If they are based one of the 4 main distros and don’t offer anything that couldn’t be done by following a tutorial, they are probably bad and likely won’t be maintained for very long, and may or may not let you switch to the base distro easily depending on the tweaks that have been done.

Otherwise the only bad distro is one where the installer doesn’t work on your hardware.

Arch based distros have poor security by default, most of the time. Besides the AUR being a problem, they usually dismiss the need for SElinux or Apparmor. It might not be a big problem at the moment, but China and Europe are switching to linux, and AI making exploits and malware easier. Linux users should start taking this more seriously even if it’s annoying to set up, or dealing with permissions for things can add an extra minute of effort every once in a while.

A lot of distros (like debian) use the default paradigm of “your distro maintains everything you install, and everything needs to be on the same library, and everything you install has access to everything” is outdated and bad, imo. There is a reason why linux servers have embraced containerization. There are reasons for this setup, I just don’t think they are good reasons, and the issues this has causes has hurt linux adoption. People who maintain complex software don’t want to have to support 20 different linux platforms and all their versioning quirks.

That said, I wouldn’t call distros that follow these practices “bad”, necessarily. It’s just traditional linux footguns that users are used to.

omarchy’s run by a fascist, trying to take over the foss community.

Did you miss the daily omarchy posts?

Manjaro lets their SSL certificates expire everytime and apparently their package manager used to (accidentally) DDOS the AUR.

hannah montana linux was left unmaintained for almost 2 decades

Most of the bad ones are bad on purpose like the meme distros people have mentioned. These are your Hannah Montana or My Little Pony Linux.

Other reasons they might be bad are they are ran by fascists, like Omarchy.

Mostly the rest aren’t actively bad in any special way, they’re just unnecessary. They’re all still Linux running similar packages, bootloaders, etc. The bones of everything are made by the specific software developers and the distros are largely just putting them together in different configurations.

I would argue something like 5 distros are truly necessary and the rest are just obnoxious fragmentation and duplicated effort disguised as ‘choice’. But they will work fine if you install them.

Anyone who tells you another popular distro is bad is likely to be talking very subjectively. Like how I think Debian sucks because their idea of ‘stability’ means having a Podman package that is 2 major versions behind the current one, lacking significant useful features. Others will say Debian is the perfect server OS or, God forbid, use it for games.

I’d say ChromeOS probably, but I haven’t actually tried it, I just disremoved it as a concept.

I wouldn’t say the distro is bad, but I remember when I was on 4chan’s tech board (/g/ I wanna say? Idk it’s been about a decade since I’ve been on it at this point) the meme was to suggest newcomers install Gentoo because of how complicated and not beginner friendly it is.

It’s basically joke distros that are intentionally bad, abandoned distros that are no longer supported, and distros run by fascists.

Red Hat is kind of bad because of its commercial status, but it’s a moot point now, because nobody is using their enterprise distro on their personal computers.

What do you mean, “bad”?

Other than intentional meme distros, there are distros that have a bad reputation for various reasons. Manjaro maintains their own separate repository for software with the intention of making arch system upgrades less risky. But they’ve had many security and cert issues over the years that have broken the updates badly, ironically.

Ubuntu is a good distro from a functional angle, and has a ton on support you can get because it is so well known, but its parent company, Canonical is not great and suffers from all the most common problems that any corporate entity ends up suffering from.

The same can be said for a bunch of others. Lots of distros are perfectly fine, but have only one or two primary maintainers, so if they go off the deep end, or get sick, or otherwise leave the project, that distro likely will just die, and all its users will have to rapidly migrate to something else. That’s bad from an operational risk angle, but fine if you have your home partition backed up and are comfortable just migrating onto something else.

But also yeah, fuck Omarchy, that’s a weak ass distro.

NixOS

I personally had a bad experience with Fedora Cinnamon Spin. This was the first distro I installed on a personal desktop gaming PC, 5 or so years ago. It started fine, though for whatever reason, issues just kept accumulating over the years:

• I had it setup to auto-login at boot, but then a year or two later, it suddenly required me to unlock the keychain (or whatever you call it) once I got on my desktop
• I started having graphical glitches when playing oblivion (I’m on Nvidia)
• then with the latest version it would no longer wake up my display when resuming from sleep
• then it started having frustrating graphical glitches in regular applications like feinshin (music player)
• then it would render the menu when right clicking in the tray icons in the upper left corner and sometimes stop showing the menu all-together

At that point I got so frustrated I installed fedora KDE plasma and everything was solved (I preferred it already and had it on my other computer) People tell me how great cinnamon is, but I had a pretty annoying experience with it. Maybe some of it is Nvidia, but KDE works flawlessly with Nvidia, it has for me for years.

Fun fact, I switched from cinnamon to KDE by just switching desktop environment, uninstalling cinnamon and installing kde plasma, it worked flawlessly I was pleasantly surprised. It was mostly done use the dnf switch command and some minor cleaning.

Ubuntu, but that’s more of a company problem.

i’m trying to move from windows but i require a strong video editor, like premiere, and the only one i hear easily works is Da Vinci. Luckily i’m pretty familiar with da vinci, but the only “officially supported” distro for Da Vinci is Rocky Linux. Anyone ever used it? I have very very very minimal amounts of exposure to linux in the past.