 Hey everybody, welcome to Linuxcast, I'm your host Matt. And I'm Tyler. All right, so we're not starting late at all. Like, not even a little bit late. We're starting right on time. What's that line from the... As always. What's that line from the loader of the rings? Wizard is never late, Bobo Baggins. We arrive precisely when we mean to. Something like that. We are wizards here, so yes. Definitely wizards. Anyways, welcome to Linuxcast. We talk about Linux-y things. We have a really good podcast queued up for you guys this week. We're gonna actually do a Linux distro tier list. Now, for those of you who do listen on the audio, just gonna put this out there right now, we're gonna do our best to make sure we're always saying where we're gonna put what distro. We're not just gonna put the logo somewhere and then don't say it out loud. That way you can actually follow along. I will also take a screenshot of the finished list when we're done and put it in the description for the audio listeners if you wanna take a look at it. That way, also, you can obviously go up on Monday and watch the actual video and watch us do this. It should be fun. We should have a very entertaining time, but before we jump into ranking the best Linux distros, because we already know which one's the best. We don't really need to even do this. Open, Susa. Sure, whatever. Anyways, before we jump into that, we're gonna do what we always do and talk about our week in open source. Tyler, my friend, other than deciding to build your computer five seconds before the podcast begins to start, what have you been up to in open source this week? Well, I have been, I have, I actually have done quite a lot with my NixOS, like ZanyOS repo. For anybody who doesn't know, I've got on my GitLab, you can go find a ZanyOS repo. It's for my NixOS configs. I've talked about NixOS a lot, so I'm pretty sure most people are aware of what I've been up to, but if you go over there, if you wanna try out NixOS, you like Hyperland, you like want a pretty nice theme set up with all the niceties already enabled, like nice animations, all that stuff, you can go over to that GitLab repo. I've got install instructions. They're pretty comprehensive. It's not like a three step process. It's like nine or 10 steps, but it ensures you don't hit any roadblocks or anything like that. I've got a lot of things already preconfigured if you're using a different setup, like with different hardware, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, all that stuff. It should hardware, should function just fine. I also made a wiki. I've been working on that quite a bit. I've heard from a lot of people that I did a really good job on it, and I think I did a really good job on it, so it explains what is NixOS, why you would choose it, why choose my configuration, how to use my configuration, common issues that people run into that aren't necessarily something I can just fix, like the Hyperland plug-in loader when you update your system. There's a chance that the headers will change for it, and so you have to reboot. It'll throw a whole bunch of errors. The plug-in will look like it's destroying your system because it just keeps spawning in and there's new errors, but you just gotta reboot. Stuff like that I've put in the wiki. That's mainly what I've been working on, and then last night I started putting together my Intel Xeon system, so I've now got 16 cores, 32 threads, and 64 gigabytes of RAM, so I feel pretty nice. And to NixOS's credit, I did not have to reinstall, do any of that BS. I literally just booted up back into the same drive. Everything worked exactly as it should. I just have to regenerate my hardware config so that Intel Microcode gets loaded and I'll be good. Well, I am happy that you were able to get everything up and running well, because I was quite worried for you. Well, I mean, it would have been fine if I had just done all of this and figured out that even though the board says Wi-Fi, it doesn't actually have a Wi-Fi chip in it, and I didn't even think about that while building it. If I hadn't have fallen asleep last night, I probably wouldn't have made this podcast late. And probably also could have had a chance to shower before I did the podcast, but whatever. We can all smell you from here. We know. Yeah. Just so everyone's clear, like I had to move my entire desk, my mom helped me move my desk with my monitors, lights, everything attached to it, threw the house into this room, and then I had to set everything up. And I gotta be honest, you said you'd wait like an hour for me? I got it all done. Pretty nice. It was more like an hour 15, but it was close. It was very close. It's close enough. We'll call it an hour. It's fine. The chat and I had a very good time talking behind your back about how there's no way that this is going to go right. There's definitely gonna be something wrong. Audio is not gonna work. Well, audio did not work, but the funniest thing about it is it wasn't even that audio wasn't working. I accidentally dropped my audio interface when I was setting up the desk in here. And when it fell, it pulled out the aux chord that hooks into the actual output for my speakers. So everything was working properly and you saw me. I was trying to figure out what the heck was wrong and then I realized that just the aux chord was important. And there was random music playing in the background. Yes. All right, so since the last time I did a podcast with you, I have switched 100% to Wayland. I'm using Hyperland. And I posted a video about this last night so I'm not spoiling anything. And I like it. I think I'm ready to finally say that I've switched to Wayland full-time and it's working and I'm happy with it. As you can tell, happiness is not the expression on my face. I did this out of boredom. I was very bored with Xmonet and I needed something to do. So I decided I was gonna give Hyperland another try and I've had a fantastic time because of Darth, I haven't done a lot of racing lately. So I've missed sitting down and theming my computer and I was able to do that. And it was a lot of fun. I've redisco... So I learned all of CSS. I was really, really good with CSS back in like 2010. Now, that was a long time ago and CSS changes a lot. So I had to actually relearned a lot of my CSS so I could do Waybar and that's been a lot of fun. So I've been doing that and I have been fighting with Vivaldi because every time Vivaldi has a update, it borks, like horribly borks. And so I finally did get it working and then I pinned that damn thing so that it opens to as it won't update it anymore ever. Again, I don't care how insecure it gets. I'm never updating Vivaldi again because it just breaks every single time. Also, I switched from Zipper to DNF 5 on OpenSUSA and have decided that that's probably the way that I'm going to go for a long time because DNF 5, oh goodness, man, it is so much faster than Zipper. Like I did a 547 package update in less than five minutes. That would have taken at least 40 minutes on Zipper. Like it's not even... Okay. Yeah. Phenomenally faster. It's awesome. Now it has some downsides, but for the most part it works really, really well and I'm very happy with it. Also, Fedora, get your shit together, man. Get DNF 5 out the door because it's so much faster than DNF 4. Like it's really good. I really hope that, because they've been rewriting Zipper now since 2016 to include parallel downloads. I hope that they just stop what they're doing and just start over again and mimic DNF 5 because it's so good. But anyways, yeah, that's basically what I've been doing. I've... Oh, also just to prove that OpenSUSE is the best. I uninstalled Plasma and everything that goes along with Plasma. And you know when you uninstall a desktop environment, usually it takes things along with it that you didn't really want to uninstall? It did that for me. But OpenSUSE handled it like a champ. It uninstalled SDDM and just decided, well, you want LightDM is installed. Just use that. Like there's no other... It just literally fell back? Yeah, it just went to LightDM. And that's awesome. Because on any other distro, if you uninstalled your display manager, you'd be put right into a TTY, like automatically. Now this one went right to LightDM. Now LightDM didn't work well with Wayland, but that's the LightDM problem. Not a OpenSUSE problem. But yeah, that was an awesome experience. I didn't even have to do a rollback or anything to a snapshot. It just worked perfectly fine. Also, while we're talking about what we're doing in Linux, I did also want to ask you, since you've had 64 gigabytes of RAM for a while, have you ever tried doing a like a tempfs or loading your root system into RAM and also doing it with a game file as well and running a game straight from RAM? No. My RAM, when I don't use it, just it's there and be sad. Basically. Well, I'm looking to, so here in the next like two or three weeks, I'm going to get another 64 gigs of RAM. And so I plan on, once I have 128 gigs, I plan on putting my root on in RAM doing that because NixOS does have a pretty easy way of doing it. The extra thing I'm going to do is try to see if I can install a game to that persistent directory as well. Just one, like the game I play the most frequently. And I want to see if it just, if loading just disappears, like it's no longer a thing. I really want to see that. But so I'll, that will be an update for the here in the next few weeks. I'll talk about that, whether or not that works or if it's worth it. Eventually I'm going to be doing a, like a NAS or something. All my games will be on there because I'm running out of space on my internal NVMe. So that'd be my experiment is to figure out because I want to be cheap. I don't, so Josh sent me a case that I can build a NAS in. And I want to do that, but I don't want to have to deal with hardware raid. So I'm going to do all of it software raid and I have no clue how to do that yet. So that's going to be, that's going to be a learning experience. Well, I'll just go ahead and let you know from everyone I know who's messed around with software raid and done a lot with it. It's going to, it's going to be a pain in the ass. Like it's, it's going to take time to get used to and you're going to run into issues, but over, overall it works. So you should, you should be fine. It'll be something fun to watch or fun to learn about because I've never, the last time I did raid, I was a Mac user and I bought a, so this is the stupidest thing. So there used to be a company called Drobo and they sold these big, gigantic raid, hardware raid