Best Linux Distribution (linuxjournal.com)

Linux Journal: We started things off with Best Linux Distribution, and nearly 10,000 readers voted. The winner was Debian, with many commenting "As for servers, Debian is still the best" or similar. One to watch that is rising in the polls is Manjaro (7 percent), which is independently based on the Arch Linux. Manjaro is a favorite for Linux newcomers and is known for its user-friendliness and accessibility. And, now for the top three LJ winners: Debian (33 percent), openSUSE (12 percent), and Fedora (11 percent).

Comments

Alpine

[DaMattster]

My favorite is Alpine because it is systemd-free, light-weight, and security-focused.

Ill-defined question. "Best for what purpose".

[ron_ivi]

The best Linux for

• datacenter nework switches is probably Microsoft's SONiC distro.
• cell phones is (god I hope it's not Android - but it's certainly not SONiC or Debian either.
• servers running open source software is almost certainly Debian.
• servers running closed source software (Oracle, etc) is probably Red Hat or some Canonical offering.
• my laptop - Debian.

Linux is in far too many places for "a" "best" distro.

But it's not hard to pick candidates for the best for specific purposes.

Let me put in a good word for Devuan

[shoor]

No systemd and it does all the things I want. In particular, it let's me run me-tv, which doesn't run well on ubuntu because of something to do with gui libraries. (Each side blames the other last I checked, which I admit was quite awhile ago.) Before Devuan, I had to run me-tv on Linux Mint, which is a very good distro (if you're comfortable with systemd, which I'm not.)