I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit the mark for us because it can be very helpful.
So, I’d like to ask: What is your least favorite Linux distribution and why? Please remember, this is not about bashing or belittling any specific distribution. The aim is to have a constructive discussion where we can learn about each other’s experiences.
My personal least favorite is probably Manjaro.
Consider:
- What specific features/lack thereof made it less appealing?
- Did you face any specific challenges?
- How was your experience with the community?
- If given a chance, what improvements would you suggest?
No hate for canonical or suse, just redhat?
Suse would get more hate if they stopped working with opensuse. Canonical provides their stuff publicly, except for long term support after five years, but that decision does get hate.
And that doesn’t extend to Fedora and free RHEL licences? Or all of the FOSS projects redhat is funding and contributing to? No demerits for Suse helping MS pressure the entire Linux community for over a decade?
You can still get the redhat source code with the free licence, GPL ensures that. You just can’t act like Oracle, reskin RHEL, and sell enterprise support for it.
Meanwhile there are businesses that literally don’t release any of their improvements to FOSS software because it’s running on their servers and so they don’t have to. Now that really goes against the core ideology of GPL 2 which is: “I give you my code, you give me your changes”.
Publicly traded companies almost always make shitty capitalist decisions. Now, remember that canonical sold user data to Amazon, played ads in the terminal, and that their IPO is still in the works.
A limited number of free licenses. Fedora is far upstream, the SUSE/openSUSE relationship is different. Plenty of people were mad over Novell and Microsoft, that is ancient history today and suse has gone through at least two different owners since then.
People can disagree with Red Hat and also disagree with those businesses. Not an either/or. People have hated on Canonical forever. Some people hate any corporate distro. Red Hat is just the latest to make shitty decisions.