this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026

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138

My Linux distro tierlist (pawb.social)

submitted 1 week ago by callyral@pawb.social to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world

105 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

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.

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

CachyOS in S, based.

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[–] albbi@piefed.ca 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] msage@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago

Gentoo in the top tier, checks out

[–] mal3oon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The only list I get behind. It is missing NixOS for S tier, but otherwise very logical.

[–] hellfire103@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] exu@feditown.com 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Why try so many distros? It's not like most of them are gonna be substantially different.

[–] juipeltje@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] jim3692@discuss.online 38 points 1 week ago (5 children)

[–] synapse1278@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago

I was getting really mad, the I realized what you did there.

[–] Morph9@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

~~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~~

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 week ago

How dare you rank Debian at....oh. I see what you did there. Nice.

[–] eta@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago

Something for B tier

[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wait, where's Gentoo?

[–] orenj@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 week ago

the dark and forbidden G tier

[–] _NetNomad@fedia.io 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)

no hannah montana linux??

[–] laurelraven@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 week ago

That's at least two tiers above S, obviously

[–] BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 5 points 1 week ago

So high it wouldn’t fit on your screen

“High” in every sense

[–] ElectricAirship@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I enjoy linux mint a lot

[–] drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Only Linux Mint Debian Edition is built on Debian. Linux Mint (main) is built on Ubuntu.

[–] drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ubuntu is a Debian distro too. Either way mint is a Debian distro.

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

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[–] gustofwind@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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

[–] sunstoned@lemmus.org 3 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Here is mine:

Mint

Haven't really tried anything else or it was 10+ years ago.

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Haha! You beat me to it! Great ranking. I 100% agree with where you've places each/it.

[–] librekitty@lemmy.today 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

artix mentioned!!!

as an artix/gentoo user, where would you place gentoo?

[–] callyral@pawb.social 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] juipeltje@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

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.

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[–] nil@piefed.ca 7 points 1 week ago

I switched from Arch to Fedora recently and so far I like it. Faster than any distro I've ever run on this laptop.

[–] Lembot_0006@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I thought this was pretty normal for Linux nerds. I’ve tried loads but I keep coming back to openSUSE.

[–] SpikesOtherDog@ani.social 7 points 1 week ago

It's absolutely normal and should resolve itself eventually.

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why do hikers travel to different mountains to conquer?

[–] Lembot_0006@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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)

[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

I think for some its fun, and they get to see different ways things can be set up

[–] callyral@pawb.social 6 points 1 week ago

I was curious

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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?

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[–] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

I wish I was competent enough to install and maintain void 🥲

Maybe someday

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[–] juipeltje@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] VOwOxel@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I tried Mint and Bazzite on my laptop, installed Bazzite on my Desktop, wasn't happy with the atomic style (wanted to install a lot of stuff and switch to the low-latency-kernel for music production),

switched to OpenSuse Tumbleweed and stayed there. I got a second Desktop PC for cheap from a friend, took out the GPU, installed Debian on it and run Game Servers (Minecraft, Satisfactory, TF2) on it now.

Very happy with both Tumbleweed (as a daily driver) and Debian (for my server).

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[–] olenkoVD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago

Void, Debian and Artix being in S tier is just based.

[–] Lazer365@feddit.nl 5 points 1 week ago

Nobara is the way!

[–] GutterRat42@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

What about LMDE?

[–] lefixxx@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

If you can handle nix why bother with other distros

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago

Every try puppy linux? Its a fun and unique one.

[–] mal3oon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Why is debian S tier, and Arch A tier? They both use systemd. For me I would switch Artix and Arch tbh. I had lots of issues with the artix repo because of hidden systemd dependencies. Void, probably was the smoothest experience I ever had. Shout out to Luke Smith back in the days who had great rice for void.

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