 Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel. The end of 2020 is close at hand and like many a Linux youtuber I've decided to proclaim to all my top picks for distro of the year Before we jump into the list of five Disros that I've chosen first thing I want to talk about a little bit is the criteria that I have used to choose these The first is that I have to have used them It would really want to make sense for me to put something on a list that I've never actually used Second they had to have been active in 2020 meaning that they have to have had at least one Release and third they should have to they should provide at least something original to the conversation Basically that means that I'm interested by them usually thick or a distro comes out and It's just kind of meh and Then that one can make me less anyways, so let's go ahead and jump into this here Let's switch over to the main screen so that you can actually see the first one is Regal athletics. This is a Ubuntu based distro and It it's claimed to fame is that it's one of the only Distros that uses i3 as its main window manager now There are other with distros out there that use i3 obviously, but this one is what it's the purpose of it is to provide a i3 Window manager experience Regolith came onto the scene a couple of years ago as an addition to Ubuntu to Ubuntu It allowed users to install a highly customized version of i3 on top of GNOME backend since those humble beginning Regolith has added more options to become way more complex than it was originally It's more than a simple race of i3 now. You can actually choose several different styles now that Instead of just this one. I'm not actually Sure how to do that. I haven't used that much These things I've lost my place And while it's Definitely still built on top of Ubuntu with it with a GNOME backend basically It uses GNOME settings and the audio manager for GNOME and the display manager for GNOME While still those things the developers have gone to great lengths to customize i3 specifically in a way that makes it more than just a simple standard i3 config it does Have this is an i3 gaps version, so it does have gaps and There are some things that are interesting about it other than it being i3. It's um the GNOME backend really makes things I Have forgot that I had to change the super key in order to close things because it was conflicting with my window manager. Anyways I lost my place again. Anyways Anyways, anyways, anyways, I keep saying that word There are a few things that make it make regolith very interesting The GNOME backend allows users to easily connect devices and have all the benefits of a desktop environment while using a window manager Like I said, regolith is one of the only desaps that I are distros that I know of That allows you to use i3 right out of the box as the main option Like it has GNOME installed, but it's not the main option It's not says default whereas like Arco Linux, which we'll talk about later It has i3 installed by default default, but the One that it logs you into, you know without changing anything is actually Xfce. So that is Regolith Linux Number four on the list is elementary us now. I apologize for the resolution. I was not able to install guest additions on this for whatever reason which is really silly because it's basically a boon to So I just apologize for that So basically we're gonna have to deal with this really small little window Which is annoying af because you can actually make things smaller than this why Element it appears the elementary does no cuz no preparation for Guest additions to be installed. So anyways, that's beside the point I've had my issues with all elementary OS and its developers over the years I think that the distro fosters Fragmentation by rewarding developers who develop only for the elementary OS brand of Linux and not Linux as a whole I think that they've taken a bit too much out of Apple's playbook when it comes to design mainly this gray Medley skew morphic crappy design But it is getting better Because later on this year, they'll be introducing the ability to do a system-wide dark mode, which is awesome so that the design won't be as big of a problem and You really can't deny that the distro has a lot of Elegance that is lacking in other distros the design aesthetic while it's not my cup tea is Very consistent, you know all across the thing except for you know some of these Even now some of these are dark themes and some of them are not not so it It kind of takes away from my whole consistency argument But for the most part the design is very consistent consistent and It's very stable and it doesn't suffer for any for many of the slowdowns that Like regular stock GNOME does even though I don't think that stock GNOME suffers as many slowdowns as it had Yeah, as it used to anyways that is elementary OS and that is number four number three is fedora now I mentioned this when I was talking in my GNOME video, but Fedora has really impressed me in these last few days and I mostly have been using it on Let's actually make this bigger Fred full-screen and that's one of the things that actually really impressed me is that it has Virtual box guest editions installed out of the box and I didn't have to do anything. It just automatically worked in full screen For years, I didn't really care for Fedora mostly because the district doesn't really play well with Nvidia and Nvidia drivers But now that I have an AMD card, I was very impressed with the performance in the ease of install It's just really good that the installers not as bad as it used to be. I'll never really be a fan of GNOME I mean Let's just look at this. This is the this is the file manager, Nautilus. These icons are atrocious and That's something that Fedora could fix Because they make the GNOME desktop environment. These these these are bad icons guys Choose something better. That's just not a good look. Anyways and Rant if you want to hear if you want to hear more about my thoughts on GNOME, I'll link the video up above I will say that Fedora does a really good job of creating a stable workstation I'll also say that the custom installer for door for Fedora uses that Fedora uses is way better than it was the last time I tried Fedora and it was by far the easiest experience. I've ever had with a virtual box I just keep coming back to that how easy it was how good it is on virtual box it's so if One of the things about Fedora is I will say this if you're looking for a stable System that you're not going to update very often that is just going to work I think Fedora is probably the best choice for you to choose Ubuntu comes close, but they change things quite a lot. They're not