enclosures. I had an eight hard drive enclosure. It costs like $3,000. I remember this was like 10, 15 years ago. So everything was super expensive. And it lasted for about a year and a half and then it just fucking completely died. Like I don't know, the power supply or something like that died and the company was the crappiest support company I've ever experienced in my life. I was like, you know, that's my last experience with a big, gigantic raid box because I was not spending that much money ever, ever again. And, you know, just, so this time I'm going to do all software raid. I'm not going to mess around with any of that stuff. I'm going to, I've debated either building in that case that Josh sent me or just getting, because there's like really cheap mini PCs and you can buy like an external hard drive enclosure. And I'm thinking that's what I'm going to end up doing because it's so much cheaper and then I don't have to build anything. So I built my computer, the one that I'm on right now. I built it from scratch all the way from the ground up and I had a good time doing it. But I've come to realize I'm also shit at it. Like I'm not really, I'm not this time, not good at it. My hands are huge and there's, especially the, you know, like the little cables that go in for like the power button. Yep, the front panel connectors. Yes. Those things are paying the ass when you have huge, gigantic manhands. Brother, I don't, I have closer to feminine hands than you do and it's a struggle for me. So I totally get what you're saying. Like that's going to be a pain in the ass. Some motherboard and case manufacturers will basically just put them all together in the order that they're supposed to go. Cause it's the same on every board basically. You just slide in and it's just one connector. But some of them have those like little like plastic things that are, have been standard for like the last 30 years. And like, first off, I'm definitely breaking one of those cables. Like it's not even, not even a question. I'm going to pull on it too hard or something. And they're so little and you can't really, you can't ever really plug them in until the motherboard is in the case. I mean, everything else you can put together while it's outside of the case and it's fine. But those little things you got to get in there and they're always right towards the bottom. It's just a pain in the ass. So I kind of. Or then you want to route your cables and you get your cooler put in so you can grab the motherboard and slide it in. You slide it in and put it in. Then you realize you got to put in the eight pin power connector. It's super close to your heat sink and your fat hand won't slide down through it. Like, yeah, no, I get what you're saying. Yeah, that CPU connectors that's always in the upper left hand corner. It is so hard to get to, especially once you have your, you know, like your cooler or whatever connected already. And then the, the 24 pin is always so fucking stiff. That you can't, and you got to bend it over. It's like, I got, it's got like a pull of J. Like you got to pull it, you got to, you kind of turn that thing around. It's so, it was, it was a fun experience. I did it during COVID and it, you know, but I've had that experience. I don't need it again. So I don't know what I'm going to be doing there, but I've been pricing things out and everybody says like, oh, storage is so cheap. Like, yeah, storage is cheap. Still $170 for an eight terabyte hard drive. And if I want five of those things, that's not actually cheap. Is it cheaper than it used to be? Sure, but so is, you know, well, nothing else is cheaper than it used to be. I can't come with it. Another point too is like, a lot of people think storage is so cheap because they literally have a small library of games at most and then just a normal system. So like for that, yeah, storage is super cheap. If you go buy an eight terabyte hard drive, you'll be set for a long time. Like you're, you're fine. But like, you know, if you do something like we do, like where you record footage a lot, oh, brother, eight terabytes, you could fill up in no time, no time. So, I wouldn't say storage is cheap. It just depends on what you're doing if it's cheap. Naysay says I should mount my PC to the wall and have an open air system. Dude, I live on a dirt road in the country. And that means- That doesn't mean you can't have nice things. Come on now. No, dust is what I'm saying. It's like you live on a dirt road, you're going to have dust up the wall. I have my computer in a case and it still gets dusty and shit. Yeah. Well, look, I don't even live on a dirt road. And I've, but my dog comes in my room and I've got, this new case has got mesh filters on it. And it won't matter. If it's anything like my old case that I had, that was nicer and had mesh filters on it in time. I'll get dust in there. So, yeah, putting it on the wall is probably going to be a maintenance nightmare. So, yeah. Also, I mean, these are sturdy walls. They're not going to fall down or anything. But the rest of my family have a tendency to slam doors all the time. And I'm very, very, very worried that somebody would slam the door really hard and that thing would just come crumbling down. But also, just to tell a story here, Tyler and I have known each other for a couple of years now and we've been doing this podcast together for a couple of years. I shit you not, there was a point during this podcast during the time we've been doing it where he had his computer in a cardboard box. That actually happened. Okay, like, so for him, cases are actually blow at some point. Yeah. It was, it was, and then almost like directly after that, it was like during his BSD days where he had his computer, he was building, you had like, you had like a car or a cooler or something like that. It wouldn't fit in the case. So, you just had a case with no sides on it. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God, I remember that. Yeah, I literally had it like, the case was completely open. Like it was, the case was only being used to mount the motherboard. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't trust that guy when it comes to cases. I mean, this is what I'm saying. Well, look, if your main concern is front panel connectors and breaking them and stuff, don't go with a cheap case because I can guarantee you every single $50, $60 case I've ever seen, the front panel connectors are cheap, short, and they're not together at all. They're always some little dinky things because this one ticks me off. This one was like 60 bucks and it had those. I have a NZXT 500, something or the other. It's the computer that has the least airflow. It's like they decided some little bitty pinholes along the side was all the holes that you needed in a computer case. Surprisingly. That's the one where the, isn't the front panel just a solid piece of like plastic or metal? Yeah, yeah. All metal, there's a glass side and then along the one side in the top there are some pinholes. It's fine. I actually get fairly good temperatures but it's still not the most airflow. Good news is it does keep a lot of dust from getting in there, which is nice. So, because if air can't get in, dust can't get in either. All right, all right. So let's go ahead and move on into the main topic. So this time around, what we decided to do is a Linux distro tier list. And I will actually put this up on screen and I have approximately 94 logos set to go of many different distros. And of course I have a whole bunch of them that are duplicated because I have reasons for that because I need different sizes. I just literally, so I have a whole full directory of distro logos. I just uploaded them all. So there's some of them here. I don't know if we'll even rank them. There's like a couple of them here that I don't even know what they are, to be honest with you. I can actually tell you what they are. So that'll be a fun experience. But what we're gonna do is we're going to rank the distros that I've uploaded here. And if we have time, we'll come up with some other distros if we need to. And we're doing this in traditional tier list fashion. So if you want to follow along, you can do so. We're doing S, A, B, C, D. I don't know what any of those things stand for because I'm not a Gen Z. So I'm an old millennial. So I don't know any of this new fangled stuff going on, but we're gonna do it anyways. So let me go actually put this up on screen so you guys can actually see this. So, and eventually Tyler will be able to follow along. I do have the chat there alongside because the Voli's awesome and allows me to tile things. It's awesome. It's great. Anyways, so let's go ahead and get started. What I figured we'd do Tyler is that we'll have fights when we get to things that we disagree on. And it should be fun. So why don't we go ahead and start off with Nate's favorite with POPOS? Where should we rank that? If I'm being honest, POPOS, I would give it an S tier even though I don't prefer its desktop. They're doing something unique with it. And depending on your hardware, they're really the only good support to go with. Like if you've got a hybrid laptop and you just want everything to work and you don't have to do anything yourself, like that's pretty much the only desktop you're gonna go with and have a great time. I feel like S tier is too high to be honest with you. Because it's, I mean, yes, they're doing their own desktop environment but it's not out yet. And you're right, they do a lot of good hardware stuff but other than that, they're just boon to. Maybe I'm being too tough on them. Do you think I'm being too tough on them? I, you do have a good point. So maybe it should be a tier but you're not completely wrong at all. Like they're not really doing anything else. They're literally just making the Ubuntu that Canonical should make. They're Linux mint but with a different turn on things. I'm gonna get a lot of shit. Nate's never editing for me again. POPOS is his distro. And I'm just here flambasting. I gotta be the curmudgeon and he can't be the curmudgeon. He's like 12 years old. Look at him, he's the Jonas Brothers all over again. I can't help it. Such an asshole today. It's all right. So A tier, you think, can we agree on A tier? Do you want to fight for your S tier? I think A tier is good. All right. Oops, I put it in D tier. That was a mistake, it was a mistake. It was a mistake, I'm sorry. All right, let's go ahead then go to Ardix Linux. I'm just randomly picking out one. Okay, this one's gonna be difficult. So basically, Ardix, you have to correct me if