The 2025 Linux Tier List
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This is just very surface level discussion. Didn't even mention that NixOS lets you roll your system back to any previous configuration or has the most packages of any distro
or has the most packages of any distro
That's very much open to discussion. You can't just go by the number of packages because nixpkgs for example has multiple python versions as separate packages, each with a set of the same libraries just with a different prefix.
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Is OpenSuse tumbleweed worth checking out? Something fairly stable and good for gaming.
I have been using Pop-OS for the longest but newer hardware and therefore waiting for the new version to get more stable. Using bazzite meanwhile. Immuble distro is interesting but not sure if I like it.
Even with the automated testing, Tumbleweed will still sometimes introduce problems with updates. They mitigate the risk of that with Snapper, so you can rollback to a previous state if things get borked.
Personally, though I've tried it a few times, I just can't get on with openSuse distros.
- Updating is really slow since Zypper does one task at a time, compared to DNF or Apt which can download and install multiple packages at once
- Updating is particularly slow in the US, since most opens use servers are in the EU
- Yast is powerful for enterprise/sysadmins, but is damn clunky to use for everyday normal stuff (IMHO).
I'd honestly just go for Fedora if you want up-to-date packages, perhaps Nobara if you want it more pre-setup for gaming and codecs. It's much more slick overall.
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I don't think so, personally.
Their YaST system is pretty heavily integrated and unique only to distros based on SUSE.
Really it's just arch-based distros for rolling releases, and debian-based for point-released. The rest are superfluous.
Fedora is a solid middle ground between Arch and Debian.
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Fedora is a solid middle ground between Arch and Debian.
Not really. I lump fedora in with suse. No point in having a separate package system like dnf.
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Not really. I lump fedora in with suse. No point in having a separate package system like dnf.
I haven't experienced any friction from DNF, so personally I don't see it as a con. I just think Fedora has a useful middle ground between new packages and stability.
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or has the most packages of any distro
That's very much open to discussion. You can't just go by the number of packages because nixpkgs for example has multiple python versions as separate packages, each with a set of the same libraries just with a different prefix.
While the full number might be inflated, it still has one of the most complete official repositories.
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Even with the automated testing, Tumbleweed will still sometimes introduce problems with updates. They mitigate the risk of that with Snapper, so you can rollback to a previous state if things get borked.
Personally, though I've tried it a few times, I just can't get on with openSuse distros.
- Updating is really slow since Zypper does one task at a time, compared to DNF or Apt which can download and install multiple packages at once
- Updating is particularly slow in the US, since most opens use servers are in the EU
- Yast is powerful for enterprise/sysadmins, but is damn clunky to use for everyday normal stuff (IMHO).
I'd honestly just go for Fedora if you want up-to-date packages, perhaps Nobara if you want it more pre-setup for gaming and codecs. It's much more slick overall.
Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I've had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.
My experience with Fedora (about 2 years of daily driving) has lead me to almost hate it, while my experience with Tumbleweed (approx. 6 months daily driver) has lead me to live it dearly. And I've never even used YAST!
Well, I guess a lot of this really depends on what packages you use, how you configure your OS, etc. — it's good to know both sides of the coin no matter what.
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Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I've had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.
My experience with Fedora (about 2 years of daily driving) has lead me to almost hate it, while my experience with Tumbleweed (approx. 6 months daily driver) has lead me to live it dearly. And I've never even used YAST!
Well, I guess a lot of this really depends on what packages you use, how you configure your OS, etc. — it's good to know both sides of the coin no matter what.
Fedora hasn't been all roses for my particular setup either, since they fully dropped X11 in the latest version, but my hardware combo isn't viable yet with Wayland, ultimately making me land on Linux Mint (which has been pretty dang nice).
I also tried OpenSUSE slowroll before Fedora, which I love the concept of, but an update on that seemed to bork my system (second monitor would remain blank upon booting), which made me a bit skeptical of its claims of extra stability.
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Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I've had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.
My experience with Fedora (about 2 years of daily driving) has lead me to almost hate it, while my experience with Tumbleweed (approx. 6 months daily driver) has lead me to live it dearly. And I've never even used YAST!
