The Linux & BSD Distro Tier List (20XX Edition)

Added: 2026-05-29

[00:00:15]What's up, guys? My name is Tony, and today we're going to do a quick and painless official Linux/BSD tier list.

[00:00:22]For the rubric of the tier list, it is simple. The question is, does this operating system respect the operator?

[00:00:29]If yes, it's going to go high on the list. If no, it's going to go low. Other factors will be taken into consideration and will be explained in the breakdowns, but the main factor will be operator friendliness. If I didn't include a DRO on this list, it's probably because I either haven't daily driven it long enough to give it a fair breakdown or I didn't want to include a fork of a fork of a fork on this list. All right, so let's jump straight into it. So, we're going to start this off with Fedora Linux. This is going to be going into peak and that's going to be the A tier for those of you born in the9s. One of the things about the Linux community is that it has a lot of beginners and a lot of elitists. Fedora is one of those dros that's an excellent choice for both groups. This unique skill level scalability is why I'm putting it in peak. For beginners, it has several guided installer ISOs including fully operational systems with a choice of KDE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, XFCE, etc. But it also has i3 and sway spins. is available which is great for power users. Its package manager DNF is bleeding edge enough so that you're not running Debian tier software from 2015 but it's also stable enough so that UDEV doesn't randomly break every update. The release cycle is 6 months predictable, well communicated and well audited. And the security advisory pipeline is also peaked here. The Fedora devs have really fast CVE responses historically. So, all that being said, Fedora is peak and I recommend it to beginners who are just starting their Linux journey as well as advanced users looking for something rock solid. All right, moving on to Yubuntu Linux. Conversely, here I'm going to put YUbuntu in the slop tier.

[00:02:03]It's supposed to be beginner friendly, but honestly, it's so bloated out of the box and its package manager is decades behind what I consider to be usable.

[00:02:10]Yubuntu started off as Debian for humans and ended up as Debian for customers.

[00:02:15]the technical decisions all point in one direction away from respecting the operator towards extracting value from the user. That being said, I can't in good faith recommend anyone actually use YUbuntu, especially since Debian is so easy to install these days. And if you're okay with a nonAPT system, just use Fedora. All right, Arch Linux that is going in peak tier. Arch is without a doubt one of the most operator friendly Linux distributions out there. The base install is just a kernel systemd and the tools you need to get a shell.

[00:02:45]Everything else is a decision that you get to make. There is no opinion baked in. There is no default desktop environment because there's no default anything. You get to build the entire system. That being said, because you have almost total control with some convenience frontloaded with packstrap, you have the ability to go base install arch and you can pick between a full TTY rice, an X11 build with OSWM or a Wayland build with something like Neri, Manga, or Hyperland. You can even go more normier and grab KD Plasma as your desktop environment. No matter what you decide, you can tell all your friends that you use Arch by the way. And that is really the main reason to be using Arch. Another reason that I consider it to be peak tier is because the Arch wiki, I think the Arch wiki might be the best piece of Linux documentation that has ever been written. Half of the time I have issues about Linux, even if I'm not on Arch specifically, the Arch wiki usually has a dedicated page for debugging that issue. Lastly, the AUR.

[00:03:38]The AUR is great for convenience. You can grab stuff that is not in the official Pac-Man repositories. You can package stuff and put it in the AUR and it's really a great tool for those of you who are willing to audit a 10line package build file. So now you ask the question, why is Arch not goat? Well, because it's not Nixos. Nixos is the goat dro in my opinion. That's going to be S tier for the boomers. And more or less every other dro except one that you'll see later in this video is what I consider to be a legacy dro especially coming from a 2027 point of view. If you are a fan of the channel, it's probably no surprise to you that I'm putting Nyxos as goat here, seeing that I've made several videos specifically about Nyxos and several other videos where I'm demonstrating a Whan compositor or quick shell or self-hosting a matrix server where I use Nyxos to demonstrate those topics. So, first of all, Nyx shells are one of the reasons why Nyx is so OP. You can just drop into a nickshell here and for example, we can run Cmatrix without installing it. So, I've got Cmatrix here. It's running and as soon as I exit this shell, I don't have cmmetric installed on my system. There's no leftover cmmetric in user bin. There's no stale cmatrix config inconfig.

