I have racked up experience with quite a few distros in my time with Linux. Here is my unbiased opinion to all of them.
Ubuntu - 6/10
I, like many others, started with Ubuntu. And I stick with it for a decent chunk of time. I used it for school, browsing, and gaming. I used default gnome, and KDE too. It was good for what I needed back then. It was easy to install, and it worked. Solid. But looking back, it’s good for beginners, but thats kind of it. It’s based on debian, stable not rolling release, and for the stuff I do now (lots of compiling and development), that wouldn’t work out well. Stable a lot of the time has mismatched versions of packages because they only update ever 6-12 months, its hit or miss with libraries too. I’ve noticed that Ubuntu is starting …
I have racked up experience with quite a few distros in my time with Linux. Here is my unbiased opinion to all of them.
Ubuntu - 6/10
I, like many others, started with Ubuntu. And I stick with it for a decent chunk of time. I used it for school, browsing, and gaming. I used default gnome, and KDE too. It was good for what I needed back then. It was easy to install, and it worked. Solid. But looking back, it’s good for beginners, but thats kind of it. It’s based on debian, stable not rolling release, and for the stuff I do now (lots of compiling and development), that wouldn’t work out well. Stable a lot of the time has mismatched versions of packages because they only update ever 6-12 months, its hit or miss with libraries too. I’ve noticed that Ubuntu is starting to get a bit territorial. They have said they are against Flatpak on Ubuntu, which sounds like Microsoft or apple.
Mint - 7/10
It’s good and easy to install, just like Ubuntu. In many ways it’s very similar, ans I think mint has become the new meta for beginner Linux. It is more open, even coming with Flatpak preinstalled. But it still suffers the same stable issue. And some libraries that work with Ubuntu won’t work with mint, so the stable issue is ever so slightly amplified. Although I’ll give it extra points for beginners with cinnamon (Wow. Mint and cinnamon. Really going for that extra flavour 🥁🥁💥). It has a similar UI to windows, which is good for beginners. Both Ubuntu and mint both are not very flexible due to their out of the box nature.
Void - 2.5
I went into Void Linux with high hopes for some reason. I was disappointed. It was difficult to install, and frequently had issues before it was even all done. It doesn’t use systemd, which I have no clue why. Systemd is modern, and perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. But that made stuff less reliable. It uses its own package manager for stuff. Which I get, but there’s so many now. apt, pacman, yum, dnf, zypper, apk. And xbps. Everything has to be its own command. It couldn’t have just been xbps install, or xbps -S. It had to be xbps-install. And this was before I discovered fish too, which made it very hard to remember all the different xbps commands. Most of my DEs either didn’t launch or were barely functional. I had to use cli to connect to wifi. Back then I wasn’t that great with complicated cli stuff. So yeah. No fun. I think it’s safe to say I didn’t stick with it for very long. 2.5/10 bcz the logo is cool lol.
Debian - 7.5/10
Debian is alright. It’s stable, so the issues I mentioned earlier still apply. And I admit, I didn’t have many issues that weren’t my fault. I only had two. First I had to start gdm manually every time I turned on my system. This was my fault, because I used systemctl to disable it. But it also didn’t re-enable with systemctl. Idk why. Second is the sound. I didn’t do anything and it stopped working. It took me ages of troubleshooting online to figure out I needed to restart some programs. But it didn’t carry over sessions, so I had to set up a wrapper script just to get my sound working. For each session. Not a lot to say.
Arch - 8.5/10
My current one, and one I used before debian. Now I know it’s cliche to say arch is the best, but i just find it the best. It’s reliable, relatively easy to install (with archinstall), and it’s rolling release. I have had issues in the past. Something to do with sddm helper was the real killer. I eventually managed to get around it by launching sddm manually, but the damage was already done. So far, on my new installs (laptop and PC) it’s all been fine. I’ve enjoyed having aur and pacman back. Arch has a reputation for being hard and easy to break, but it’s really not. If you use KDE, you can use that app store GUI. Or gnome I think? One or the other. And if you are sensible, it’s not going to just break. The only issue I’ve had so far was reinstalling because the manual partitioning in archinstall didn’t like my esp that I didn’t want to format.
Garuda - 6.5/10
It’s arch that’s desperately trying to be different. Yeah it has its themes, the assistant program, and the garuda-update command, but it’s just a layer of glass on top of arch. You can still see it’s arch, but it’s blurred out. It’s heavy, themes aren’t easy to change, and the themes are possibly the only real reason for someone to download it. It feels like I’m being mean. It does have some things going for it. It’s easier to install than arch, and the assistant app is helpful for installing specific software and drivers.
Fedora - 7.75/10
Fedora is really good! Only broke once, and it would hang on startup. Never did fix it. But other than that, it was a great experience! It’s the middle ground between stable and simple mint, and flexible light rolling release arch. It’s quite easy to use, flexible, and it’s about average recourse usage. It’s mainstream enough so that dnf has no lack of packages. It’s good, not a lot to say tbh. The only other issue I had besides the freezing, is gcc was too new and LFS didn’t handle it well. Everything is new and up to date on fedora.
Honorable Mention - Zorin OS I personally haven’t tried Zorin yet. But it’s growing in popularity fast. I’ve heard it’s really good, and it looks like it’s worth checking out.