Well, I guess a lot of this really depends on what packages you use, how you configure your OS, etc. — it's good to know both sides of the coin no matter what.
Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.
Fedora 41 has DNF5 now, pretty fast.
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Your Fedora vs. OpenSUSE comparison is amusing to me, as I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. Fedora 40 DNF was hella slow for me, fedora broke regularly, etc.
Fedora 41 has DNF5 now, pretty fast.
Yeah, that's why I specified fedora 40. I guess eventually I'll need to try fedora again
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or has the most packages of any distro
That's very much open to discussion. You can't just go by the number of packages because nixpkgs for example has multiple python versions as separate packages, each with a set of the same libraries just with a different prefix.
https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique
This only includes packages that are also in other distros
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Is OpenSuse tumbleweed worth checking out? Something fairly stable and good for gaming.
I have been using Pop-OS for the longest but newer hardware and therefore waiting for the new version to get more stable. Using bazzite meanwhile. Immuble distro is interesting but not sure if I like it.
From a previous comment of mine:
After more than 15 years of Kubuntu I installed Tumbleweed a few years (two?) ago, because it offers a rolling release, system snapshots and KDE.
Having a job and a family, I do not have the time to tinker anymore, so I expect things to work smoothly out-of-the-box nowadays.
Tumbleweed let me down in this respect.
Once I had to completely reinstall the system because the snapshots filled the system partition during an update, which made it unable to start KDE. I could roll back from the terminal to the previous snapshot, but couldn't figure out how to remedy the problem, except for using a greater partition and reinstalling.
And just a few days ago KDE (and many applications, when used in LXDE) wouldn't start, because of version mismatches (caused by an incomplete update?) that broke the linkage of qt libraries. To resolve it I had to make a decision between two packages (tlp vs tuned) to finish the update, even though I hadn't installed those manually and didn't know anything about them.
Besides those problems I find the administration suboptimal, with the divide between the Interfaces of Yast and the KDE settings. I didn't manage to get my Brother network printer to work (except via direct USB connection), which worked out of the box with my android phone.
I plan to try the fedora atomic desktop soonish.
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While the full number might be inflated, it still has one of the most complete official repositories.
That is true, but most NixOS contributors and maintainers would agree that the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros. However, there is the upside that because of how dependencies are handled, a broken package won't mess with other things on your system in the same way a broken AUR package could.
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This is just very surface level discussion. Didn't even mention that NixOS lets you roll your system back to any previous configuration or has the most packages of any distro
Rollbacks are definitely something worth talking about, but the package count is not.
Nixpkgs automatically generated packages from some language specific package managers, mainly Haskell and Node packages, which do hugely inflate the number. If you account for these, it does end up being smaller than the AUR. Plus, many of those automatically generated packages are frequently broken.
This still leaves Nixpkgs as the largest official repo, but I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package. Package review processes are not nearly as intensive as they probably should be due to the lack of manpower to handle that.
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That is true, but most NixOS contributors and maintainers would agree that the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros. However, there is the upside that because of how dependencies are handled, a broken package won't mess with other things on your system in the same way a broken AUR package could.
the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros.
Care to elaborate? I don't remember packages not working, but if anything, they're not building; which is basically the reverse of what happens at other distributions where sometimes, breakage during building isn't noticed because the packages aren't getting rebuilt when a dependency or the compiler toolchain changes.
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Rollbacks are definitely something worth talking about, but the package count is not.
Nixpkgs automatically generated packages from some language specific package managers, mainly Haskell and Node packages, which do hugely inflate the number. If you account for these, it does end up being smaller than the AUR. Plus, many of those automatically generated packages are frequently broken.
This still leaves Nixpkgs as the largest official repo, but I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package. Package review processes are not nearly as intensive as they probably should be due to the lack of manpower to handle that.
I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package
Package maintainer here. Not sure what you mean by quality; as that term is very ambiguous. Shit works and configuration is often a breeze by comparison to other distros.
I would never go back to a legacy distro. Who wants to do that shit all by hand?
