I labeled some of the lesser known logos. The criteria are arbitrary and I made this based on how much I liked using it.
Note that Fedora Sway Atomic isn’t bad, but I had a bad experience because I was trying to install NIri on it and it clearly wasn’t meant for that. Basically, it’s just not for me.
I wanted to rank Manjaro low because I heard bad things about it, but I think I used it for like a few minutes because I wanted to try Gnome, and I didn’t like Gnome after trying it and didn’t want to deal with uninstalling all the Gnome stuff manually, so I just hopped to another distro.
Artix really needs an archinstall like script though. Setting it up more than once is really tiring.
Very nice. I would rank down debian because it has weird defaults like not having /sbin in the user PATH but other than that I agree

Wait, where’s Gentoo?
How dare you rank Debian at…oh. I see what you did there. Nice.
In all honesty i don’t get it the E for endravourOS on my old ass laptop everything works just fine, even the nvidia card
I was getting really mad, the I realized what you did there.
Here is mine:
Mint
Haven’t really tried anything else or it was 10+ years ago.
Haha! You beat me to it! Great ranking. I 100% agree with where you’ve places each/it.
If you can handle nix why bother with other distros
I can handle it but I wanted a more traditional package manager so I could search the repos from the command line without relying on external tools, so I went back to Void Linux after a year and a half of using NixOS. Also, I tried a lot of those before even knowing about NixOS.
you mean like
nix-shell -p tldr?I mean like
apt searchorpacman -SsNixOS also doesn’t show what packages were updated after an update, and doesn’t show which version they changed to, which is slightly annoying.
I use fedora workstation but it’s so boring because it just does what I need and I never have any problems 🥲
I might give Debian a spin at some point
Debian + nix home-manager is hard to beat. Confining my bleeding edge software to be rootlesson top of a bulletproof distro is very much the same – boring (in the best way). Plus the latest apt in debian 13 just feels nicer than dnf to me somehow.
Void and NixOS in S tier is based, my two favorite distros. Because of me using void though i kinda miss using Runit when i want to use a declaritive system like nix. I’m working on a gnu guix config in a vm now to see if i can use that as an alternative instead. It’s not runit per se, but who knows, maybe i’ll still like shepherd better than systemd.
Void, Debian and Artix being in S tier is just based.
Nobara is the way!
I enjoy linux mint a lot
I’ve been recommending it as the beginner’s distro for years. Default DE is very windows familiar, install is easy, out of box experience is great, built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck. There’s nothing really wrong with it unless you need newer drivers or something
Only Linux Mint Debian Edition is built on Debian. Linux Mint (main) is built on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a Debian distro too. Either way mint is a Debian distro.
There’s the Linux Mint main distro build off Ubuntu and a separate Linux Mint Debian distro build directly from Deb.
Specificity is useful, especially in the context that you said “Mint is built on Debian so it’s stable as fuck” - well actually, not directly. It’s built on Ubuntu, which a lot of people complain has a more bloat and thus less stability than Debian.
Personally I’ve not had issues with any of the three, they’re all good, but there are differences. Mint includes a number of packages that Debian does not (PPAs, Snap, Wayland infegration), because it’s inherited them all from Ubuntu. Mint is 64-bit whereas Debian supports 32/64 and other architectures, because again… Mint (standard) is based on Ubuntu, which is 64-bit only.
no hannah montana linux??
That’s at least two tiers above S, obviously
So high it wouldn’t fit on your screen
“High” in every sense
Here’s mine:

- Note 1: This tierlist only includes distros I’ve tried.
- Note 2: Slackware would rank higher now; I made this about month ago.
- Note 3: The “noob” tier doesn’t mean the distro is bad. If it weren’t there, Mint would rank higher.
Gentoo in the top tier, checks out
Gentoo is good only if you got a powerful computer.
I used to run it on my Raspberry Pi 5 without complaint.
Some stuff did take a while to compile, but the trick is to do other things — like make some tea, go for a walk, or watch TV — instead of staring at the terminal the whole time (I am 100% serious; this is not sarcasm).
CachyOS in S, based.
Why try so many distros? It’s not like most of them are gonna be substantially different.
Idk, autism?
You never know, the grass might be greener elsewhere. I will say though, to me that only applies to independent distros. At this point i only bother trying distros that are actually different at their core. Arch- or debian-based distros are all kind of the same to me.
The only list I get behind. It is missing NixOS for S tier, but otherwise very logical.
I want to like NixOS. I love the idea of declarative system configuration, but I always found NixOS quite easy to break. It also didn’t seem to like Eduroam much.
Damn, you’ve tried a lot of different distros. I’ve been using Linux for 15 years but only been on like 8 different ones. Installed personally about 5.
Well, I began in 2019, but I distrohopped a lot.
Need to add Qubes os as S+ tier
Redhat and Ubuntu are controversial for me. Don’t want them for desktop, but for any professional server I would choose them over any of the others (and preferably alpine for any docker containers running on them)
So, why would you pick RedHat over Rocky or Alma?
Or Ubuntu over Debian?
Genuinely curious, not judging
It’s way easier to explain to customers “these companies have enterprise commitments and long term support available if needed”, I realize that they all essentially run the same stuff but frankly I can’t guarantee I’m always gonna be the one supporting them and it is an added safety net for when they decide not to upgrade for an eternity. Not to mention just about every VPS provider has at least one of those two options available out of the box, they’re frankly the safe boring choices.
Why is debian S tier, and Arch A tier? They both use systemd. For me I would switch Artix and Arch tbh. I had lots of issues with the artix repo because of hidden systemd dependencies. Void, probably was the smoothest experience I ever had. Shout out to Luke Smith back in the days who had great rice for void.
The answer is simple: when I used Debian, I was just starting out with Linux and didn’t mess with systemctl at all. It was an ok beginner experience (I’d already used Mint before trying Debian, so I was at more of an intermediate level) but I probably wouldn’t like it as much nowadays.
I like the idea of using different software for different things, why do systemd timers exist when there’s already crontab, for example?
Meanwhile, I mostly used Arch on my server where I had to deal with all the systemd stuff, which was rarely useful for my purposes.
I switched from Arch to Fedora recently and so far I like it. Faster than any distro I’ve ever run on this laptop.
If you want Fedora atomic Niri, use https://github.com/zirconium-dev/zirconium














