically over the years (it doesn’t need to) so it’s easy to keep up with its development. Plus, I have a custom setup script for it that installs and sets up all of the basics, so if I ever need to reinstall, I’m not starting from zero.

I am eyeing NixOS as “the next step” but didn’t yet experiment with it too much. Arch is just too comfy to use and the advantages that NixOS brings aren’t yet significant enough for me to make any kind of switch to it, but I consider NIxOS (as well as its related technologies like the Nix package manager) to be the most interesting and most advanced things in the Linux world currently.

If you’re reading this as a newbie Linux user: probably don’t use any of the two mentioned above (yet). They’re not considered entry-level stuff, unless you’re interested in learning low-level (as in: highly technical) Linux stuff from the start already. NixOS/Nix in particular is fairly complex and can be a challenge even for veteran Linux admins/users to fully understand and utilize well. Start your journey with more common desktop distros like Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu.