Linux

Probably PoP_OS!. There isn't anything wrong with the os itelf, my problem is rather that its often sugested as a beginer friendly distro which in my experience it absolutely isn't. The amount of issues I encountered while trying to use it almost drove me away from Linux as a whole. (It was the first distro i tried) The time I spent trying to make everything work was comparable to Arch.

I realy like the idea and the DE they ship by default is one of the best ones I've seen (it's like GNOME but in my opinion much better) but the bugs make it a terrible suggestion for new users.

Pull out your pitchforks, debian.

Don't get me wrong, it's good in a VM or a server, but it's the worst Linux desktop experience I've ever had.

• Apt sucks, it's the worst package manager imo (and I use Gentoo). Slow, bad a dependency resolution and apt-autoremove nuked my system both times I tried to use debian.

• It's old. LTS is only good for servers, you cannot change my mind and I don't see a reason to use sid or unstable, when I can use literally why other distro with a better prepare manager.

And it just does some bizarre things, like not setting up sudo with the graphical installer...

I agree with you.

I don't hate Manjaro's developers, but they simply do not know what they are doing. They over promise and under deliver.

Hannah Montana Linux. Do I have to explain?

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'm going to mention two:

Manjaro. I've attempted to use Manjaro a few different times, and outside of a VM it just didn't work properly; on my laptop it would boot loop for reasons I don't understand, it had poor hardware support and optimization on a Raspberry Pi, and it didn't last long on my desktop. It's had its chances, I'm done trying.

I really did not hitch horses with Pop!_OS, and it's almost entirely because Pop!_OS started at Gnome and kept fucking going. Just thinking about the two miserable weeks I spent trying to get Gnome to do anything is making me physically angry. Words like disobedient and belligerent come to mind when I think of what it's like to use Pop!_OS. Linux Mint is designed to feel familiar to anyone coming from Windows. Pop!_OS feels like it's designed to be the opposite of that, it deliberately doesn't work the way you think it does. YOU have to conform to IT. And I FUCKING hate it. It is never welcome on my hardware ever again.

For me personally: Something like Arch. I want to spend as little time as possible on installation and configuration, and I don't want to have to read update notes or break my system. But I get that it's great for some people, and their wiki is just next level!

In general: Ubuntu. It feels like I read something about Canonical causing trouble every other week, and don't even get me started on snaps!

I use Fedora as my primary desktop distro. It's a sturdy base with relatively up-to-date packages from the repos. It doesn't really push technology I consider undesirable, like Snaps. Even though I have to rely on RPMFusion for a number of proprietary parts, due to Fedora's free software stance, I don't have any particular qualms about that. I also increasingly use Flatpaks anyway.

When I used to use Reddit the /r/fedora community was helpful and welcoming.

One downside is because the kernel changes frequently, and I (sadly) own a Nvidia GPU, akmods runs very often. Another downside is sometimes that frequently changing kernel can cause issues. I think in the past year or two I've had two distinct occasions where a kernel upgrade caused my mounted shares to not mount correctly. Reporting an issue to upstream also takes quite some involvement, as I discovered when I had to create some Red Hat account to report an issue about the packaging of some software in a beta release of Fedora.

So all-in-all I would say Fedora is a strong distro. It is probably not the most beginner-friendly one, though, given how you have to dip your toes into RPMFusion and related challenges. It used to be worse, since DejaVu used to be the default font system-wide and you had to install a fonts package from COPR to make the system actually look pleasant. Since then they switched to Noto, which makes the font situation MUCH better.

On servers and VMs I use Debian because I do not have the patience to maintain a faster moving Fedora multiple times over. This is exacerbated by the awful defaults of Gnome, which I have to bend into shape with extensions. When Fedora 40 releases later this year I fully intend to reinstall from scratch since KDE Plasma 6 will be available.

edit: i misread the prompt and just talked about my favorite distro that i actively use. whoops.

My least favorite distro could be Manjaro if I actually used it, but it is Ubuntu because of how close it is to being a great distro. Snaps really soured me to that deal. Snapd and Snaps make it difficult to use in VMs, too, because now you have to over-commit resources for something that could and should be smaller and simpler. Debian stays winning, as usual.

Ubuntu: It's not a lack of features that pushed me away; it's more about the way things are going. I am not a fan of snap packages. I have run into odd issues trying to use them. I used Ubuntu server for my Dell Poweredge and I shut it down until I can find a suitable replacement. I struggled with it respecting my DNS settings which in turn killed my reverse proxy setup.

Manjaro: While I love Arch and some of its derivatives, I can't stand by Manjaro. I thought it would have been a good OS to use since I was familiar with Arch, but it had enough dependency issues where updates broke them. Funny enough, never have I had a dependency issue with just plain old Arch.

I use Arch btw. But besides the meme on it, I legitimately eo use arch and couldn't be happier.

Any DE that looks remotely like Windows. My journey to Linux began with a seething hatred of the way Microsoft does pretty much anything. Including the Win10 UI. So when I jumped ship I wanted something completely different. I tried Gnome on a couple distros but ultimately landed on Pop!_OS and really like it!

Ubuntu because they've the ability to great things and end up just delivering a buggy and mangled version of Debian with proprietary crap, spyware, snaps wtv. After all we're talking about the distro that had ISOs on their download page with a broken installer multiple times.

Ubuntu. They've managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It's the old-and-busted distro that I'm routinely told is "the only Linux we support".

Anything Red Hat. Screw GPL corporatism.

I'm about to piss off a lot of people.

It's Arch and Arch-derivatives. And I'm saying it as an Arch user, btw, and I actually love it.

Between the Big Three (Fedora, Debian, Arch), it is the least likely to have an official package for somewhat niche applications. If something is not available as a flatpak or appimage, I have to compile it from source or an AUR PKGBUILD, but we all know the dangers of doing that. Some software will just assume that it's running on a particular disribution, usually Ubuntu. Some software will detect the distribution and straight-up refuse to work on Arch.

That being said, it would take a lot to make me switch to a stable point-release distribution. Arch's advantages more than make up for the sub-par software support.

(actually, I lied. Fuck Canonical and *Ubuntu. And IBM.)

Manjaro. Its just Arch but worse

Ubuntu / snaps

Not a whole lot of experience distro-hopping here (went from Ubuntu to Endeavour and haven't really changed since) but from what I know it seems like most distros have their place. Arch is highly customisable and all rolling release distros are good for gamers and those who need the latest software. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and other LTS distros are good for servers and newcomers (fewer big updates and therefore fewer potential crises)

For the sake of answering the question, I'd say Ubuntu is my least favourite. Its pretty bloated, and then there's the whole snap fiasco