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?
  • rodbirenEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    I swear it is my machine or something, but despite CachyOS claiming being faster and more optimized I have yet to benchmark it as faster than the stock kernel for things I play around with. I wrote an application in rust to process a large text file and it both compiled and ran slower on CachyOS. I play around with llama.cpp and again it compiles and runs slower on CachyOS. I want to like Cachy, but right now all I can see is a bunch of window dressing to stock Arch with KDE and a couple of themes that I would rather change to default.

    Also, why in the hell am I being asked to make a wifi password encryption key with the damn USB installer? CachyOS is not the only one. A lot of KDE using distros pop up the encryption window when you setup WiFi on the install image. Why? You want me to temporarily encrypt my wifi password on a temporary live image??? I just slows me down.

    Anyways, I’m sure I’m crazy and clearly it is fast for somebody, but I can’t even get games to benchmark higher.

    • moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
      2·
      5 months ago

      Did you test with different kernels? Them using a custom scheduler that prioritizes desktop applications might cause background things to run slower.

      Plus, the use of ananicy (cpu/ram limiter) limits stuff like that as well.

      I use cachyos because they set up zram, anf uksmd by defualt. That’s ram compression and deduplication, and it’a pretty powerful in my experience. If you’re using cachyos, then uksmdstats and zramctl can give you an idea of how much you are saving.

      • rodbirenEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        I used the default v3 kernel that Cachy installs by default. My guess is the workloads I have are Ram I/O bound and that just doesn’t mesh with the scheduler. I’m literally rooting for it to be faster because I want caring about scheduler and optimization to matter, but freaking stock Linux Mint ran the loads faster.