I’m not really partial to any distro. I’ve had to use Windows for school for quite a while now but when I used Linux on my personal machine pre-school, I mainly used Lubuntu, a derivative of Ubuntu. I’ve also experimented with Manjaro on occasion.
There’s no easy way to do this, but I’m always curious about the polling breakdown while operating within certain constraints.
As a half-baked example, within Framework’s context I’d be curious for comparisons of distros by use-case. This could be a comparison between beginner-friendly distro’s (Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, etc.) or between power user distros (Fedora/Arch/Suse).
Beyond Framework, I find the usual discussion about “what distro is best” to be of decreasing value. I don’t think it would be that hard to matrix all of the differences between the distros (package managers and compatibility, init system, window manager, release cadence, desktop environments, multimedia frameworks etc.).
Framework and Linux are a match made in heaven because of their modular nature. Due to modularity, it’s far more helpful to address the “why” behind the above-listed components that are specific to the distribution rather than the “what” that people initially interact with in a distribution. I don’t understand why there is no existing matrixed comparison between distros that enables people to assess the pros and cons of a given distribution’s components rather than repetitive and incomplete generalisms about a given distribution.
For example, I’m a relative newcomer to Linux. I now know that wayland and pipewire are prerequisites for my use-case. Separately, I’m curious about MX’s lack of SystemD and what that actually means. The matrix I would like to see could inform me about how these modular components (Wayland and Pipewire) can integrate with the variable that I’m less familiar with (SystemD), thus more efficiently enabling my success with less experimentation and floundering.
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No love for RHEL 9?
…
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To drive community engagement.
I enjoy Fedora quite a bit. It’s a nice balance between bleeding edge packages, and dot releases. By the way, anyone voting for a derivative of a distro, just vote for its upstream so you don’t split the vote. Ubuntu is probably closer to 35% if you consider all the derivatives alongside it.
For the record, this was last year’s poll:
Which Linux distribution do you want to use on your Framework Laptop? - Framework Laptop / Linux - Framework Community
Similar…but asked differently…kinda.
Something with good implementation of KDE Plasma desktop. At this moment I find OpenSuse Tumbleweed the best. KDE Neon and Kubuntu are also OK.
openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE!
Pretty sure Distrowatch has that covered 
RHEL is a paid for distro targeted at large corporates, it’s not an option for the vast majority of end users (unless you count fedora, which is RHEL’s proving ground distro)
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RHEL is not a paid, and is free for some cases including individual and small production cases.
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PopOS 22.04 - It just works and runs so well on my Framework laptop.
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Fedora KDE for me definitely, it’s still a bit buggy but it’s getting there!
Arch. Well, a little derivative called EndeavourOS.
- Rolling release
- AUR
- Excellent documentation
- Interesting graphical installer features
@FrameworkBee Not sure if you can retroactively edit it your poll options, but I suspect breaking “Arch” out from “other” would make your results a lot more useful!
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PopOS is by far my favorite out-of-the-box desktop experience followed closely by Manjaro and its variants ( which has some specific packages I use for dev work )
However, once I learned enough to build an Arch system I never looked back. Having a curated distro for exactly what I need vs a generic install is all I really ever want.
The next step for me would be Linux-From-Scratch if I ever felt so inclined.
I’m sentimental about Mandriva and Slackware and still have a Slackware propaganda button on my website, but I’ve been getting ready to give openSUSE a try since Slackware isn’t available on ppc64/64le, which is what i’m planning on moving to.
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Slackware for the win I say! I do love the simplicity that it adheres to
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If it had a ppc64le port, I’d still be using it right now! Something about it, whether it was KDE Plasma 4 or how close it was to barebones, just really felt good to me.
Edit: so it does, if unofficially!
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I’ve been distro hopping on my Framework to find the best experience with fractional scaling. So far nothing has been perfect. Manjaro Gnome with Wayland gets close, but some apps like Discord and VS Code are blurry at 150%.
At work I use Ubuntu for servers but may switch to Debian soon.
@Avendor maybe try Fedora 36 Gnome on Wayland? I’m running VSCode Flatpak (and everything) at 125% and it’s super sharp?
this isn’t a distro issue, you just need to adjust some stuff for individual apps. most electron ones require the same config. i can give you mine for both.
edit: for some reason discord doesn’t get borders on wayland, probably it’s because it depends on an old version of electron. there’s a ticket open upstream about it.