The 2025 Linux Tier List
I woke up asking for war and that's because I decided to do a Linux tier list and I don't think anything can create a war faster than distro wars. I want to shout out Chris Titus Tech for doing kind of an original version of this video which I thought was really well done. I don't agree with everything that Chris does but that's okay that's kind of the whole point of these is I get to share my personal thoughts on this. Make sure to stick around to the end because I will have more takeaways for all of you and how you should pick a distro based on kind of my thoughts along the way. Now you'll notice that I actually don't have that many distros and that's because I've gone through and filtered out some basic things to save time in this video so I can give more thoughts on specific distros. I went ahead and eliminated things that are forks but not established enough forks that
you can't just claim it under the same umbrella but on the other hand I feel like Linux Mint is established enough as its own operating system that even though maybe it was a fork and still is arguably a fork of Ubuntu it's just been long enough where I feel like it was more established. Similarly, Manjaro is not here because I'm just going to put Arch and talk about Arch broadly. Anything that I think should just be avoided I'm not getting into this video. Anything on this list I could see a use case for somebody so these are 14 that we're going to start out with. We're going to start with Arch. Arch is such a unique operating system and I completely understand why it's
built up the reputation it has within the Linux community and it's because it's simple, it's minimal, there's almost no bloatware and of course it has kind of the friction point of installing it which I think makes everyone feel a little bit cooler once they get it installed. It's kind of a perfect recipe. Now Arch is bleeding edge so it's definitely not the most stable thing. It's probably stable enough for most people to use day to day because of Arch being so powerful and so good at what it does. This is actually what I opted to use when I did a pass through configuration
where I ran Windows and a VM and I had GPU pass through to try to get native like performance to edit videos back in the day so I could still edit in Windows but it wasn't a guest VM. I will say Arch did break on me a couple times and I really needed to lean into the community to fix it. If you've ever read through the Arch Wiki you know what I'm talking about the community behind it is fantastic. Now the downsides there is kind of a learning curve. I would never recommend Arch
as a first Linux distro for somebody unless they had a very specific use case. There are other options here that we'll get into that are probably better for you if this is your first time moving to Linux. It is a bit more manual of a configuration and also there is some instability. It's just not as stable as some of the other distros on this list. With that said I just don't think you can deny that it's one of the best Linux distros out there and I think that as long as it's the right user it's probably the right distro. Kind of on the opposite end of things but still having
similar problems you have Debian. So Debian is kind of the opposite because it's extremely stable. You're going to get security updates ported back to Debian and they do a really good job of keeping up with security updates but you just can't expect the newest software. Anytime there's a new major version of Debian people get really excited and they see an uptick. But what tends to happen is that the software starts slowly and slowly becoming harder and harder to install and maintain. So because of this this makes Debian a really really good operating system for people running servers or if you're going to be using something like Flatpaks or something else on top of Debian to handle your software. Debian was one of my first Linux distros and I thought it was really good. It was super stable and I had it installed for a super long time. The stability and the
software availability and the community are all massive wins. The downside is again older software and it's not super user friendly to use. I would not recommend Debian as a first Linux distro as well but again I just can't deny that it's overall one of the best Linux distros out there.
Just to really speak to this on Debian I remember when I wanted to contribute to Firefox's code and try to get a little bit more into the engineering side of things and when I tried to simply compile Firefox I went ahead and I tried to install all of the requirements and so I tried to install one thing and it says oh you're missing these four things because they're out of date. So then I try to go through each one and update each one but each one has a different prerequisite for something else and it you know it's just this infinite tree of software that's way too outdated to do some basic stuff. Nowadays I could probably figure it out but when I was just getting started this was not something obvious to me when I used Debian so probably something I could navigate today but not something that as a noob I was able to navigate. Linux Mint I'm not even going to give you an intro it's going to be for new users. Linux Mint is a Ubuntu fork and what it does is it installs a
desktop environment which is the looks and what it seems like and feels like and when you're using your operating system it's going to look similar to Windows-ish. So if you're somebody coming from Windows and you're really intimidated by Linux yes I know you're going to see a lot of people in the Linux community say yeah just there's better things than Linux Mint and I do agree I personally wouldn't pick Linux Mint as my first distro but so many people and I can't ignore the anecdotes. There are just so many people who like that Linux Mint makes it easy to install, is beginner friendly, has good hardware support, has great pre-installed applications, is stable, is based on something that's stable and it has that really familiar interface for a lot of people. I always go back
to the video that Linus made and seeing Luke's experience with Linux Mint was actually really eye-opening to me as well if you want to see kind of what that experience looks like for someone who's you know fairly new to Linux. OpenSUSE is actually one of my favorite Linux distributions and I'm going to go ahead and start by putting it in certain use cases. So it's got something called YaST. Super cool it's pretty much a control panel to let you do so many things with Linux that normally require lots of DIY and stuff in the CLI but YaST is like a GUI to be able to customize so many things and when I saw YaST it made me wonder why not every other Linux distribution decided to also implement it because it's so cool. OpenSUSE also has great community support, is extremely stable but also has a rolling release called tumbleweed so if you want more cutting-edge updates it's really good. I actually this might be a hot take. I almost see OpenSuse