as if as staunchly conservative in their updating as Fedora is, you know, they make changes in with file system that make changes with, you know stock GNOME that might not, you know Fly on every system Fedora is just very very Solid as a rock it's stable. It's as stable as you can be the only other distro that I would say is maybe more stable It's probably Debian But I think Fedora is very close to that in terms of stability Anyways, I would highly recommend Fedora if you're looking for you know this I'm really looking forward to actually trying out the KDE spin of Fedora because if it's if it's as good as this I might have fun my next distro when my Arch system crashes or whatever Anyways Moving on to number two and we'll see what number two is here in just a second and number two turns out to be Old standby Ubuntu Ubuntu 20.10 is a very impressive distribution for the Fact that it's probably the most stable and fast version of Ubuntu that's ever been released I'm very impressed with the speed and very impressed with its durability and stability Maybe not as stable as Fedora, but I mean they're pretty close But because I think it gets the number two spot ahead of Fedora because We just looked at the file manager in in Fedora, and this is the file manager and they're both Nautilus They just use different themes and this is So much better Fedora, I hope you're looking at this because this is so much better than add a water or whatever the hell it's called I don't think a fire top five list would be complete without including Ubuntu because it's the most used Distro in the world. It's the one that a lot of distros are based on Linux Mint's based on it at Ubuntu has a tons of flavors you know out there and I think that's what really draws a lot of people to Ubuntu because it gives you a lot of choice in terms of what you Want to use you don't have to use stock Ubuntu like I'm doing here and it's just It allows you really easy seamless integration with a snap store and so if you're looking for a package manager that is Gonna vomit when I say this but that's good Then snaps is probably good for you and The Ubuntu software store here is just Way better than it used to be. I mean it's just way better than it used to be I Talked about this again in my in my GNOME or my I think this was in my Ubuntu 20.10 review The item never gonna like snaps because of the closed source Way the the stores ran but snaps themselves are actually Really good and this this store has definitely come leaps and bounds You know from where it was before so let's move on to number one Number one is arco linux For those of you who have what who watch? Distro tube you'll know that number one was Arco linux for him as well, and I swear I didn't do this just because DT chose Arco I've been using Arco for ages and ages So this isn't just me you know copying DT DT even though I'm using his color scheme I've never had a the thing is I've never had a more stable version of arch On my system than I have with this install of arco You know I have seven wet window managers and a couple desktop environments installed And things just work. I have no problems at all The only issues I'm having right now are some issues with pycom and those are gonna be easy to solve When I get around to it, and they're not even a big problem And that's the thing is that I've come to the point where I can go through when I come to a problem is Just easy to fix it I've had no issues Real I mean like stop like show stopping issues with this install of our arco ever and For people who know me, you know, I loved to tweak Yeah, I'm using a custom version of dm that I built myself and You know I you know I like to install I had blur going in pycom for a little while. I had you know, I've been Messing around with environment variables and different scripts and stuff And usually when you start dealing with that kind of stuff you break stuff and I Haven't broken anything. I think it's great I One of the best things about arco is I love the options that you get When you install you can download pretty much any desktop environment window manager or multiple of them when you install It's on right from the install media And it's so easy that almost anybody can do it arco also makes it so easy to install multiple desktop environments or window managers without conflict it's just Usually when you install too different like if you talk try to talk good plasma and you know I'm on the same system you have these conflicts and stuff and while yeah that they have more you get duplicate Duplicate programs and stuff just like on any distro And you don't see any give a terrible Conflicts that you you know would normally get and I don't know how they do it, but it just is really very well done The one point I will make is that the support is a bit meh Honestly, the main dev has a ton of videos on YouTube like 2,000 of them And that's great But if you're trying to find a specific video out of 2,000 videos and that's you're really good at Google Foo And he's done you know a good good enough job at putting your issue in the title of the video You're kind of out of luck and if you try to go to their community and ask All you'll see is you know read the manual or watch a video. It's not great So in conclusion, I think that the most for the most part what tissue you choose is relevant There are two things that matter when you're choosing what districts to install and one of them is only The only one is distro Specific is your package management system. How do you and how do you choose to install packages? If you prefer app and snaps chances are you're going to use Ubuntu if you prefer the Pac-Man And a you are you're going to use arch or arch based distro if you want to use fedora You'd use yum or whatever In the end those that's the only thing that matters when you're choosing a distro your package manager After that, it's all about your desktop environment or your window manager and Those can be installed on any distro you choose Now if you're not interested in installing your own desktop environment Then you should choose a distro that has the desktop environment or window manager that you like But if you're okay installing it on your own you can choose whatever distro you want that just fits your package management needs So what I would really like to hear is what distro you use what's your favorite one of the year or the one that you've used For years and years and why you like that distro Let me know in the comments below so That is it for this video If you liked it give us a thumbs up if you didn't like it for whatever reason I can tell you why you wouldn't like this video. 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