I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit the mark for us because it can be very helpful.
So, I’d like to ask: What is your least favorite Linux distribution and why? Please remember, this is not about bashing or belittling any specific distribution. The aim is to have a constructive discussion where we can learn about each other’s experiences.
My personal least favorite is probably Manjaro.
Consider:
- What specific features/lack thereof made it less appealing?
- Did you face any specific challenges?
- How was your experience with the community?
- If given a chance, what improvements would you suggest?
Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.
Suse would get more hate if they stopped working with opensuse. Canonical provides their stuff publicly, except for long term support after five years, but that decision does get hate.
Suse would get more hate if they stopped working with opensuse.
And that doesn’t extend to Fedora and free RHEL licences? Or all of the FOSS projects redhat is funding and contributing to? No demerits for Suse helping MS pressure the entire Linux community for over a decade?
Canonical provides their stuff publicly, except for long term support after five years, but that decision does get hate.
You can still get the redhat source code with the free licence, GPL ensures that. You just can’t act like Oracle, reskin RHEL, and sell enterprise support for it.
Meanwhile there are businesses that literally don’t release any of their improvements to FOSS software because it’s running on their servers and so they don’t have to. Now that really goes against the core ideology of GPL 2 which is: “I give you my code, you give me your changes”.
Publicly traded companies almost always make shitty capitalist decisions. Now, remember that canonical sold user data to Amazon, played ads in the terminal, and that their IPO is still in the works.
Debian.
Everything is so manual, not even system upgrades or enabling automatic updates. Like, this can be easily scripted using sed, why dont they do that?
It gets outdated very quickly and people complain that their apps are outdated, while Debian is simply shipping an extremely outdated package.
I respect what they do, and maybe for a Server it is a good OS (even though I would trust Fedora with SELinux and quick updates more).
Fedora. It doesn’t really add anything and is just more stuff for people to get distracted by.
Also, red hat is responsible for shilling a lot of bullshit.
I tried Fedora aswell and couldn’t get behind the package management or GNOME. I’m sure it’s trivial to change the DE to something more sane (my tastes lie with Xfce and/or KDE) but I used it for a month and I just went straight back to Manjaro until I could find something better, and ultimately settled on EndeavourOS.
RHEL - for obvious reasons
I don’t get the hate for Manjaro, TBH. I never had any problem with it, and I used it as my main OS for a few years now.
People dislike it because:
-
There’s no real reason to use it over Arch/EndeavourOS
-
Their holding back of updates for 2 weeks is stupid and can cause breakage/dependency issues when you also have stuff installed via AUR (which doesn’t get held back for 2 weeks)
-
They hold back packages for 2 weeks, citing stability and that they can check for issues then patch before they push, but then they just… don’t do that. Known issues still get pushed.
-
Manjaro repos have had issues with malware in the past
-
Manjaro has on multiple occasions had their SSL certificates expire, with their advertised “fix” being to roll your system time back. This is a job that can be automated, or at the very least should have a reminder for someone in Manjaro to sort out. The fact it happened once is an embarrassment, but the fact it’s happened more times is absolutely inexcusable.
Once, I listened what some people said on the Internet, and I tried Arch. I came back to Manjaro, but I learned a lot so I’m not unhappy with the experience.
However, to say that there’s no reason to use it over Arch (I don’t know about Endeavour, I never actually used it) is just wrong. Maybe you don’t like the differences, but they are important and useful for someone like me. When I installed Arch, I needed to tinker it for hours before having something usable. I don’t want to tinker, I want my OS to work, even if it means other people made choices for me, as long as I can revert them; that’s what Manjaro offers. For example, I love GNOME, but only with some plugins, like dash to dock. When I installed Arch, GNOME made an update which broke a lot of plugins, included dash to dock; while Manjaro waited for dash to dock to work to push the new GNOME. Some issues may be pushed, but a lot of others aren’t. I prefer to have one big update twice a month instead of having to update and tinker again my OS possibly every day.
Manjaro is far from perfect, no distro is, but for people like me, it works very well, and better than Arch.
