Ranking Linux Distributions for 2023: not your average tier list!

hey everyone this is Nick and since I already made a tier list video about desktop environment I guess it's only fair I now make one about this truth and like the previous one it's not just going to be my face over tear maker because that's super boring and of course I can only rate this Strokes that I actually tried myself so if your favorite one isn't on the list leave me a comment down below I'll give it a shot maybe make a dedicated video and I'll make sure at least to try it out for the next tier list video and in the meantime you can try out our sponsor this video is sponsored by savings portmaster portmaster is an all-in-one tool to easily take your privacy to the next level and it's a tool I use myself on all of my Linux devices portmaster lets you automatically block all trackers and malware in every application you run on your computer not just your web browser but everything you run it's easy to use use with defaults already in place that lets you just set it and forget it but if you like to configure every Rule and every app you also can portmaster is completely free and open source and also free of charge as it's funded by users that subscribe to the SPN a super powered VPN that gives you multiple identities for every connection of every application so if you want to easily improve the privacy of your system whatever the Linux distro you use or even on Windows click the link in the description below and download the Ford Master for free Okay so let's begin with the first distro I ever used Ubuntu I've had a love hate relationship with Ubuntu over the years when I started with Linux it was basically the best the one that lifted everyone else by trying to make Linux in general more user-friendly and more accessible graphically that was in 2006 as time went on they slowly blast Folk focus on the desktop started resting on their low rolls before slowly climbing out of the hole but nowadays I would just put Ubuntu in the decent category it does follow the latest gnome release cycle they do have their own spin on that desktop and they've regained some amount of stability that they had lost for a while but they are not the best for beginners anymore and they do Force snaps on users which I'm not a fan of as it's undeniably not as good as other formats on the desktop but it's not a bad distro so yeah decent it's not the devil but it's also not what I would recommend to New Linux users anymore now let's move on to Linux Mint the no longer green and distribution mint is a distro I used to not enjoy particularly but nowadays I feel it's really one of the best options for most people it now looks pretty good with its new default theme and it's one of the most complete experiences out of the box they have graphical utilities for everything and their desktop cinnamon is very customizable but it remains simple to use it's basically what I call the KDE of gtk you've got tons of options but everything is still super legible and simple to use in true gtk fashion the distro is very stable very well maintained it walks backs on the more controversial choices that Ubuntu makes and it has a clear focus on user experience and ease of use so I'm going to put it in great it's a distro I could see myself using on a daily basis with the only caveat being it's pretty old Ubuntu LTS base which means Hardware support isn't always the best if you have the latest and greatest components in your PC still mint is a great choice for beginners and for advanced users alike which is super rare in the Linux world and it deserves to be mentioned and now let's move on to the distro that started this channel Elementary OS and this is a hard one to place on the one hand it's a very polished experience and I love what they're doing they basically started this idea that each desktop environment should have their own ecosystem of apps that follows precise higs they are still the only distro for now that offers payment to developers in their app store they were the first to implement smooth one-to-one touchpad gestures and on X11 no less and they have a very considerate approach to how they develop features and some people might think that this is a negative as in You Can't customize it but that's sort of the point of the distro it's a take it or leave it experience and I like that approach doesn't try to serve everyone it just offers something that they thought about if it's not for you that's okay but on the other hand if we look at where it is today it is lagging be an gnome in terms of Polish and features and app ecosystem and Elementary still makes decisions that cannot be described as anything other than bone-headed like forcing users to completely reinstall with each new version something that has been sold on Linux since 2005 or they only enable their Elementary apps in their store after install and sure it has flatback support and you can add flat Hub easily but this means that after an install you cannot install an office suite or a web browser which come on that's just not a good experience so as it stands today Elementary OS is only going to be decent for me I think they're biting off a bit more than they can chew they're trying to make the apps and a desktop and a distro and with Elementary EOS 7 they released something cool but that's not necessarily up to today's Linux standards okay now let's talk about orange by the Arch Linux sorry Arch is a distro I've used for a while and that I regularly go back to on and off but never on a production device It's a Wonderful learning experience that teaches you how a Linux operating system is built by letting you pick and layer every component you prefer on top of each other and it lets you be really deliberate in the choices you make it's also pretty much always up to date plus you get access to the Aur to get virtually anything you want but this is a double-edged sword Arch doesn't hold your hand it will let you destroy your system if you don't read update notes or if you're not careful or if you abuse the Aur it is also simply not as stable as Point releases like Ubuntu or Fedora it gives you everything as it's released with minimal testing and almost every problem with Arch is user error not necessarily the fault of the distro but it also means that there are a lot of potential errors and there's the usual joke about installing it but honestly