I'm wrong because it's been fucking forever since I've even looked at Ardix. This is just basically Ardix Linux but without system D, right? Yeah, they hate system D. So this is like Devuan or MX Linux, I'm like that, right? Pretty much, yeah. I agree with Waffles except he put the wrong distros in there, D tier for Ardix, just knock off Arch. I don't really have much, I don't have a high opinion of protest distros just in general. If you don't like system D, you can literally just install Arch and remove it. Like, if it's that big of a deal for you, I don't know why it would be that big of a deal. Like, brother standardization has been a good thing in Linux, like just to ask steam. So we're getting some people who are saying that it's S tier, which like, come on, come on. Like, there's no way this is S tier, all right. So I think I agree with you that it's D tier. It doesn't, so we probably should dis, we should probably define a little bit about D tier a little bit. It doesn't mean that we think that they're bad, okay? If you use them, you're not a horrible person and deserve to go to prison or anything. Just, you know, not as good as Open Sousa, okay? Well, and also, I don't, a lot of people are saying C. We could make a case for it being C, but... Other than removing system D, what did they do special? Like, we gave Papa West a lot of credit for doing something special, hardware support and creating their own desktop environment. Other than removing system D, what did Artics do that's special? Nothing. Yeah, that's what I say. I mean, if somebody in the chat wants to correct us and tell them, well, they did this and this that we don't know about. And we're not saying that you can't use a protest system. It's just, that doesn't mean that, I mean... Yeah, and also like, just because I made the comment that I don't have a high opinion of like protest distros, doesn't mean I don't have a high opinion of people who use them. Like, I don't care what you use. It's just personally, I would never go out and pick one. I don't think most of, and it comes back to what we just said. Most of them don't really provide anything else other than removing and replacing a specific thing with the regular distro. So, like. All right. Again, someone in chat said, it's definitely not the worst one. Look, D tier is not for worst distros. If we had an F tier, then we'd be calling out distros and be like, they're out or crap. But yeah, no. I don't think there's, I don't think I have any logos here that are for, well, there might be here some here that actually deserve F tier. Now that I think about it. All right. We'll see if we need one. Maybe we can add a tier or something if we need one. All right. Let's go ahead and move on to, I'm just picking out random one. Let's do void linux. Ooh, void. Void. Okay. We had to be cautious here because the void gang is scary. Yep. To me, it's going to be a B or C because they're a step up from Arnex in the sense that, yeah, they do just have their own like a knit system. Most people are running void because they use a run it or not system D. I mean, at the end of the day, they do a lot of unique stuff. They are an independent district. Yeah. I mean, they have their own repositories and their own package manager. And you, if you wanted to run without, you know, the, if you wanted to run without glib C, you could run with me, me with soil or whatever muscle or whatever. So they do offer quite a bit of, you know, things that you can't get like really easily by doing a different distro. So I would say B, you said B or C, right? I think B is a good place for Void Linux. Now let me find the logo again. So B for Void Linux. I think that that's where, there we go. All right. Let's go ahead and then go to, let's talk about, let's see here. How about Solus Linux? I think we're going to be disagree on this one. Yeah. I don't know that we may. You go ahead and tell me what you think. I think it's D. I think it has to be D. Oh, we agree. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's not that it's bad. Again, really the reason why I would say Solus is a D tier distro is simply because they can't make up their mind on what they want to do. And they keep changing bases. They keep changing, you know, from GTK to they wanted to go to QT and then they were going to the enlightenment libraries and now I don't know what they're doing but they changed their mind again. And it just feels like they don't have a vision for what they actually want to be. Although they, they do and their defense have significantly contributed to a desktop environment of their own. So I, I agree with what you said, except I would phrase it a little bit differently. I don't, I don't think they don't have a vision. I think their vision continually changes, which is not necessarily a problem, except you, if you don't finish the last vision and you create a new one and then you don't finish that one and then you create a new one, it's not a good look. So yeah, I would say D tier. All right. We're going to go to D tier then. All right. Linux from scratch. Shit. No. We might need that F tier brother. Well, okay. I suppose we should ask, should we even rank it given the fact that it's not technically a Linux distribution? Cause you have to build everything yourself. I mean, there's literally nothing there that's distributed. It's just literally you're pulling down every package and building it yourself. Yeah. I would have to say we need to make that F tier and put it there. All right. Let me see if I can add an actual tier. I don't know if I can or not. We'll see. All right. Oh, add row below right there. There we go. And we're going to name that. We'll get to go here to the settings for this. We're going to call this the F tier. Oops. That's a D mat. Not enough. All right. There we go. So we're going to put Linux from scratch in the F tier. Like my thing with Linux from scratch is if you want to learn how distros or how Linux under the hood operates, it's great. But also, most people don't want to. You don't realize what you're asking when you say maybe I want to learn that or I should learn that. That's like 36 hours of work and you're going to end up knowing things about the Linux system that you probably don't need. You don't need to or ever want to use. I know way more. I've said this multiple times, but because of Linux from scratch, I know way more about Sysvnit than I will ever. Ever need to know? Never. Well, I mean, you could use, I think that, I think that like MX Linux uses Sysvnit. I might be wrong about that. I think that that's what they use. That's the only other one that I even think uses Sysvnit out of the box. Well, Sysvnit has been like kind of obscure for like the past five years, if not more. It's the thing that came before system D, right? So it's been around for a very long time and it's not that it's bad. It's just system D overtook it. And if you're looking for an alternative in its system nowadays, you go for run it or open RC or what's the one with six, six it, six it? Never even heard of that one. There's one called Sysvnit or something like that. It's a little more rare. Anyways, yeah, I think that the F tier kind of fits that. Again, I have a hard time but it's just, it doesn't really fit in any other tier. All right, let's go ahead and then go to Fedora. This is just stock standard Fedora. We'll do, I have the Kino White logo. We can do that later. We can count those as different. Yeah, S6, that's the right one. I knew I had a six in it. I know we're probably gonna fight about this one and I know Chats probably gonna fight me on this one. But I think if I'm being honest, I think Fedora is a B tier. Like it's good. You can probably use it for a long time without much issue, but I don't know, it's not great in my opinion. Okay, let me argue for a tier. I'm not gonna argue for S tier. I don't think it's that good, but I think Fedora deserves to be up one tier higher than what you say, just because they are the paving ground for literally every technology that Linux uses. System D, PipeWire, you know, Pulse Audio when it was a new thing, System D when it was a new thing, Wayland, literally everything that is new and that every other distro is eventually going to adopt and be standard comes through Fedora first. They are the guinea pigs of the Linux community. They test literally everything. And given the fact that that's true, it's astonishingly stable for what it is. Given the fact that it is basically a beta testing ground for literally everything that Red Hat wants to push on all of us, it's still a very good, you know, distro and very, very stable. So I would push for A tier, what say you? Are you gonna fight for B tier? I am still gonna fight for B tier only because it is their testing ground. You are right, it is surprisingly stable for being their testing ground, but I don't know, like, the reason, the reason I would say it's B tier is a lot of the A tier distros that I assume we're going to have are ones that are focused on making sure the users have a working system, which is not Fedora's actual goal. Like, their actual goal is just to like improve technologies for the Linux desktop and literally have Fedora be a development environment for that. Their actual stated goal is to be a paving ground for RHEL is basically what we're saying here. It's a place where RHEL is born and then eventually gets filtered down into the stableness that is RHEL. All right. No, me saying that does not mean Fedora like doesn't give a crap about its users. Like, that's not what I'm saying, but they don't have like your, the user base is not their sole focus at all. Like, it's the tech. I will, I will capitulate on B. I still think it could be A, but borderline AB. All right. I think it could be an A, but I think it should be a B. All right. I will, I will, I will live to fight another day. Fedora. Okay. Let's go ahead and go to something a little bit more obscure. Let's talk about Katie Neon, which I have two logos for, by the way. Katie Neon is the paving ground for Katie Plasma. They say themselves as not a distro. They say themselves as not a distro. Matt, your English is fantastic. You are a writer, my friend. I can't, I honestly don't, I mean, I want to say, I want to say B tier two, but I don't know like D tier actually. I would say D because they don't even want to consider themselves a distro. They don't want people to use it. They, they, this is literally just, they want it to just be for developers. They do provide a stable thing, but it's, they call themselves a testing ground for the latest KG technologies. And well, yes, you can get the LTS stuff and you can use it and it's stable and all that, but it's just, it doesn't feel like it's, what does it do? Like it's Sabuntu. We have Kabuntu already. It exists. It's there. I will capitulate with you on D here because that's kind of, I didn't know they didn't consider themselves a distro and I definitely didn't know they didn't want people using it. Well, maybe that's a little bit harsh, but they say on their website that their primary isos are the non-stable isos because that's where you're going to get the, you know, like the more recent versions of KDE. The LTS version is based literally, literally is just a more KDE-centric version of Kabuntu, which by the way, again, it exists. We'll get there. I have a logo for it. Like it's literally right next door, right? So I would just say, yeah, I'd say D tier and you said that's okay with you as D tier. All right. