For me it’s PeppermintOS.
I started my Linux adventure a few years ago, and haven’t owned a Windows PC since.
I currently use Arch on my main rig, and I wanted to install Linux on two old laptops that I found laying around in my house
I then remembered the first distro I ever used, which is PeppermintOS, and I was amazed at the latest updates they released.
They even have a mini ISO now to do a net-install with no bloat, with a Debian or Devuan base.
Sadly, I believe the founder passed away a few years ago, which is why I was really happy to see the continuation of this amazing project.
deleted by creator
I generally don’t understand why people go for the smaller ones at all. I guess it’s good that someone does to prevent the whole scene being dominated by a single distro, but with some exceptions (e.g. you hate systemd for some reason and really want systemd-less arch, or you have a super niche preferences). For 99% of distros it makes very little difference which one you use, except that you’ll have fewer resources at your disposal (fewer packages, fewer stack overflow threads, fewer everything).
ubuntu pushing snap is what pushed me away. i had used it since warty and was a regular contributor in the official forums. i went back to pure debian, and have since added mint and manjaro (yes i know about its history) desktops, and a few dietpi on x64 (no sbc here), two of which run my piholes.
I don’t know about it’s history, can you enlighten me?
main source is ManjarNo
There are still subtle changes that non-techy users wouldn’t know how to deal with. For example, can you explain why the same exact games (either native or Wine) would work on one Ubuntu-based distro, but not on another? And it’s not like the lesser-known ones are always the worst. Currently my two favorite distros are HamoniKR and Pardus, which are very obscure, but I find them the most user-friendly, OOTB experiences I’ve had. And I have distro-hopped a lot.
Doing changes right is a bit hard. With immutable Distros, some changes are easier like adding or removing packages, bur core OS adaptions are harder.
But for example how would you convert regular Ubuntu to
This all gets messy, so people choose small distros