now you have pretty much guided installers that you can download and install and even following the wiki isn't that hard it's not my definition of a good time when I want to have a computer up and running I would much rather have a graphical installer with five clicks to make but it's not that tricky so Arch is going in good but only if you know what you're doing and if you know how to fix a mistake if your Linux beginner or someone who just wants to use their computer you know set it and forget it way it's going in the no way category do not start your Linux Journey with Arch Linux unless you have a lot of time to waste you're ready to learn and you have tons of hours to spend to read wikis and ask questions it is not meant for beginners another distro I used for a while is Solas and I liked it for the budgie desktop which at the time felt like what I wanted from gnome and for its approach of building a Linux distro from scratch without using Ubuntu as a base for example it also has a pretty good package manager and its own set of repos but solos is going in no way because it pretty much feels like a dying distro these days the website was down for about three months there hasn't been an up-to-date ISO released since mid-2021 the latest status update from the team dates back to the end of February and packages don't seem very up to date either nowadays budget the desktop they use even basically said they don't want people to experience budgie through Solas anymore and that desktop itself hasn't moved a lot in recent years seeing minor updates as it's repairing a transition away from gtk and gnome Technologies so yeah no way I would ever use this thing in its current status they need to prove that they're able to maintain a Linux distro which for now they're proving they can't so unless something happens it's just not recommended at all add on to Fedora the distro I use everywhere these days and I'm still only going to place it in good not great because while I feel this is the distro that is pushing the Linux desktop forwards these days by adopting the most modern Technologies quickly helping them get tested contributing to them I also feel they missed the mark in some ways and I won't bore you with the installer again it's horrible it has the worst ux of any installer I ever use they're working on another one it's just bad let's move on Fedora also requires you to add a repo to install the NVIDIA drivers which is annoying and makes for a less seamless experience and until now they also half embraced flat pack by not giving users an easy way to have flat Hub right at install although that's going to be fixed in fedora 38. apart from that it's smooth it ships vanilla desktop environment so you can customize them as much or as little as you want it's super stable it's modern it's good once the new installer is there and flat Hub can be enabled by default in just one click and maybe once they add NVIDIA drivers readily available at install right on the iso then sure it will move in the great category but for now it's good okay let's talk deep in it's a basic desktop environment but it's also a distro and it's a distro I'm putting in no way the desktop environment looks beautiful but the default apps are way too basic and can't handle half of the tasks I need from them installing anything else results in that nice unified look being completely broken and as such it's just not a good experience and it also uses a very old Debian base which for their it's a desktop for everyone purpose is just not good and their performance is also hit or miss and then there's the usual is it spyware thing because it's from China and there's always some amount of Chinese paranoia somewhere and it's hard to get cold hard proof on what it collects or not it's open source but the amount of code and the very little interest there is in Western countries means that it really hasn't been checked all that much now what's for certain is that it does collect some Telemetry using a Chinese tool comparable to Google analytics so yeah it lacks in features the performance isn't that great it uses a very old base and there are some potential privacy concern it's going in the no way category if you want to use the deep in desktop use Ubuntu DDE it's much better now let's talk about Manjaro and this one is going into no thanks it's a distro I used a lot on my desktop but I just cannot recommend it anymore the distro itself isn't necessarily bad but the way it's being run absolutely is the team has a horrible track record of not renewing their security certificates for their websites and instead of fixing the issue they'll tell users to roll back their computer's clock so the certificate appears valid they had issues with their Treasurer leaving after some people people misused company funds they made deals with proprietary office suites replacing open source ones before backing down when the community was understandably pissed they packaged beta or Alpha versions of apps without asking the developers and passing that as a stable update it's just super weird kinda Shady not respectful and I just don't think it sends a good message and if you start mixing and matching Manjaro packages and stuff from the Aur you can very quickly make that distro completely broken as Aur packages might depend on newer versions of libraries that Arch ships but that Manjaro doesn't yet it's just not a very good platform it's not very stable it's not very performant it's not bleeding edge either and the way the companies run is so so so yeah no thanks now good old Debian the granddaddy of Linux distros and here I will refer to the stable version I never ran testing or unstable personally I like their new stance of offering proprietary drivers and firmware on the iso because you won't have them installed by default but it makes the experience better for people who need them it's rock solid it's tested to Perfection and the repos are huge and well maintained I hesitated a lot but I'm gonna put it in the good category although this is a distro I would never run on a desktop or a laptop exclusively on a server because Debian stable is extremely old it has very very outdated versions of desktop environments and applications and sure the latter can be fixed using flat pack or something equivalent but the desktops the current stable version is at gnome 3.38 or KD 5.20 there are full three gnome