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Comment by BMc2020 | Hacker News Reader

BMc2020

I had a brief (one week) love affair with Wubuntu because it tried as much as possible to have everything with the same name in the same menu in the same location etc. etc. as Windows 11. People spend years building up their muscle memory and hate having to throw it away...then I found out it was basically a malware distro. Pity. I'm always looking for the perfect distro I would reccommend to Grandma.

I'm still a distro hopper. Pop_OS! and Cinnamon Mint until something better comes along.

Rank Distribution HPD

1 Mint 2509>

2 MX Linux 2187<

3 EndeavourOS 1603<

4 Debian 1268>

5 CachyOS 1177>

6 Manjaro 1141=

7 Pop!_OS 1107>

8 Ubuntu 1072=

9 Fedora 957>

10 openSUSE 705

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As a public service announcement.

'The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring interest in Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.'[1]

[1] https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

A better metric is the "Average visitor rating", which is included on every distro page. Mint is rated 8.75/10 from 751 reviews. Here is a page listing distros by Average visitor rating: https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=ranking

I have always wondered why MX Linux is at the top on distrowatch, it does not seem that popular outside the site

I installed MX Linux years ago and have not looked back. It has been incredibly stable and easy to upgrade. While I had ubuntu and mint regularly get trashes on system updates in the past.

Distro watch's ranking isn't a good metric since it could be gamed easily. My understanding is it's just based on the number of clicks on the website, which I bet is gamed. I doubt MX Linux is actually that popular. I've never known a linux user who runs it, I have ran it myself several times. But I have known more Void users than MX users.

Addition: This isn't a dig at MX. I enjoyed the times I've installed it. I personally like it, although it's not my main go to distribution. Just that distrowatch's ranking isn't reflective of reality.

This has information to how they do it https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

Zorin OS is the closest thing I've tried to the Windows experience. It's not 1-to-1 but it's pretty close. It's got a Wine compatibility layer that makes .exe files click-to-install in most cases but I've only needed to use it a couple of times for a workstation setup so I can't vouch for advanced use cases like gaming.

What about printing? It seems hit or miss with hardware support with certain features like duplex printing and scanning.

I bounce off Linux every few years because I always run into a "that's just broken and if you don't like it go eff yourself" situation. Maybe sleep doesn't work right, or battery health charge limiting doesn't work, or I can't change the order of the window control buttons without throwing the whole WM out, or my 1% lows go absolutely in the trash, or some other obscure things just doesn't work.

Also the whole "Wayland was supposed to replace X twenty years ago but a third of software doesn't work on Wayland" thing is just super embarrassing and makes me feel like the entire Linux ecosystem doesn't know what it's doing.

> Maybe sleep doesn't work right

Over the past decade I've had far worse luck with Windows for power-management-related problems.

Wayland is indeed an embarrassment, but it adds approximately 0 value for most users, so you can just tell everyone to use X11 still and everything will just work.

(my most recent peeve stopping me from using Wayland: Firefox no longer remembers which windows belong on which virtual desktops. I don't know whose bug this would be by normal rules, but if you want to replace the entire ecosystem, you have to take responsibility to fix ALL of the bugs)

i don't think any of the distros in that list come with KDE Plasma as their default/flagship offering; it's not the same as windows but i think it will be a lot more familiar to a windows user than the more macos-like offerings like Gnome

specific distro recommendations with plasma ig are Fedora KDE Spin[1] and uBlue Aurora[2]

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/spins/ [2] https://getaurora.dev/ [2]

openSUSE does.

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