My thoughts and views on distros

2026-10-09

Arch

this is what i currently use (both laptop/desktop AND server) and i love it.

Main reasons i prefer Arch over other distros:

• you know your system in detail (great for learning, easy troubleshooting)
• minimal, no bloat
• flexible, you won't fight the distro defaults trying to customise things
• Rolling release means no big breaking updates that take a weekend. small maintenance here and there fits me better
• strict "follow upstream" packaging, no strange patches, no eccentric maintainer decisions

other advantages:

• very recent package versions
• good amount of well-maintained packages in official repos
• AUR available (but i recommend not to rely on it, use it as inspiration / copy the pkgbuild and built things yourself)
• Archwiki might be the best source of linux info there is
• easy packaging system, low overhead
• archiso is a great utility for making custom bootable media

Downsides:

• constant updates can be tiring
• repos do not keep old versions - trying to install a package without updating the whole system first is unsupported (possible but risky)
• sometimes first to discover bugs (i am glad to be helping the developers out by sending good bug reports though)
• minimalism can go a bit far sometimes (vlc shipping without any plugins -> plays nothing, whats the point of vlc again?)
• defaults often not end-user focused (debug packages, compression level, etc..) but these are easily fixed and well documented

Note that since learning what's actually going on on my system, i much prefer the CLI and text config files to any GUI for changing settings and managing my system, which is also something Arch encourages. Some might see that as another downside.

Debian

This is what first got me into linux. Debian is great, and a really important part of the entire open source ecosystem.

Reasons i like Debian:

• Stability (hard to explain in a bullet point)
• strong FOSS ethos/community
• beginner friendly and lots of resources online
• not corporate

Things that pushed me away:

• packaging/maintainers for certain packages (keepassxc, anything sway related, unison....)
• sometimes 3-4 year old versions of software (the flipside of the stability argument)
• apt with install scripts (updating your system gets interrupted by interactive scripts a LOT)
• not as easy to customize the system itself (user stuff is fine)
• packaging system seemed very tedious to me when i tried making my own package

Things have gotten better on debian in many ways, and i imagine i'd have a much easier time today than when i first started out with it. But i tried both desktop and server debian recently and it's just not a good fit anymore for how i want to work.

Immutable distros

i've only spent a day or so trying out a Fedora Immutable distro, so take this with a grain of salt. I love the idea of immutable distros - a stable and secure, read only system with atomic upgrades seems like a huge improvement.

My problem was that the way applications are usually packaged on linux strongly conflicts with the immutable system idea. As far as i can see, you are supposed to work around this issue using things like Flatpak or Distrobox to install your user applications, leaving the core system alone. This approach doesn't work for me though. First, i don't like flatpak all that much (had various issues with it in the past). Second, i think maintainers are a valuable and very important part of the open source ecosystem, and skipping them with tools like flatpak is not a good idea in general. (will have to finally get around to making a blog post explaining this).

So i wanted to use the Fedora packages for user applications, but that means to install a new package, you have to do a full reboot of your system. a LOT of overhead for someone like me who likes to experiment a lot. Also, customizing the system as i like to do seems like it would be a constant battle against the immutable system.

Fedora (minimal netinstall)

my current experiment is putting Fedora on a laptop, but only the bare minimum of packages and seeing if i can build it into something i like. Workstation was a little too "feature-full" for me. Hopefully i remember coming back to this post and updating it later.

At work: RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)

based on fedora, but redhat does 10 years of support, which is pretty cool for a server you want to set up once and not touch again ever. Works fine, but i do get more and more annoyed with things redhat does (both on the distro and outside of it). not getting into it here.

Other options i've considered

• Gentoo: i actually used this for a week - got real tired of compilation times real quick. Otherwise a great distro. If you're an actual dev, you might love it.
• Ubuntu: snaps are even worse than flatpak both technically and in the "Bad for open source" way. not a problem in itself, but Ubuntu pushes them WAY too hard.
• NixOS: love the idea of the declarative system, but haven't gotten around to learn the language yet AND the concepts are kinda hard for me to wrap my head around. Likely similar issues to immutable distros for me.
• Alpine: great distro, surprisingly many packages available. If i wasn't using systemd a lot at work, i might try to learn OpenRC instead and use this on my devices.

Non-linux: FreeBSD

My storage server uses FreeBSD, both for stability and because it has likely the best support for ZFS which i use for my RAID. Very no-nonsense, and actually really well documented with the FreeBSD Handbook. There is much less software available for this, and in my case Hardware support wasn't as good as linux either, but the machine works perfectly and does its job without issues (and so far practically no maintenance either).