Linux

I daily drive Fedora and I think it has the best Gnome desktop.

But in terms of "best at what they do" I'm blown away by Mint as an apporoachable easy to use "just works" OS. It instantly became my recommendation to new linux converts. Everything is easy to set up. It's remarkably user friendlly. Good software store, flatpack support out of the box. Brilliant hardware support. I like the aesthetics as well.

I have an old Core 2 machine and I tried to get every potato grade distro running on it. I tried Puppy, and Linux Lite, and AntiX and all the "this will run on your toaster" type distros and had problems with every one of them. Mint XFCE installed no problem. It ran beautifully. I pressed my luck and installed a Quadro K620 and an old firewire card (trying to back up old Mini-DV videos). It handled ancient hardware perfectly. Butter smooth 1440p desktop computing and light video editing on an 18 year old machine.

Tried Manjaro and Opensuse for a presentation machine lately: issues over issues, that just shouldn't exist on new installation (problems with USB disks, input). Came back to Debian asap because Debian, weirdly, "just works (tm) now.

gentoo! still kicking it

MX Linux. Best at what it does.

We don't know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know... Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.

Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.

OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years... I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.

Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won't be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today

The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting... but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross... partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don't see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.

Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won't be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public... maybe KDE's new bet?!

Garuda absolutely nails it with their helper app that sets you up with a choice of popular software, handles updates, and gives you easy access to common settings.

It makes it very approachable for people new to Linux.

In my opinion I love CachyOS.

NixOS by far has the most momentum right now.

Just check the non-unique package counts:

https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique

More than 80K packages that exist in other distros, more than all of packages in AUR combined with 90%+ being the newest version in unstable

And you can run unstable without an issue since you can downgrade individual packages whenever

I do like Mint very much, but I think that they are neglecting to update their apps. A lot of apps are not up to date, and that's just sad...

The one I installed, obviously.

POPULAR != BETTER

The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. They’ve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. It’s paid off for them and Arch isn’t really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.

Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedora’s proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesn’t hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.

Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I don’t know how they’re going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.

Fedora. I’ve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 I’ve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of “being there” but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.

Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, can’t run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you don’t need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I don’t know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.

On the other hand:

Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. They’ve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that it’s not super “new user friendly”. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see “I’ll give Slowroll a try.”

PopOs’ cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.

Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like “Nobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedora”.

The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesn’t come up as often as a couple years ago.

I don't know about the best but Debian has been going strong for 32 years and the backbone of many distros. Its MVP in my book.

Love Fedora with KDE, my new daily driver. Tested Endeavour, Manjaro and also Mint and openSuSE but finally went with Fedora. Debian (on the other side) is my preferred base for servers and services.

I'm not an expert but ...

• I think Fedora and OpenSUSE are the best. Well-funded and they take security seriously.
• Arch and Bazzite are filling specific niches.
• ReactOS and NixOS I think are in beta, but I'm not paying much attention to either.
• In terms of desktop environments I think KDE Plasma leads the pack. MATE is strong on accessibility though.

Fedora has gotten much more stable and reliable in the past decade. 15+ years ago it was generally regarded as nice but unstable. I'd say nowadays for a moderately technical user it offers a better experience overall than Ubuntu or Mint. There are still unfortunately some pitfalls for new users (media codecs come to mind). In fact, the only issues i've had in most of those 10 years have been related to GNOME plugins or the Plasma 6 transition, problems that also occured on Ubuntu.

I have 2 computers: one running Ubuntu, one Fedora. This has been my setup for over a decade. I have lately been finding Ubuntu more and more cumbersome to use, with less of the "just works" experience i remember having in the past. Perhaps the focus on cloud computing has caused the desktop to languish a bit.

I would like to try Pop!_OS, but i haven't had a free evening for a while to do a backup and reinstall on one of my computers. It's also been a while since i used Mint, so my impression could be out of date.

The nice thing about Linux overall (compared to macOS and Windows) is that each update generally improves on the experience. On commercial platforms the experience gets worse as often as it gets better, usually both at the same time. GNOME and Plasma are both overall much better than they were a decade ago (despite a few regressions) while macOS and Windows are both worse in general.

Bazzite has been working so well that even the wife has converted over. It cured my distro hopping so I haven't played much attention to how other distros have been doing.

While Void isn't exactly under rated ( it is very highly rated on distro watch for one ), for someone looking for a systemd free distro or a light weight one in general, it is a decent choice. The repos aren't as broad based as Arch but they do have newer versions of the software that they host.

I could be wrong, but aren't Linux Mint and Pop OS ultimately based on Debian? (Mint is based on Ubuntu which in return has a Debian base). Debian was my main entry way to the Linux world and there is a reason why so many distros are built on it. Very old as well (not as old as Slack ware but Slack ware isn't exactly noob friendly).