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead then. This is proving to be a very hard thing to do because some of these logos, I don't know what they are. So I'm trying to really remember what the logos are. So like I have a bird here. I think that this is Farron OS. I might be wrong about that. If they'll check, tell me if this blue bird here is Farron OS. If I'm right about that, you can let me know. So let's talk about Linux Lite. I think that's what this, the feather is Linux Lite. Is it? Yes. So Linux Lite, I believe is based on Ubuntu or Debian. I can't even remember. I believe it's Debian. Okay. I believe so. Yeah. So where do you think that Linux Lite should be placed? This one's a hard one for me because I don't really like or not, I don't really like, I don't, I wouldn't prefer to use it, but I've used it before and it's really rock solid. Like it works damn good. Well, I mean, if it's actually based on Debian though, of course it works solid as a rock because it's based on Debian. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what kind of work did you do there, friends? I mean, you see. Well, they've got, they've got some of their packages are a little bit more up to date than they would be in just the regular Debian repos. I don't, as far as I know, I don't know that could have changed. I'm pretty sure. Where would you put it? I'd probably put it in D tier. Oh, really with Fedora? B or C, yeah. Cause I mean, it's really easy to use. It's rock solid. They do actually do a lot of their own stuff. So. All right. I can't put it as a B man. It's just, can we compromise on a C tier? Cause remember, we'd be putting it above Solis, above Katie Neon and above Artix. All of which, it feels to me that all those which we ranked as a D tier, it feels like all of those do more to be a distro than Linux Lite does. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe a D tier. Maybe even compromise. I may even go down to a D after you said that, right? Well, I mean, it's like, I keep, we keep saying like, it doesn't mean that it's bad or anything. It's just. Yeah. I would say Solis, Katie, Neon and Linux Mint are kind of in the same or Linux Lite are kind of in the same sphere. Like they, they do their own thing. Maybe it should be a C tier only cause Linux Lite has helped and one of their focuses is helping older, like I almost said older people, people with older hardware, you know, keep around. All right. C tier it is then. Okay. Let's go ahead then and do one that everybody's been waiting for. Nix OS, let's talk about Nix OS cause we're definitely not agreeing on this one. No, we're definitely not. All right. So it literally has to be an S or A tier. It fundamentally has to. Does it have to be? Does it really have to be? I'd be fine with putting it up there with Papa OS. That'd be fine. I'm surprised that you're even willing to put it as an A tier. I would actually agree with you that A tier is a good place to put it and because they do just a ton of stuff, literally everything from scratch because it's a distribution that does things completely differently than everything else. So, and they have a purpose for existing. They do different things and everything else. So I think I can agree with an A tier. I, let me think about it for a while. See, here, here's. Do you have an argument? Here would be my thing. Do you have an argument for S tier? I want to hear it. If you have an argument for S tier over A tier. I do have an argument for S tier now as to whether or not everyone would agree with it is highly debatable. My reason for it being S tier is it is extraordinarily simple to manage a system with Nix OS. Like if you set up a system with Nix OS and then you want to move it to another system, the odds that you run into issues, especially if you're doing something like I'm doing where you're actually configuring a lot. You've got variables to change out for different stuff. There's like no problem. The only thing is, is that learning curve because it is genuinely different. Like even though like installing hyperland on most distributions is very difficult. You have to install the hyperland package, which normally doesn't pull in the desktop portal that you need, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. On Nix OS, it's literally an option of programs.hyperland.enable. Like that, that's it. You just set that to true and you've got hyperland. That being said, I understand some people have the argument of, well, I don't know that one liner for enabling it. So I've got to learn that. I get that, but at the end of the day, it's still easier than doing it pretty much on any other distro. That being said, even though now I've made that argument for it, I still think it should go in A tier. I think that's probably, I don't think Nix OS deserves to be above pop OS in the rankings. I think they both do a lot to help people manage their systems or have usable systems just in different ways and different approaches. All right, I think A tier is as high as I would go as well, simply because it's not for everyone. I think that in order to be an S tier, you would have to be a distribution that can work for everybody. Now, all of the distros that we've already ranked can be for everybody, but they have other flaws, right? But in order to get to S tier, you had to be something that everybody would want to use. And I don't think that Nix OS is there. So I think that you're right. A tier is where we'll go with Nix OS. I'm actually, I'm surprised that we were able to come to agreement because when I thought we're doing this, I thought, well, Nix OS is going to be really low. I'm going to put it as a D tier distro. I thought that for a little while, but it's not that bad. All right, let's go ahead and then do another one that I think we'll probably disagree on. Linux Mint. Let's piss off some Linux Mint guys. Ah, yes. I'll go first. I think that this is a D tier distro. It's a boon to guys. Now, admittedly, they do do their own desktop environments. So I would be okay with saying a C tier and actually now that I think about it, I would say C tier is where I'd put it. It's a protest distro. So at least that's why I would argue that it's protest distro. It's protesting against the way boon to does things because it does things as a boon to but does everything differently than a boon to and it is a distribution that doesn't have as clear of a focus. So it's kind of like solace. So they've split their focus on Debian and a boon to. And I would also argue that they don't update as often as you would like them to see. So you're always going to be even, you know, a boon to has old stuff, right? Because it only releases every six months, but links is older because it releases after a boon to. So I would say C at the most D is really where I want to put it, to be honest with you. What do you think? I agree. I think there is an argument to be made for it being B tier but I, if you want, I will compromise with you at C tier. No problem. Make your argument for B tier but I'm going to tell you right now you're wrong. Nates throwing a fit in the chat. A tier man, A tier. No, just because a lot of people use it and it's popular, doesn't necessarily make it better than anything else that's on the list. I'm just saying. Wait till we get to a boon to. I'm just saying is what I'm saying. I genuinely think the best argument for Linux Mint being B tier is the fact that Linux Mint does a lot more for their users than Fedora does. So my argument for it being B tier isn't really necessarily based on Linux's Mint's merit. It's really built, it's really built on the fact that we have other distributions in the B tier that don't, that not, not don't do as much for their users but Linux Mint arguably could, you could say they do more or they do as much for their users as those ones in making their life easier. Okay, let me see if I can come up with an argument for B tier as well. Just try to convince myself. They make applications. So things like Nemo file manager, obviously Cinnamon desktop. They have that weird TV streaming service application that they for whatever reason decided they were going to make. They have like a notes application. They are phenomenally bad at updating the mutter window manager on Cinnamon. It's always significantly behind Ubuntu and you know, I guess that was a negative, not a positive. I have such a hard time buying B tier. I don't, this is a protest of a protestist drill. Let's expand users, you're welcome. You couldn't pay me to put it in as an A tier by the way. It's not, it's not there. All right, let's go ahead and when we, I don't even know if you know what this is, it's called Mubox. It's basically Manjaro with open box. That's what it is. F tier. Okay. I think I agree with that. All right, sorry Mubox users. I don't even think we need to have a discussion around it F tier. All right, let's see here. Let's look for, so let's see here. I have ArchCraft Linux. This is basically a window manager version of Arch. It's an ArchBase distro. It has a ton of different themes and stuff. It runs open box and BSPWM and maybe another one, but for sure those two. And it is basically a theme changer script on top of Arch is the way that I describe it with those window managers installed already. With what distro or what was the name of the distro? It is called ArchCraft. ArchCraft, okay. I thought I heard something different. So, okay. I would give this one probably a D or an F if I'm being honest, only just because it's literally another distro with, I mean, it's pretty much what I'm doing with my configuration. Like I got a theme changing script. You get a certain desktop environment