What's your favorite Linux distro?

jdrakeh · 2026-03-14T04:24:17+0000

I've started fooling around with Linux again, using Manjaro as the primary OS on my older Dell Latitude 3350. They finally seem to have battery/power management under control, which is a HUGE leap forward for laptop users (the last time that I looked at using any flavor of Linux on laptops, power management was so poor that you could drain a new battery in about an hour under heavy load). It's also very stable for a rolling release distro, and quite customizable if you enable the AUR repository (this is where things like Google Chrome proper among other things live). So, fellow Linux users, what's your favorite distro (bonus points for explaining why)?

SableWyvern · 2026-03-14T04:38:30+0000

Ten or fifteen years ago, I installed Ubuntu on a laptop. I ended up breaking it after a few months (constantly playing around with settings) and went back to Windows.

About 18 months ago I suddenly realised I was getting no value from Windows or MS Office generally, but I was getting less and less control of my own system and more and more intrusive crap. All that being the case, I decided to give Linux another try. I went with Fedora with KDE Plasma. Part of the reason for that is that I had recently moved to Okular as a pdf reader, which put KDE on my radar. The customisation options with Plasma were a big selling point (knowing Windows was going to cripple my taskbars in Win 11 was part of my motivation to shift). Fedora seemed to sit in a nice zone where it's a long-term, stable, well-supported distro but also not a typical first choice so I can feel a little more unique (further enhanced by my choice to go with Plasma).

Overall, I've been very happy. I picked up a new laptop a while back and, within an hour of arriving home, it was also running Fedora.

jdrakeh · 2026-03-14T05:55:22+0000

SableWyvern said:
Overall, I've been very happy. I picked up a new laptop a while back and, within an hour of arriving home, it was also running Fedora.

I haven't fooled around with Red Hat/Fedora for a long time (1999-2003), when my boss used it to run the on-site file server at our home office. I'm sure it has evolved a LOT since then, but even back in those days it was stable, dependable, and almost always up. Bonus, it was hard for hackers to crack (I think we had one successful intrusion during the entire time that I worked there).