as like a more accessible and more stable and more like enterprise version of Arch in a way. I know that might piss a lot of people off to say it that way but that is kind of the best way I can describe OpenSuse. If you have a business and you're trying to roll out a Linux distro for a lot of people and you need support, OpenSuse is a great option for that specifically because it has a formal organization behind it to help you out with things like that. So I really like OpenSuse, don't really have a use case for it myself but I just think it's great. Fedora I think has been getting more and more polarizing ever since Red Hat's been becoming more and more Red Hat-ish as however you want to call it. Fedora is my personal favorite and go-to Linux distribution. The reason for that being I really enjoy the privacy and security defaults in Fedora. I think
and I'll talk about this at the end that most of these Linux distros have good privacy and security but Fedora does do a few things to take it a step up from them and something else I like about Fedora is that it includes things like Silver Blue which is such a cool, they no longer call it mutable so it's a super cool atomic Linux distro for those of you who really want to lean into the security side of things. You're going to get the latest software patches, you're still going to get lots of fast updates but it's also extremely stable. So while it is from Red Hat part of the beauty of coming from a company like Red Hat is you get some stability and you get a little bit more of a formal organization behind the software you use. It's GNOME support is also super strong. So I really enjoy Fedora and the main con that I can really think of is that it's from Red Hat and technically there are some more stable distros out there but I think that Fedora is just a fantastic place to start. The thing that I really enjoy about Fedora is that I can actually put it in almost any of these. I think Fedora is not the first distro I'd recommend for new users but it can be used by new users. The only thing that might be kind of a trip up is the fact that
it doesn't have apt and it uses DNF instead but that's kind of the biggest you know friction point of Fedora that I can think of. It also has certain use cases with things like Silver Blue if you wanted to go with that route and I also think it's one of the better options for privacy and security which for me just means that it's one of the best Linux distros. I know it's a bit of a hot take because I personally also don't like Red Hat but I just can't deny that this specific operating system from Red Hat is just super solid. That could change depending on how Red Hat you know changes things because they're Red Hat but as of right now I don't feel weird putting Fedora as one of the best if not in my opinion the best Linux distro for most people. NixOS is just going to go straight into certain use cases so it's a declarative configuration system. If that sounds complicated let me kind of try to explain briefly what this looks like.
With NixOS you can essentially customize your entire operating system like with a file essentially you can host that file wherever you want so a workflow that a lot of people have is they'll host a file on GitHub which is kind of their like NixOS configuration file and what you can do is you can install Nix on any operating system you don't have to only do this on NixOS you can do it anywhere else and essentially it's going to automatically set up a new operating system based on the configuration that you're hosting somewhere else so it's a way for you to distro hop or do whatever you want with a unified configuration. It's also atomic kind of like Silverblue which is really great for both security and reliability it's customizable and it's great for people with more complex configurations. With that said I don't think it's something that if you're new to Linux or even moderate or even advanced to Linux not everyone has a use case for NixOS. I know I don't but I can still appreciate it for what it is. So many people I don't even know how to how to tackle Ubuntu because I feel like it's such a polarizing operating system and there is no winning you can you can crap all over Ubuntu and you'll get fanboys who come and say well why are you crapping all over it you can do the opposite and love Ubuntu and you'll get a lot of hate for that and I'm not going to do that. Now kind of like Red Hat being kind of sucky canonical can also be really sucky and I think Snap packages suck. They're slower they might be easier to use for some users but I
think that like the the sacrifices that come with Snap just completely goes against the philosophy of Linux as a whole. So if you're getting into Linux you're looking for open ecosystems compatible with multiple operating systems and isn't trying to lock you into anything that's specific to your OS. With that said the reason why I wanted to keep Ubuntu here is that I still think to this day regardless of the problems with Ubuntu I think it's still amazing for new users. Hear me out. Many of the issues with Ubuntu plague other operating systems that are not Linux right so Windows and macOS has a lot of the issues that Ubuntu has and Ubuntu's version of those issues is much much tamer than those operating systems so it's still an improvement and you're getting something from a formal organization that keeps things very stable very beginner friendly and it has massive amounts of community support. Ubuntu back in the day was actually my first Linux distribution and I think it's a really great Linux distro to start on and frankly I think that Ubuntu's shortcomings and limitations come up very quickly. I very quickly once Snap became a thing started realizing that my programs are opening slower and so I started investigating it and I realized I don't want to use this OS anymore and I migrated to something else but what I learned from Ubuntu without getting overwhelmed and moving back to what I was previously using is a huge benefit and I think a lot of people can benefit from Ubuntu as their first Linux distribution. Now if you want like a canonical free version of Ubuntu that's where I think Linux
Mint is still fantastic. Okay Kali Linux. I put it in here because I needed things to put for the privacy and security section but also I think it's really important to just this is a PSA. I am I'm really tired of people acting like Kali Linux is this like ultra secure operating system. Not that it isn't secure enough but that's just not at all the use case for Kali Linux. Typically I see people in like YouTube comments you know they say oh I don't this is privacy invasive Facebook is bad Amazon's bad. I'm going to move to Kali Linux and it's like let's let's clear something up here.