chosen. Like it's not really all that much going on, but I mean, I could see it getting a D tier. I've heard a lot of really good things about ArchCraft. Like people at least like it and make setting up Arch easier. So. Oglo does have a good point that it is very pretty. So they do a good job of writing, but I agree with you. I think I'll go with D tier because I like the Rises and so that does provide some value to having a distribution that is all set up for you and then you don't have to do the Rising yourself. So we'll put that in D tier. All right. Arco Linux, if we're writing their website, it's definitely an F as a distro though. As long as we can completely take the website out of the equation completely. I think our code deserves a C tier. It does more than just looking good or making the install process simple. There is a lot of usability or user, user accessible nice scripts pre-written for you to do a whole bunch of stuff. Eric Dubois takes care of a lot of things. Like it's just, it does a little bit extra where I'm going to assume a lot of the arch bay arch derivatives are probably going to end up in D tier. And compared to a lot of them, it does do a lot of extra stuff, but I wouldn't put it up with like Fedora or like Void. So. Okay. So I'm going to disagree with you on this one majorly actually. And I'm going to say A tier. And the reason why I would say A tier is because it's with Arco, it's more than just a distro. First off, they were one of the first arch based distros that took Calamari's to its full potential. So before that Calamari's did exist, but it was just an installer, just like any other installer. But because of their contributions, they were allowed to basically make it so that you can choose basically everything you want to install right, you know, as the install happens. Not a lot of distros did that before Arco did it. Another reason why it is kind of less to do with the distro itself and more of the fact that the guy, Eric does a ton of stuff. Like he's basically made the arch wiki but better in YouTube form. And he has a ton of different videos. And every time there is a problem that comes through because arch fucked up grub again, five minutes later, Eric has made a video on how to fix it, you know, and it's on his YouTube channel and tells you exactly how to do it. And if you Google on how to do anything on arch and you need to learn how to do anything with any window manager or any desktop environment, chances are he's done a video on how to do that thing even if you're not using Arco. So that's very valuable as well. Hold on. So can we go ahead and agree that if we take into account everything that Eric Dubois does outside of the actual distro itself, like not saying that like he's not doing a lot with the distro himself, but if we include the YouTube videos, the posts he makes and also like you can just talk with the dude too. Like that is a thing. So if we count all of that extra in, I would agree that it should be an A tier because if we're being honest, a lot of people don't wanna go read their documentation. And when it comes to arch, a lot of arch users that are using arch are only using it because of Eric Dubois' help or his support. Yeah. Also, all the tools like the Arco Linux tweak tool, which is I think now called the Arch Linux quick tool work on other arch distros. So they created all the tools and you can go, you can install that on arch and use it to install all your window managers, all the rices that come along with it, all the tools and stuff. So it's not just as if the tools, I mean, like PopOS and Linux Mint, which we just gave a beat here to, by the way. And I'm gonna let you live that one down. Linux Mint does all these tools stuff, but and yes, you can use them on different, you know, desks or distros, but they weren't designed to do that. Whereas the Arco stuff, they literally, he literally wants you to use it on arch and not just Arco. So I would still argue for ATEAR. Oh, and also, just so we're not giving Eric too much credit here. The reason he wants you to use them on other arch distros is so he knows whether or not it's working and he's done his job correctly. So yeah, but yes, they are built for you to use anywhere else. So yeah, I would agree, ATEAR. All right. Now there's gonna be so many upset Linux Mint users and Fedora users in the chat. No, no, no. Just wait until we rank arch lower. Just wait until we do arch lower because that's definitely gonna happen. All right, we gotta see the MX Linux. Where should we put MX Linux? Based on Debian does not use system D by default has a ton of awesome desktop tools, including one that allows you to basically create an ISO of your installed system, which is just phenomenal, but those tools are only MX usable. So you can only use them on that distro and they do provide a system D backup. So you could use system D on it if you want to. So they're not a protest distro, so much as they providing you an options distro. So they also have a somehow a game distro watch. So that you're credit for that. To me, MX Linux could be literally anywhere between an A and a C tier. Like it'd be hard to make the arguments for A or C. You could easily make an argument for it being B and it not be a problem, but the reason I say A through C is cause like, MX Linux is really good. They've got a lot of tooling, they're really good. So you could make an argument for A. They're probably in the ballpark of everything in B, but you could also say it's very comparable to something like Linux Lite. Like they do have a lot of similarities in what they're doing. So I would say B, but that's just me. Well, I really like MX Linux. I think it's a fantastic distribution and I love their tools, but I feel like the reason why a lot of their tools exist are just because they don't use system D. So they created a whole bunch of GUI tools that help you get past the fact that system D is not usually running. But they also have other tools, things like the snapshot tool and the tool for, they basically have a GUI for configuring Konki, which is freaking awesome because if you've ever configured Konki ever, it is the worst thing to configure like bar none. In fact that they have a GUI to do it, it's pretty cool. So I would say C tier right along with Linux Lite. I think that's... Yeah, and just to kind of agree with some people in chat, we'll call it a high C. We'll call it a high C. I mean, I'll go and I think hip dad said S tier. Sorry guys, you haven't had an S tier yet. MX Linux is definitely not going to be it. Yeah, S tier is gonna be hard to hit. Well, I know I'm gonna argue for at least one being S tier, but I don't think I'm gonna get it. But we'll put MX Linux as a C tier. All right, let's go ahead and do this just to piss everybody off. Arch Linux, where are we gonna put Arch Linux? B. Let me explain. Let me explain why I'm saying B, okay? I don't wanna go any lower on the list at all, but I can't go any higher on the list, mainly because, look, Arch is phenomenal distro. We all know it's a great distro. It does exactly what you would think it does. The only problem is, is the community around it. In a lot of the cases, especially Vanilla Pure Arch. I can see the chat right now. You guys are all over the place. I love my last one, I saw it was unsold. It's great. I think it's the most active chat we've ever had. It's awesome. Probably. But look, the reason I don't wanna go lower on the list is because I don't wanna put just regular Arch down with something like RTX or like MX Linux. But also at the same time, like, if we're gonna be honest with everyone here, MX Linux and Linux Lite does a hell of a lot more for their user base than Pure Arch does if we're being honest. Okay, let me argue for A tier. Okay, and the reason why I say it is because without Arch Linux, here are the things on this list that wouldn't exist. Arco would not exist. Let's see here, what's another one? Artics would not exist. Black Arch would not exist. Let's see, Zero Linux would not exist. Stormer West would not exist. I mean, there's just a ton of them here that just would not be in existence if it weren't for Arch Linux. So I think that alone puts them at an A tier. My agreement with you though comes in the fact that they do tend to be very not user centric in that they break things in weird ways, not just because they're a rolling really sister, but because they like pushing out the git version of grub. Like, what are you doing? That's not a good, no, that's not what you're supposed to do. Sorry, Steve, Steve tells us all the time that that's not what you're supposed to do. So I'm assuming that he knows what he's talking about. I'm glad you said that because the amount of times I've had to listen to Steve complain about grub and Arch, like the amount of times, man. Every podcast for the last few. It's too much of you. We love you, Steve. That man has complained about grub and Arch so much, which I'm not saying it's a bad thing because he has to deal with that crap. So like, I get it. But yeah, I could see it going in A as long as parts of the reason it's going in A is because a lot of other distros won't exist without it. Like, that would be pretty much the only read. Look, their documentation. Yes, it's incredible. But just like all documentation, it can be hard to sift through and find what you need. And you might overlook things. And when the entirety of the communities, like, well, I would say the entirety, but a good 90 percent of the communities, like, help is at the best a link to a page in the documentation and not great. This is hard. Yes, it is probably the hardest one because we rigged Arco as an A. Feels like we screwed ourselves. But Arco does so so much to make Arch better and usable. Yes. So shouldn't shouldn't it be kind of obvious that Arco would be all right ahead? I'm of Arch itself. