What Are The Hardest Linux Distros? (It's Not The Ones You Think!)

I have been asked thousands of times over the history of this channel "What is the hardest Linux distro that you've tried?" This is a difficult question to answer. In fact, I often avoid answering it. But today, I wanted to properly answer it on camera.

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[ik]

Gentoo was insanely difficult to build practically from scratch when it first arrived in the early 2000's. Getting a decent X session running in the '90s was a challenge, too!

[weswheel]

I find that if an install isn't complicated enough for you, you can always make it harder.

[brettlloyd]

Great video! I really like your candid assessment of both the distros as well as yourself not reading the manual sometimes and making it harder! Nice to see a pro still be humble and do an honest self assessment too. Well done!

[Ferran-Gnu-Linux]

In this point. we don't need to sacrifice our lives installing a Gnu-Linux distro with a hard, old, or rare installation; the final experience, quality, performance, optimization, etc. of it will be equal like another easy distro once you had installed. Nothing is enough to justify a hard installation currently. It's a pure masochism to believe that the "hard" is "better".

[tiberiusmagnificuscaeser]

I really like gentoo. In my opinion, portage is one of the nicest package managers to use, port trees make finding packages so nice, and the search functions are great. However, I don’t currently run gentoo, mainly because my computers are all potato laptops and and would take a week to do an @world update.

[bstar]

I agree 100% about major distro release upgrades being "difficult"... if you have a carefully tuned system with a lot of very specific optimizations and configurations, doing a dist-upgrade is the most stressful thing you will do all year. Since using Arch I've never had an update cause more than a minor hiccup (all my issues were Nvidia driver related) whereas I've had Ubuntu and other Debian based distros break so bad that I've had to reformat.

[InfernalMonsoon]

I been using Garuda Linux for a while now and it's the perfect mix of ease of use and pushing the player to learn more about their system bit by bit at a pace that's not too pressing. Because sometimes with rolling release distros based on Arch and other things, there's going to be a hiccup or a breakage at some point, luckily I've not had anything too major. But whenever a problem does occur, I just look around various forums, especially the Arch forums and I usually find my answer after a few searches, and if I can't I usually ask around, talk about the issue and get some feedback with useful links on how to solve well known issues and then I'm usually golden. Arch and Arch-based systems really aren't that hard, especially when they have great documentation.

[POMRNC]

Installing Gentoo is pretty easy when you follow the handbook. Maintaining an existing installation long-term is what is actually difficult. When things break on major upgrades, fixing it can be significantly more complicated than on other distros. For example because of USE flags and having the ability to choose in cases where other distros just choose one solution for you (which is a much simpler approach). Just some of the conflicts in portage can cause headaches and I've been using Gentoo for more than a decade.
There is a certain level of Linux knowledge you need to have to handle things like that, which is the reason people call Gentoo hard. Obviously at your level a specific distro doesn't really matter anymore, because you understand the underlying concepts all distros are built on.

[Bruce.ItsYourPC]

Linux is very easy these days. Most people do not understand what difficult means when it comes to Linux. The 1990's early 2000's dependency hell. The difficulty of waiting days, not hours, but days for Gentoo to compile everything, the absolute nightmare that Slackware could be when trying to get software working. These days people think it is "difficut" when widget a isn't working the way they want it to, and widget b isn't as pretty as widget c LOL

[Redmage]

I appreciate the way you explained your point of view when attempting to give your answer to this very difficult question.

I do approach things slightly differently - I try to consider the community support behind a distro and judge a distro’s difficulty on how willing those on official forums are to help instead of saying “after reading X in the wiki you shouldn’t have questions” and blaming the new user for their lack of experience with the OS.

Over the years, I’ve had a few issues in Arch where I was tempted to go to their forums. But after doing searches on the topic and seeing the levels of derision enough of that community has towards the confused user’s questions, I knew I should not ask and start trying seemingly random approaches to a problem or give up on fixing it.

Wikis are not the end-all, be-all of support. Some learn better from people, who can contextualize and make relevant the principles behind a solution, which leads to more efficient education for those types. Some don’t self-teach well, and need that help.

[bufordghoons]

Gentoo user here, in it for the Rolling Release cycle, using IceWM for a light & snappy desktop that is not trying to be MS Windows. Gentoo isn't all that time consuming if you schedule updates when you are away or asleep. There are occasional issues but nothing a little brain elbow grease can't fix..

[zonnodon]

Lol, at the end, man you're kinda like an alien to us!

[uuu]

The hardest is the first distro you ever used

[jesse]

I also find Arch Linux easy. I have only installed it using Archinstall, which is anything but difficult. Usage wise, it's super easy. Frankly, the enormous amount of documentation for Arch makes it so that any issue you have can be resolved if you do the work.

[ArniesTech]

Great Points, Derek. Although I respectfully disagree with you on many points here, I massively enjoyed to hear your point of view. Keep it up, sir 💪

[xs]

I've installed (all) debian and arch based distros. Used Ubuntu, popOS and now I've landed on ZorinOS. I look how polished is a DE. Now I triple boot Windows 11, macOS Ventura and Zorin.

[walter_lesaulnier]

Fedora's semi-rolling model is awesome. Their major updates go flawlessly- no need to clean install. SELinux in Fedora can "get in your way" and make you come up with new swear words when trying to do complex/ unusual things with virtual machine hardware.

[Technopath]

I'd argue Arch is fairly easy once you understand it, but I'd say it's not exactly that user friendly for the first-time user as the installation guide is frankly intimidating (especially if they're not familiar with Linux). I would definitely like to see some content to try and make that experience easier for people who are newer to Linux as it would be great for people to experience Arch instead of being stuck with Ubuntu distros to begin with. Arch is really fun, but I think people like to try and gatekeep it.

[MichaelWilliams-lrmb]

I think people get easiness and intuitiveness confused.

The graphical installations are typically more intuitive. It's not necessarily easier than something that may require reading instructions.. Sure, I could use a GUI instaler typicaly without reading instructions, yet fine-tuning the system during the installation may be difficult, even impossible, when compared to Arch or Gentoo.

[crab_aesthetics]

I had the same experience with upgrading distributions that are periodic release distros, the further away you get from a vanilla install, the more things go badly during a major upgrade. I now run rolling release distros on all my hardware except three machines: two proxmox servers (which both need to be upgraded) and one zentyal domain controller (which also needs to be upgraded). I don't want to upgrade any of the three because they're all important for my home network to function, and if the upgrade goes badly I'm in for potentially many hours of rebuilding.