https://uwuntuos.site/ obvi?

But seriously though, Arch all the way, because it teaches me about Linux and computers, because I can customize all the packages at OS install (without the need for lengthy compiling like Gentoo) and because my Steam games work flawlessly on it.

I don’t know that it is objectively the best - but its the best fit for me right now (LMDE).

Mine’s best for me:I get it set up the way I want, the updates are frequent but not too frequent, and it has all the packages I need.

My choice isn’t necessarily (or even likely) the best for everyone. There’s a lot to consider when selecting (or recommneding) a distribution. It’s not a one-size-fits-all scenario.

I started with Mandrake back in 2000 and used Red Hat at school. In 2004 Ubuntu was released and I adopted it for life. I switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu to Ubuntu MATE to Kubuntu up to this day. It’s the best because of all the quality of life additions, the stability of the LTS releases, the amount of widespread documenation, and general size of the community of users. This makes it a lot more easier to use and get help to troubleshoot any problems. So far it’s been mostly a problem free and easy experience.

Until recently…

I just discovered Zorin OS and started messing around with it in a VM. I gotta say it’s of of the best, most polished Gnome desktop experiences I’ve had so far with their free core version. While I love KDE for it’s desktop experience being the closest to Windows there is, I usually find it has WAY too many customizations to a fault. Some people like this, but I find that the more you mess with configs, the more prone to problems it gets. I also find Gnome to be more well put together and well integrated. The fact the customization options are limited means I spend more time doing what I need to do than messing around with getting my desktop just right. I just hate the default Gnome destop and whatever paradigm they tried to make. That’s why I’ve stuck with Kubuntu for a while. But with Zorin, I think they found the sweet spot. This might be my next install and I might recommend it to anyone who wants to get into Linux over Mint.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best

It works, has the packages I need and they are up-to-date

BunsenLabs Boron - Debian 12 with Openbox Window Mgr - no desktop, no icons. The machine is not burdened by having to run a heavy desktop environment. All navigation and execution is done with mouse (right click), keybindings or command line. Linux without the Windows artifacts. On my HP i7, boots to login in 19 seconds.

Does what I want and gets out of my way.

It’s extremely stable, and countless other distros are derived from this.

NixOS best👍👍

Zorin is boring. uses ubuntu stable, out of the box distro so you can do anything you want to do right after installation (including installing a windows program with play on linux but also like burning a disk), emulates windows. Add kde if you want to spice it up (distro really needs to change to kde out of box.). If someone is from windows and does not want to learn all that linux stuff they can pretty much go for most things right away and they can use the software store, choose the debian download for anything they find online if its available and if not they can download the windows right click and say install with play on linux. Its the lazy mans linux and im plenty lazy.

Because I can hit “next” a couple of time and have a working install

Really? I guess everyone was 15 at some point and hadn’t heard that distro wars are useless 🤣

There is no best. Period.

It was the first one I got used to, and I haven’t had a reason to switch; it does what I want well enough. The best reason, though, is interjecting (I use mint btw) occasionally.

Nobara: It works well most of the time and has pretty much everything needed for gaming preinstalled. I had a bad update once that prevented booting past the command line though. Now that I’m more experienced I’d probably use a more mainline distro and install the gaming stuff myself.