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and go beat here. Beat here for Arch. Good Lord. We can get murdered in our sleep. All right. Well, there there went six thousand of your subscribers. Well, let's let's go. Oh, I got it. We're so going to die. I'm just going to get murdered. Look, there's going to be memes about this podcast for years. All right. Let's go ahead. Let's do another one that's going to piss people off. Man, man, Jaro. That has to be lower than ours, right? Convince me, it's not enough. I can't convince you that it's not enough. I could argue for D because when it came out, Arch was hard to install and Manjaro made it easy. And the problem with that argument is that Arch is no longer a hard to install. Well, OK, but I've said this so many times with Manjaro, but I need someone to explain to me how the entire idea of their distro is that they hold or not the entire but the main feature of their distros, they hold back the unstable packages from Arch on a two week window so that they can fix any problems, address any things that Arch causes so their users don't have to experience it. And they still push out the same broken updates that Arch does just two weeks later. Well, also by holding things like so, I can holding things back isn't a bad thing. So because opens to the tumbleweed holds things back to. OK, you're never going to run. No, it's not. But the problem is, is that with an Arch based distro, a lot of people are going to want to use the you are because they you are is the primary benefit of using Arch or at least one of the primary benefits of using Arch. And by holding things back, you break the you are so many times because those dependencies aren't going to match up for version wise. Yeah. So so you end up you hold back packages and you break the community packages. But then even on top of that, the whole idea behind you holding back packages is so you have time to fix any issues that come through with Arch. And if you don't fix those issues, what are we talking about? Why are you holding back packages? Why do you exist? What? All right. Like we got to put it in. That's been my problem. F tier is definitely going to be in Jara. OK. All right. Gentoo, we're going to put Gentoo. This would be good. I would have to say this one's going to be different. I think Gentoo deserves an A tier or a B tier only because kind of for the same reasons that like Arch, like we were talking about with Arch, it genuinely does provide a lot of distros and stuff wouldn't exist without it. And also Gentoo is kind of where a lot of other developers in the Linux space learn how to do things like package programs, how compiling actually works, especially when we're doing it outside of, you know, like Nate. Hold on. My answer for Gentoo is compiling. Look, I could I could go I could go with anywhere from an S to C on Gentoo. I could see the arguments for literally any of those tiers. Where do you think I think that Gentoo has to be an S tier? I think that maybe this is coloring because it is so hard to install, but you can't install Gentoo without learning something. Any other distro, other than Linux from scratch on this list, you can anybody can install. There's nothing prevents you from installing it in like five seconds. You know, if you have a really fast computer rig within five minutes, you can install literally anything on this machine, other than Linux from scratch and Gentoo. Now, just because it's hard to install doesn't necessarily make it good, but you can't install Gentoo without learning something. And a lot of these distros you can just install. You'll never learn a thing. It's just an installer. And I think that just going through the process of installing Gentoo, you learn so much about Linux that it can't it can't help but be an S tier. So I think that it's an S tier and I just don't see how it could. I mean, I mean, eight here possibly. But I think I think that it's an S tier. Yeah, I would have to agree only because like LFS, like one of the main problems that I see with with LFS and that does make it so low on the list is sure you learn a lot. But at the end of that 36 hours that you've spent like building this system, do you have a usable package manager? No. Can you install like now? Do you know how to build packages properly for your system? Probably. But do you do you know how to build a big package? Could you get steam installed? No, like, trust me on God. If you get LFS with steam installed, brother, you haven't seen the outside grass in six years. There's it's just not great. Gen two, yes, it is a there's a massive learning curve. Depending on your hardware, compiling can be extremely time consuming. But compiling is how all of the packages on every system work. Somebody's got to compile them. That's what happens with software. And you can use the system afterwards. You can learn how to use a functioning system. Also, I think I think it might be an S tier just solely based off of portage alone. Portage is if you want a package manager that works extremely well, is pretty easy to learn and gives you literally infinite amount of options. You could you could do pretty much anything with portage. All right. It's a great package. S tier, our first one. All right. Let's go ahead. I mean, I have literally like 60 more distros to go. I don't think we're going to make to all of these. But Ben said he was going to write if we didn't rank Storm OS. So let's go ahead and do storm storm OS next. Sorry, Ben, this isn't going to be pretty. And you're my friend. OK, so I want you to know this does not. This does not have any impact on our friendship whatsoever. But I don't I think it would be D or F tier. I've tried storm OS before. It's got a lot of problems, at least when I tried it. I couldn't get it to work on hardware. It just didn't function properly for me. So it would be D or F tier. And to be honest, I don't I also wouldn't rank pretty much any arch based derivatives very highly, like in general. Arco is probably one of the only few ones I'd rate highly anyway. Just because Eric DuBois does right there with you so much. It's like, yeah, so sorry, Ben, this hurts. This hurts, buddy. I'm sorry. But F tier, it's a it's a it's a good personal project. I just don't know. I mean, it's for you, bud. As long as it's your S tier, it doesn't matter. Let's go ahead and do the other one that's going to hurt a friend here soon as well. Zero Linux, I mean, your F tier or two. We're ranking this with full knowledge that zero Linux doesn't actually exist anymore, guys. So I don't think Steve is going to hurt us on this. So I think we'll put that right out there along with StormOS. It doesn't actually exist anymore. He's just doing he's doing he's going in another direction. Let's go ahead and do the fact that I OK. Let's just everybody in pause and count the number of Redcore Linux icons I have on the screen right now. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven Redcore icons. Let's go ahead and do Redcore. Shall we? Redcore based on Gentoo Linux. Easy to install Gentoo Linux and has its own package manager, Chisafis, which is still the worst thing for a dyslexic person to have to spell every single time. So where would you put Redcore Linux? To be honest, so just I'm going to have to could you explain Redcore for a second while I kind of look it up? Redcore is gentoo, but it uses the Calamari's installer. So you don't have to install it in the Gentoo way and it has a portage front end called Chisafis that basically is a Python script that does everything that a merge and portage do. And the Dev has done a lot of work on making a very what's the word I'm thinking of? It's a very containerized version of make.com and all of your use packages and stuff like that are all very separated and into their own files and stuff. So he's done a lot of work for that and he's created some tools that make Gentoo better. Also, he he's basically created the manjaro of Gentoo where he takes the Gentoo repositories and holds them back so that he knows that everything is stable, which given that Gentoo has its own stable repositories, I don't know really why it exists. But well, it's definitely there. OK, so I've read up. I just wanted to make sure I was thinking of the right thing when I was talking about Redcore and everything. So after after making sure I'm talking about the right thing, my opinion is going to be this might upset some people, but I think it's going to be a D or an F tier only because in one of the main benefits of Redcore is the fact that it's easy to onboard Gentoo with binary packages that you're probably not going to find in regular Gentoo repositories and Gentoo's just now released a binary repository. Yeah, I will say D tier simply because I used it for a couple months and I know that it is a very good distro that does provide some benefits. But I would also say that it makes it harder for you to go use Gentoo instead of easier because if you're going to use Gentoo, the point of using Gentoo is part of is the installation because it teaches you how to use Gentoo along the way. Once you've installed Gentoo, you know how to use Gentoo. Whereas with Redcore, it really does install it for you. And you're not, especially if you only use Sisyphus, you're not going to learn how to use portage. And if you just stick with binaries, you're not going to end up you're learning how to use use flags, which is like if you're going to use Gentoo and not use use flags, what are you using Gentoo for? I mean, right? So I think I've talked myself into an F tier. Damn it. Well, I mean, I could go with D tier. And I think it definitely with with Gentoo's new updates and everything that Gentoo is doing as of late, it could easily be dropped down to that F tier. But I think before Gentoo's binary repositories and stuff, like it should have been a D tier and we'll keep it there. D tier is fine. I think that's probably good. OK, let's go with the oldest of them all, Slackware. I don't like Slackware at all. It should probably go in down in the F tier. As far as I know, as a distribution, it works for plenty of people. They can't even keep the site up. The site looks a truck. I mean, I don't know if they've updated it. But the last time I looked at the site, it's atrocious. Like it looks terrible. Also, as far as I know, I was talking with someone who used Slackware. So this could be completely wrong and it very well could be. I don't know. I could have misunderstood. But from what I understood, like the way it works is like you have to install every application inside of the repository or choose the ones that you don't want installed. I don't know if that's how it works, but that's how that's the impression I got from talking with somebody who uses it. And like I don't want every package inside of a repository period. The fact that somebody just compared us to Chris Titus Tekken called us a horrible tier list just to make some tier lists are opinions, bro. Just saying. It's an opinion. Go make your own damn tier list. But yes, we are trying to top it. We would like it to be even more controversial. Make your own damn tier list. That's what I said. OK, so I got angry there for a second. We were doing Slackware, right? I would say D tier is simply because it's been around for so long and it's fathered a whole bunch of