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the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros.
Care to elaborate? I don't remember packages not working, but if anything, they're not building; which is basically the reverse of what happens at other distributions where sometimes, breakage during building isn't noticed because the packages aren't getting rebuilt when a dependency or the compiler toolchain changes.
I agree that Nix handles broken packages much better than Arch, but that's more on the package managers themselves than the quality of packages.
NixOS Unstable has fairly frequent package breakages, especially for Python applications or packages using autogenerated dependencies. There are also many unmaintained packages. These unmaintained packages often get updated automatically without being tested, breaking them. Without a maintainer, some of these take a bit to be fixed.
I do think Nixpkgs packages are on average higher quality than AUR packages, they are just not up to the standards of many other repos official packages. Also, to be clear, I'm not hating on Nix or anything, I love Nix and NixOS is and has been my distro of choice for years.
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I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package
Package maintainer here. Not sure what you mean by quality; as that term is very ambiguous. Shit works and configuration is often a breeze by comparison to other distros.
I would never go back to a legacy distro. Who wants to do that shit all by hand?
I didn't say or imply that NixOS is worse than other distros overall. I am also a maintainer of several packages, but I am referring to those with Nixpkgs write access, who generally have a deeper understanding of the repo.
Shit usually works, but not always. Breakages on unstable are not uncommon. For example, things often break when a major Python package is updated. The auto generated packages in Nixpkgs are often broken, sometimes completely, but sometimes in ways you don't realize until you're using them. Nixpkgs just does not have a review process that is on par with other distros.
I agree that NixOS configuration is amazing, that's not what I was talking about. Im not shit talking NixOS, I love Nix and have used and contributed to it for years. I'm just bringing up valid points about it that are worth talking about.
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I didn't say or imply that NixOS is worse than other distros overall. I am also a maintainer of several packages, but I am referring to those with Nixpkgs write access, who generally have a deeper understanding of the repo.
Shit usually works, but not always. Breakages on unstable are not uncommon. For example, things often break when a major Python package is updated. The auto generated packages in Nixpkgs are often broken, sometimes completely, but sometimes in ways you don't realize until you're using them. Nixpkgs just does not have a review process that is on par with other distros.
I agree that NixOS configuration is amazing, that's not what I was talking about. Im not shit talking NixOS, I love Nix and have used and contributed to it for years. I'm just bringing up valid points about it that are worth talking about.
Nixpkgs just does not have a review process that is on par with other distros.
We can agree on this. There is work to do.
Breakages on unstable are not uncommon.
I run unstable, and I have had this happen twice. Both times with Tmux (which is weird); but it was upstream issues. But fair enough. Maybe my systems aren't exotic enough to experience the uncommon breakages.
Could nixpkgs do better? Yes. I mean, look at the backlog. You have to be active in the community to get your work merged in any decent timeframe. I think this is the most annoying part about the Nix ecosystem.
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Nixpkgs just does not have a review process that is on par with other distros.
We can agree on this. There is work to do.
Breakages on unstable are not uncommon.
I run unstable, and I have had this happen twice. Both times with Tmux (which is weird); but it was upstream issues. But fair enough. Maybe my systems aren't exotic enough to experience the uncommon breakages.
Could nixpkgs do better? Yes. I mean, look at the backlog. You have to be active in the community to get your work merged in any decent timeframe. I think this is the most annoying part about the Nix ecosystem.
Maybe my systems aren't exotic enough to experience the uncommon breakages.
The majority of issues are caused by Python applications, because Python packaging in Nix is still very rough. This isn't Nix's fault though, its the fact that pip sucks and most Python software uses a simple requirements.txt. Hopefully one day Poetry and UV build helpers will be in Nixpkgs.
You have to be active in the community to get your work merged in any decent timeframe. I think this is the most annoying part about the Nix ecosystem.
Definitely agree. It can be hard to get things merged or even reviewed. The simplest option to improve this would be to give more people write access, but of course lowering requirements for getting it would be a risk for security and stability. Nixpkgs automation is frequently improving, which will definitely help.
