What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?
I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS
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 be in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too.
Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress latelly, 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.
The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are interesting… but there is a bridge to cross that most of the World still not ready…
Finally we have Arch. I see it better future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 to 10 years down the line. It won’t be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS that brings it to the public… maybe KDE’s new bet?!
Can I get a summary of what’s going on in Chinese Linux land? That seems pretty interesting; I always wonder what programs the East uses vs the West
I haven’t play much with them but this is my take:
Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets… for better or for worse, but I like their take.
Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven’t tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu’s or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.
OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch…). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.
There are others but for niches.
China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.