Linux innovation. I mean, you learn how to do package management there to begin with, because it's existed before Gen 2. If we were to be ranking this in the early nineties, it'd be S tier. As of right now, it's a D tier for me. I will. I will capitulate and we will go with D tier. It's good. OK, peppermint OS based on Debian. Basically, as far as I can tell, this is basically like Linux light is in ways, but it also has some tooling and stuff. So I'll be honest with you and say that I don't think I've used peppermint OS in literal years. So I'm not that familiar with it. I'm not familiar with it as of late. It's been a long time since I used it back when I did use it. Based off my experience with it, I'd probably give it a C tier. It's very close to Linux light, MX Linux. It's got it makes using something like Debian way simpler. It's got a lot of it's got a lot of pre-installed things that most average users are probably going to want installed anyway. Without bloat, you know, you're not going to find your freaking candy crush installed or whatever. You're not going to have a ton of like. I think peppermint comes with a Libre office and that's pretty much the most bloated application you're going to get with it. So again, most people probably want an office suite anyway. So I to me, I think it would be C tier. They help out a lot of users. They do a lot and they kind of stand out from a lot of the D tier. Yeah, I agree with you. This year's a good one. All right, let's go ahead and move on to. So we just got a few more that we're going to do here. I'm going to skip out on the Ubuntu flavors and just go ahead and do let's do Ubuntu just regular plain old stock vanilla Ubuntu Ubuntu of eight or 10 years ago. Probably a S or a tier of the Ubuntu of today. I'd probably put down with like. At best, I'm giving it a B tier because I think there's a lot of Ubuntu derivatives that do a better job than Ubuntu does anyway. So I don't know, B or C would be my answer for just stock Ubuntu. I'm I'm going to say this with. Everything I can't see how we put this on the same tier as Linux Mint. Or Fedora or Arch, just don't. If you're running a server, I think that it's a good distro. I don't think that it's a good distro for the vast majority of people right now. So I would say C tier as well. And there goes the rest of my subscribers. All right, let's go ahead. The next one is the granddaddy of them all, Debian. I like I don't know about where you're about on the list, but I'm thinking it's going to be higher up than Ubuntu, only because Debian is quite easy to actually use, like by itself. Like, yeah, there is a lot of distros that make it easier. But if we're being honest, like messing around with straight Debian is probably easier than Ubuntu in a lot of cases, even though Ubuntu makes it like they've got a lot of stuff. I don't know, man. I probably put them in. I'd probably put Debian in an eight here. Like it's just all right, I wouldn't say S tier. Let me make the argument for S tier. OK, without Debian, Linux would not exist. OK, you are literally every other distribution on here, even if it's not based on Debian, would probably not be here, other than probably Slackware, maybe open Sousa, but probably not open Sousa because Sousa would probably just delete it. So there are three granddaddies of them all. Debian is one of them. I don't think I mean, we did rig Slackware very but the thing about Slackware is that no one else is basing anything else on Slackware. OK, not really. I mean, I'm sure there are derivative distros out there of Slackware, but no one else does. Debian powers pop, it powers Linux mint, it powers MX Linux, Linux Lite, Peppermint, Ubuntu, Solis, KDE Neon. Half of the things that are on this list are powered by Debian. And if Debian went away, they would all go away. So I think it has got to be an S tier. I would agree with that, yeah. Debian, you've been crowned. OK, go ahead. Let's go to. So let's see, there's we need to do open Sousa. Let's go ahead and do open Sousa next. Oh, great. All right. Here comes the flight. Let's go. I'm going to say S tier because it's awesome. And literally, literally, Sousa can't go in an A tier. It starts with an S. OK. Well, but you see, the problem is, is I don't even think it gets a tier. I think it gets B tier. You know, I'm sorry. We gave your NixOS an A tier. Yeah. See, here's here's my reason that I would say it goes in B is because open Sousa is really great if it works. I've I've tried leap literally like I don't even know if leap works. I haven't gotten it to boot on any machine I've tried. Leap isn't a weird place right now because it's going to be replaced. OK, it's not I know, I know, I know. That was a cheap shot. I'm sorry. You're judging it too hard, man. Tumbleweed, let's just judge tumbleweed. And I think that I pulling back from my fanboyness, I would say a tier simply because if you do get it installed, first, you prove that you know how to use Linux. So that was a burn, by the way. Second, second of all, it's one of the most stable rolling release distros you ever went to see. Specifically, I'm talking about tumbleweed, obviously. And once you have it installed, it's so very stable, has a ton of software available to it. And here's the kicker. We gave Papa West and we gave a lot of other distros on here props because they had tools. There is no tool out there that is better and more comprehensive than Yast. It just doesn't exist. Yes, literally, if you want, you can do anything you want to do on Linux. You can use Yast to do it. OK, you know what? You won me over if you as soon as you mentioned, yes, we'll give it an A tier. That is yes, that is hands down. Pretty much anyone that tries open so we'll say, yes, it's probably the best piece of software they've seen in a long time. It literally does everything now. It's very good. It has its flaws. It definitely does look like it came from from 1998. Yes, it uses zipper as a back end, so it is slow. But as a tool, it's the most comprehensive tool you'll ever see. Literally, well, and also, if we're being fair, even if you're coming from Windows, it looks very similar to a control center like you're not you're not going to get confused at what what buttons do what it's very simple and straightforward. So let's do so there's two more that I want to do. And then we'll call us today. There are more that may if you're watching the video version, there are many more here that we could have done and maybe we'll do this again someday. I don't know. I we bit off more than we could shoot. Turns out there's a lot of fucking Linux distros. Yeah. All right. So elementary OS is second to last. Like a dentist. I really like it. So I want to be nice, but if we're being honest, it's probably a CRD like and here's here's why. It would be it would literally be an A or B tier. If if it didn't have like it. There's literally only one problem with elementary. They don't give you the flat hub, just repo by default. So their software center is a barren wasteland. Like, I really hope they fix that for the next version. But when is the next version coming out? Exactly like I feel that there's like one person developing elementary OS, you know, there's has to be a team behind it still. But they are the by the. The next LTS of Ubuntu will be released literally like days after the next elementary OS release, which means you'll be like, you know that they'll be on like 22.04 when 24.04 is around. It's it moves too slowly. It just moves too slowly. So I would argue for D tier. They do a lot of really good stuff out of the box. They've put in a lot of work to make it a unique environment. So I think it has to be better than an F tier, but it moves too slowly. And on a debt on a Debian slash Ubuntu based distro, it can't move that slowly. I mean, you know, it already moves slow to be honest. I think our I think me and you have have talked about this because we've talked about elementary quite a bit. But the only two problems with it are the fact that at Software Center, just give people flat out by the there's no excuse not to just do it. If that's where 90 percent of your software is going to come from, do it, just add it in there by default. There's no reason to require the user to accept it. Whatever if that your Software Center is already going to tell them it's a flat pack, there's no problem. Or if you want to, if you're so concerned about having control over the repository, FlatHub is open source. It's not like Snap where you were proprietary. You could, if you wanted to import the flat packs that you wanted to into your own repository and just mirror the ones that you want, you know, and then you could at least have things like LibreOffice and Firefox in your repository. And you when someone Googled web browser, you all you get is epiphany, you know, it's not like it's simple. All right. So what do you think D tier is where we want to go? Yeah. All right. There are three more that I want to do. And Devereux, I want to do I lost the I want to do Zoran and I want to do maybe those are the only two left that I really want to have anything to say about. Are there any other distros that we haven't ranked that you want to do? No, I think we've done all the ones that I really want to get to. And Devereux, let's talk about that for a minute. Where would you put endeavor? Probably B tier. It's not only because I don't think endeavor is as like flushed out or as it doesn't have as much going on for it that Arco does. But it is really good. I don't know. It may it may be up with Arco, but I would I would say probably B tier is where I put it. Like I mean, I've used it. It's rock solid. It works. They've got a lot of nice, nice stuff going on. Two hundred and seventy three people are watching this right now. Do that's nuts. Welcome to everybody. By the way, I had to go to refresh the screen because Vivaldi crashed that tab and I still can't see the chat. So if you're saying anything to me in chat, I apologize. I can't see it. And I'm just I'm just hoping that the stream is actually still going. It is. I'm watching it. And I'm watching you try to reload it. Whatever reason, basically, it showed me a like, you remember when like flash used to crash your browser tabs? It's basically what just happened to this. I don't know what's going on. Like, you two are you still using flash? All right. So I agree. B tier for endeavor OS. So the next one that I said, the last one I said I wanted to do was I've already forgotten. Oh, Zoran OS Zoran. What do you think Zoran where Zoran would go? Hey, why do you do this to me? It's going