versions behind and seven KDE releases and so I decided to put it in good still because that's the purpose of the distro it's being super stable super well tested at the expense of having recent releases of anything basically so I would personally never use it but for people who need that it's a very good distribution now let's move on to pop OS it's a distro I really loved and I even moved all my computers to it for a while it spin on gnome is great they add a lot of very useful features like Auto tiling and some customization on top they include extra software on top of Ubuntu repos they support flat Hub and they actually have a stake in making sure the OS works really well because well they sell computers with it pre-installed yeah that kind of stuff will make you care a little bit I guess but for now I will only put Bob OS in the decent category because it's in sort of a limbo while they developed their new cosmic desktop shell it looks very interesting but in the meantime popos hasn't seen a new release in almost a year it uses an older version of gnome and its own additions to gnome were not updated either there is also no word on if we will see a Pap OS release to follow Ubuntu 223.04 or what it will bring and yes I'm sure that once they release their new and updated Cosmic desktop and they start updating the base and the apps again I'll be able to put them in good or great but for now it's only decent because it's too old for a Mainline desktop distro it missed out on a lot and you just don't know where it's going for now now let's continue with Gen 2 and look this one just isn't for me I tried it I understand why it exists but I also don't really feel the need to have almost everything I install be compiled for my Hardware specifically I don't need this level of control over what I install and performance wise I would argue that on a recent computer you're never going to notice the difference but that doesn't mean Gen 2 is bad it's solid and once the long install process is finished it runs like any other rolling distro and the heavier packages are provided as binary so you won't waste 20 hours compiling chromium or LibreOffice and that level of control over how you install things and what exactly you want to install is what some people look for so Gen 2 is going in the good category it's not for me but I'm not going to criticize it just because I'm not the target audience now let's move on to zorin OS it looks icy cold and cool it has tons of layouts you can use to make it look and behave more like a desktop you're already used to it includes a bunch of tools like a rebranded KD connect or wine out of the box and some people might call that bloat but honestly if you use that word you're probably an arch user and you had zero interest in an Ubuntu based distro anyways now sorry no s will go into the no thanks category because it also suffers from the not updated often enough problem they tend to release new major versions every two years only which is not frequent enough for a desktop distro at least in my opinion you're stuck on super old gnome with worse performance no good Wayland support all the drivers I just can't recommend it Linux Mint uses an older base as well but they provide regular updates to their desktop and apps zorinos doesn't if they had a semi-rolling release policy for the desktop and applications then sure but for now if you install zorino as 16 today it feels like going back in time you're missing a lot and there are better choices for your desktop now Katie neon that's a good one it also uses an older Ubuntu LTS base which can be your problem but it has all the latest software from KD from the desktop to the apps and that's a very good mix so it's going in good basically it gets great stability plus unevolving desktop which is what I want from a desktop distro even though they said themselves they are not a distro but they clearly are there's nothing much more to say here it's a great choice for KD lovers unless you really really want snaps or you absolutely need a more up-to-date base than an LTS I would never recommend kubuntu to you over KD neon it's just a better choice and of course I plan to test a lot more distros this year including open Souza which I haven't looked at in years or Nix OS some immutable distros and more so if your favorite distro was not in that tier list Don't Panic tell me about it in the comments below I'll take a look at it if it's interesting enough I'll make a dedicated video on it and who knows if I make another of these tier list videos it might be included in it as well just like I included this Segway to our sponsor if you need a new computer and you plan to run Linux on it stop buying Windows laptops or desktops and trying to retrofit Linux on top of it for the best experience click the link in the description below and buy a device from tuxedo they make computers laptops desktops nugs gaming devices whatever you want that run Linux out of the box the hardware is picked specifically for Linux they are super customizable the range will cover every price point and every need and all laptops can be opened repaired customized upgraded you can replace the battery the ram the SSD and sometimes even the wireless card so if you plan to run Linux and you need a new computer buy something from tuxedo from the link in the description it's just my much better so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications to write a comment and if you didn't like the video there's always that little thumbs down button but do tell me why in the comments as well it's more polite and if you really love the channel and you want to help support it there are plenty of links down there for my social networks Libra pay PayPal patreon YouTube thanks YouTube memberships whatever you know what to do so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 296,791

Keywords: linux, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, opensource, linux tips, distro, linux for beginners 2023, linux tutorial 2023, linux vs windows, linux desktop tier list, linux distro tier list, linux distributions, list of linux distributions, ubuntu vs mint, ubuntu vs fedora, ubuntu vs debian, ubuntu vs arch linux, ubuntu vs zorin os, gentoo, popos, arch linux, manjaro, zorinos, zorin os, linux mint, solus, deepin linux, elementary os

Id: d7-EhGIeGUs

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023