Kali Linux is a penetration testing operating system. This means that if you are somebody who is ideally doing this for ethical hacking you're able to download Kali Linux and go ahead and just out of the box have access to countless security tools. Some people think it's useless because you can get those tools on any other Linux distro and while this is true the cool thing about Kali is for penetration testers or security researchers they like having just a convenient place where all their tools are installed ready to go out of the box and if you are one of those people Kali Linux is just top tier and on this note ParrotOS is very similar also built for security researchers neither of these are meant for everyday use neither of these are meant to be like your daily driver privacy and security tool. They are used for penetration testing just to really speak to
the use case here. If you do like an ethical hacking course which I've done a very basic intro one before typically you know they'll say oh just come installed with Kali and that means that you're ready to go for the course. You don't have to you know post eight different things that you need to install beforehand just for that one lecture and in the next lecture you have to install eight more things. It's just all ready to go for you and it keeps things unified so that people can
clearly communicate and use the best tools. In Chris's original tier list there was no cubes but I went ahead and added QubesOS because I think it's deserving of its own spot. QubesOS is very difficult for me to rank. For context if you've never heard of QubesOS it is arguably the most secure operating system on this list. The way it works is everything is virtualized and isolated so when you open a browser it's literally running as almost its own virtual machine or what they call a qube. Now there is a hierarchy so there's something called DOM0 which is the privileged management. It's almost like you know for most people if I'm trying to use analogies it's like
your virtual machine software or your host OS kind of but everything you do in cubes doesn't feel like you're using virtual machine software it just feels like a browser opened but behind the scenes the browser opened in its own little dedicated cube. Super cool now you might think Henry this is you said it's best for security and it has lots of security benefits because everything is compartmentalized so isn't it here but then I go well it's also great for certain use cases. Hear me out. QubesOS is so cool for people who have lots of projects and they instead of having
to use browser profiles or instead of having to you know merge all of your signal accounts into one account you can have like eight versions of signal you can have 10 browsers and they're all set up for totally different use cases. You can have VPNs and different networking rules that are that just completely change on a per software basis. The amount of customizability and actual like day-to-day benefits that you can get from QubesOS just phenomenal. Now the issue is that it doesn't seem to have that kind of usability in mind. I feel like the UI UX of Qubes has so much room for improvement and for people to actually benefit from this compartmentalization I think that it needs to get better so while there is that certain use case I still overall think that you know it's geared towards high security but I really wish that Qubes would actually pivot to being more of a usability oriented tool because I think a lot of people could benefit from the compartmentalization if it was done a little bit more user friendly. Also stay subscribed because I have a Qubes laptop here that I intend to review and you guys will see that very shortly. Now if
you like security you'll like the end-to-end encrypted provider Notesnook which is also supported on Linux and in the web so as long as you have access to either Linux or a web browser you can use Notesnook. Notesnook is open source allows you to organize your thoughts is fully end-to-end encrypted so that all of your thoughts all of your notes anything that you write down is only kept with you. It has incredible features that are competitive to the mainstream even non-end-to-end encrypted counterparts and they have a phenomenal community to make it all happen. If you want to take ownership of your notes thoughts ideas and anything else check out NotesNUC down in the description it's open source and they have a free plan to try it out so there's really no risk. I
really enjoy Notesnook and think that it's one of the best note-taking softwares out there. Now back to the tier list. PopOS is from System76 which you might know as the company that builds computers and sells computers and it normally comes by default with PopOS. Now I'm going to go ahead and just put it here for amazing for new users. I think there's something just really great about being able to buy hardware that comes with PopOS out of the box and the entire experience is easy and accessible to anybody and I think System76 knocked it out of the park with the entire ecosystem that they've built around usability. So while you know PopOS wouldn't be the first thing I recommend to most people it's good for gaming, it's very clean, very modern and I think most people could figure it out. I think even like noobs to computers could figure out PopOS and it has great hardware