to be dear. Oh, yeah. Because I to me, I don't I don't have a very high opinion of Zoran. They're pricing structure. I don't know if it's changed because I really don't keep up with them. Like it's a distro that works. But like when you're I think like I pretty sure it was like a hundred dollars or like two hundred dollars, like a year or something like that to unlock like a different layout for your desktop environment and a whole bunch of apps that they pre-installed for you. And and in their in their defense, they give you a whole bunch of support, right? You can like I think it literally have someone you can call on the phone to get support. Yeah. But like, if we're being honest, I'm doing like general like Linux support focused towards Nick's OS. And you can go and do my Patreon. I do that for eight dollars a month. So if you do the math on that, that's still less than it. And it's that's for support, like specialized support. Let me. I don't know, maybe. OK, so I think Zorn has a lot of the same problems that elementary OS does, but it's better. It's better developed and better supported than elementary OS. But they also have a problem where they are significantly behind when it comes to their updating. So they're still based on twenty two to four. It doesn't feel like the next version is going to be based on because it literally just came out with a brand new version. Twenty four out of four is three months away or two months away. Two or three months away, right? So we won't get another version of Zorn until the fall, which by that time, twenty four out of four will have been around for a long time. And so it feels like they have a lot of the problems elementary OS does. And so I would. On the other hand, they do a good job of supporting in the meantime, where elementary OS developers just kind of disappear in between updates. You never hear from them between updates, whereas the Zorn guys are always around. So I would argue for C tier just because I think it's a little tad bit above elementary OS. But I if you're very I could, you know, no, I can do that. C tier for Zorn. Yeah, that's that's pretty fair to that. C tier for Zorn. And again, we can't see the chat to actually know whether or not anybody's agreeing with us. I'm going to reload this one last time, see if I can't get the chat to load. I think it's because it's popped out. Oh, there it is. All right, we got a whole bunch of people sit F. All right, let's let now, guys, I know that there's a whole bunch of districts here that we didn't get to. We didn't do do Rocky or like Sparky or any of those other ones. Like there's a whole bunch of other ones here that we could have done. But we're running out of time. We've been going now for an hour and 34 minutes. We still have things of the week to do. And I'm quite sick of sitting in this chair. So I think that that's where we'll leave our tier list for now. Thanks, everybody, for watching that. That was a lot of fucking fun. I had a lot of entertaining to that. We'll have to do some more tier lists in the future. We're not going to do tier lists all the time, though, because that would be ridiculous. But we will do some tier lists of other things in the future. And make sure to hit the subscribe button if you want to watch those things. So before we jump out of this podcast, we do have thingies of the week to do. So Tyler, let's go ahead and put our faces back up here. You guys can actually see how dark it's gotten in the meantime, because Tyler is not sitting in the dark. It was I could only bring one light with me, man. And with this DSLR, this one light, don't do crap. It was light when we started. He's not light anymore. So that's how long we've been going for. So let's go ahead and jump into the nuggies of the week. Tyler, your nuggie of the week. Yes, I am quite happy with this one. So for anybody who hasn't like, I don't know, tried out NixOS yet. If you're going to start using it and you're playing around with it, you're having a pretty decent time, but you'd like to do some more cool like theming stuff. I highly recommend you check out the there's a NixOS module called Nix colors. It is a great way of managing themes. It pulls from the base 16 color repository. So you've got a ton of themes. You know, your Tokyo night themes, grub box, et cetera, et cetera, it goes on. So if you if you want to do some cool things with theming and having one theme that you can easily switch and replicate it across your GTK themes, QT application, configs, all that stuff. It's definitely something to check out. I had a lot of fun with it. I've been using it now for a while. I may have talked about Nix colors on the podcast before. I can't remember, but definitely go check it out. If you're going to look in looking, if you're looking into NixOS or potentially going to stay for a while, it's it's fun to play around with. Your your thingies of the week or your Nuggies of the week are going to be very Nix centric for the for the foreseeable feature. OK, yeah. All right. So my Nuggy of the week is actually two. I have two. So for the longest time, I'm a big reader. I read dozens of books every single year. But I for for my entire life, all I've done is physical books. Like if I'm going to read a book, I have to add in my hand. But I live in a very small house. I've run out of room for books. And in the winter, I live in Michigan. It's not always easy to get to the district library. So I've sadly had to abandon my quest for owning all the books in physical form. So I've been looking into ways of getting digital books. And Kindle books is obviously the way to go if you want to buy digital books, get it from Kindle or from Barnes and Noble or whatever. But I don't want to pay for every book that I read, because I DNF a lot of books throughout the year. So I found two apps called Hoopla and Livy. I like BBY. Basically, what they allow you to do is if you have a library card and your library supports it, they basically allow you to download or basically rent a copy of books that the library has in digital EPUB form and you can read them either on Kindle or in the app that's provided in the case of Hoopla. And they have access to all the new releases and stuff. And old releases, basically, if your library supports it. And you can, if you don't have a district library, find libraries out there that don't have residency requirements, so you can get a library card from them. So I have the cool thing about Libby in particular is that you can be a member of many different libraries. If you you have a reciprocal agreement with libraries or you found libraries that don't have a residency agreement, you can put them on Libby. And that means that you can have if the you'll have more selection of the books. So if, you know, every book, every library has only so many books available of a certain title or whatever, the more libraries you have, the more likely you are to be able to actually rent one of those books. So Hoopla and Libby, they're awesome. And as long as you have a library card of some form, the vast majority of libraries do support them both. And like I live in Podunk and or BFE as we, you know, call it and my little ass district library supports it. So definitely check those out if you're a reader and you like to you don't want to actually have to, you know, buy books all the time. So yeah, those are my nuggies of the week. So that is it for a awesome episode of The Linux Cast. I really highly enjoyed this. We're definitely going to have to do a tier list again. I've been mixed on tier list because I think that there's like that one guy who says, well, this is a stupid tier list. It's their opinions, dude. Like, seriously, that's all stupid. They're all like there is no good Linux distros. They're all they'll suck, use windows. Um, anyways, that's it for this episode. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so in any number of ways. Probably the best is to head on over to the website, which is available at thelinuxcast.org. There you'll find previous episodes all the way back to season one and even more recent episodes because I've actually been keeping that up to date. Also, you'll be able to find all of my previous blog posts there as well. You can follow Tyler, who does a very Nix OS centric YouTube channel now, but he's on YouTube at youtube.com slash zany og and where we're just waiting from to lose the password again, because it will happen, happen eventually, uh, no, no, he's a great YouTuber. And he's coming up on what, 5,000 or 4,000 subscribers. I think I'm at 50. I think I'm, I think I'm over 5,000. So you're coming up on 6,000 or something. So if you haven't subscribed to head on over there, subscribe to his channel, especially if you like Nix OS links for his discord and my discord will be on the website as well. So make sure you check out that as well, because they're really less than how many times I can say as well in the same sentence, just to say. Anyways, youtube.com slash linuxcast. If you want to subscribe to my channel, patreon.com slash linuxcast. If you want to support me monetarily, Tyler also has a Patreon. That link will be on the website as well. You'll find all the stuff at the linuxcast.org slash contact. That's where you'll find all the links to my mastodon Tyler's mastodon, Tyler's discord, my discord, all that stuff, and you can just head on over there. If you want to support the channel and get awesome merch head on over to the store, which is available at shop.linuxcast.org, there you'll find a whole bunch of merch and it all goes directly to help the podcast as well. So thank you so very much for everybody who has done that. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube and Kofi. You guys are awesome without you. The challenge would not be anywhere near where it is and we wouldn't have a podcast every week because I would have no motivation to do so. I have the time I get up in the morning just to see your guys's lovely faces. That's depressing as hell. Anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me. Thanks everybody for watching. This was by far our most watched live stream ever. Not even doubled. I think the last highest one. So thank you so very much for watching live. We record this live every Saturday, usually around three o'clock p.m. Eastern time. If one of us doesn't decide to rebuild our PC is literally right before the podcast. I'm not to the name of names. Anyways, I don't know who would do such a thing. Head on over and watch us live on YouTube.com. Plus Linuxcast. We'll see you next week with a brand new topic. See you then.