support but just be aware that you know System76 definitely has you know more of a focus on it so it might work best on their devices and while it is user-friendly it might not have quite the same community around it as something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu but I think POPOS is great and you really can't go wrong with it. Tails OS. So Tails OS I would probably put here as the best operating system for strictly privacy and anonymity. So if you've never used Tails before what you can do is you can just load it on a flash drive in fact that's the recommended way to use it and you just boot it as a live OS. Now it has no persistence and right out of the box it's built for anonymity so everything in Tails OS runs through Tor, everything is built to blend you in with other users who use Tails OS and you can use this on any public computer so it's just probably one of the best tools you can use and then when you're done with it you just unplug the USB and it wipes everything on your drive so it's also extremely ephemeral. So again excellent privacy, excellent anonymity, doesn't leave a trace when you're done with it and also kind of like Kali and Parrot comes with tools out of the box designed for privacy and security. Now some cons it is slow and also
not for everyday use you know a lot of people similar to Kali and Parrot come forward and say oh I'm just going to use Tails for everything and it's like well you might be able to but it's not really designed for everyday use and funny enough and I'll say this right now this is going to be the full Privacy and Security list and of all four of them Cubes OS really is the only one that I think realistically is for day-to-day use which makes it extremely unique on this list because none of the others do it. Elementary I didn't even know if I was going to include in this video to kind of really demonstrate how much I really enjoy it. I will say I'm putting it here just as if the first three don't speak to you then check out elementary and see if it speaks to you. I think the target demo for elementary is like Mac users who just want their computer to out of the box look and feel like a Mac but realistically I've tried elementary guys and I just I just don't think it does it. I think that if you're used to Mac OS and you try elementary it's just not going to itch the same thing that you get from Mac OS and I've seen people have much better luck customizing Arch to look like Mac OS. Now and I'll talk about this and you can customize any of these operating systems to look like anything else but I just think that just to throw one extra thing towards you there is elementary. I didn't love it and I can't think of many use cases but if you're a new user
to Linux and the first three here don't work for you it's another backup option. If you do like elementary let me know in the comments why. And then we have Alma Linux. Now Alma Linux is actually kind of representing a few Linux distros for me. The main one being CentOS so you might be thinking CentOS why would I ever use CentOS. Well it's very business friendly so for example DaVinci Resolve
if you wanted to edit videos on Linux with DaVinci Resolve is only really formally supported on Red Hat and CentOS but CentOS has been discontinued. So what Alma Linux is is a drop-in replacement for CentOS so if any of you are looking to kind of deploy anything for your team or you're looking for something a little bit more stable that's geared towards production or development or especially server workloads or anything that requires critical sensitivity that's more enterprise focused definitely check out Alma Linux. It's less cutting edge and if you want something more cutting edge that's where you get Fedora you know it's all indirectly related to Red Hat but I'd say Alma Linux is like the the D Red Hat version of what CentOS used to be before they discontinued it. So I think that it deserves a mention because I'm sure somebody listening to this has a use case for a Linux distro like that and I actually have an interview with one of the team members from Alma Linux coming out soon so keep an eye out for that. I will say that I think that being on pretty much any Linux distribution is a win for most people. You're getting a great baseline of privacy,
a great baseline of security using open source software and getting away from companies that don't have your best interests is always a win so please know that this is for fun it's my personal takes on some of these and I hope that it's more just educational for those who are new to Linux and fun for those who are more advanced who have their own thoughts to see you know where we overlap on things. If you're new to Linux or you need help deciding a couple things don't pick a Linux distro based on look and feel you can switch a desktop environment with like a command I wish I could make this up so if you like the look of Ubuntu or you like the look of Fedora just know that you can get that exact look on pretty much any other operating system if you really wanted to. What you're looking for in a Linux distro is the priorities of the Linux distro, the community behind it, who it's geared towards and what you need out of it, the package manager and also stability and how quickly it gets updates and those are kind of the main things that separate all of these as well as sometimes like pre-packaged things and things out of the box to make it easier for certain users to use. Let me know what you think about this I know that Linux distros are always a kind of a polarizing subject so I would love to hear some of your takes in the comments. If you disagree with me let me know why, if you agree with me let me know why and I want to thank Notesnook for sponsoring our content again they are compatible with Linux and they're also compatible with any web browsers.
I also want to thank our patrons who are making this content possible and if you join our Patreon we also have a private signal group that you get to be a part of so go ahead and check that out if you want to support us and get access to some cool perks and click up here to see the top 10 privacy tools that I use on a daily basis so those are things that I use in my personal life every day and I'm pissed if anyone takes them away from me so check that out and I'll see you next time on TechLore.
2025-03-01 16:03