[00:04:50]There's no dependency garbage in user lib on a legacy distro such as Arch. I would have to run something like pseudo Pac-Man-S cmatrix and then I'd have to run cmatrix and then in order to uninstall that I'd have to run pseudo Pac-Man RNS cmatrix and then pray that Pac-Man actually cleaned everything up.

[00:05:09]Obviously you can do a lot more with nick shells but for me the ability to test a package without committing to installing it is incredible. Another thing I love about Nyx is the dev shells. So if we actually clone something like oxwm here and then we cd into it, we see there's a flake.nix right there. And if I run nyx develop dot here, I'm going to be entering the devshell of oxwm. And this is on any machine. So I immediately will have all the dependencies to build and test that project. And in this dev shell, I'll have access to zig here, which is 0.16.

[00:05:39]For me, honestly, Nyx devshells are the 20x version of Docker containers. And it's probably the best thing about Nyx.

[00:05:45]But yeah, another cool thing about Nyx is Nyx run. So I can run something like disk through Nyx packages without installing it. super quick way to check stats on my computer such as disk space or whatnot. And there's no real equivalent for DNF, Pac-Man, or apt.

[00:06:00]This is something that is a nicity exclusive to the Nyx package manager.

[00:06:04]Besides the three Nyx commands we just discussed, Nyx OS is really good because of the reproducibility and the rollbacks. If I'm comfortable with a new package after a while, I'll just add it to my configuration.Nix and rebuild my system. The cool part is that I can share that configuration to other machines and reproduce the exact system on them. same kernel, same package versions, etc. And roll backs are similar. If something breaks after an update, I'm literally three seconds away from rebooting into the previous generation and being back to a working state. And one big feature that I like that nobody really talks about is per package pinning. If a single package regresses, I can pin that package to an older version and keep updating everything else. Normally, this actually happened to me recently with a Caden Live update. They pushed a release that broke my workflow. So I had to pin Caden live to 25.11 until the next stable release fixed it. This is why Nyx kind of dissolves the whole rolling versus stable debate. Every other DRO forces you to pick globally. You're either on stable or everything is old. But on Nixos, you can just literally decide which package is going to be stable, which one's going to be bleeding edge, etc. And that puts Debian's stability argument and Arch's bleeding edge argument both in the trash can. All that being said, Nixos is the goat dro and I'll be continuing to daily drive it on 90% of my machines. If you've never tried Nixos, you're kind of in a unique position, similar to somebody who's never seen Breaking Bad in that every other show seems fine to you because you've never seen the gold standard. So, why 90% of my machines? Well, because my main production machine has been on Gen 2 Linux for 10 years, and I'm going to put Gen 2 in peak. Gen 2 is probably the most operator friendly Linux distribution of all legacy distros. But why do I still use it on my main production machine? Well, the answer is control. Gen 2 gives you almost full control of your system. You can use musal libcy or gibbc and use open rc or systemd. You can tweak your compile flags for your specific CPU. You can compile a custom kernel that strips out every driver and feature you don't actually use. You can update your use flags to ensure everything you compile compiles without Bluetooth or something you don't care about. So yeah, compiling Firefox for a few hours can be annoying, but there are binary packages available as needed, although I would consider that going against the spirit of Gen 2 and missing the point of it. Something I like to refer to as the Gen 2 paradox.

[00:08:24]For systems that are slow enough to actually benefit from Gen 2's custom compile flags and strip down builds, those systems also take forever to compile anything. And then for the systems that compile incredibly fast, you won't really notice any speed benefits from those optimizations.

[00:08:39]Anyway, so this paradox was a lot less wide back in 2010 when I started using Gen 2 and it was much more applicable to get those optimizations and at the time it was required for certain things on the hardware that I had available to me at the time. So why is Gen 2 not in goat tier? Well, it was goat tier for me for a long time until I encountered Nixos.

[00:08:59]Being forced to be FHS compliant and not being able to systematically declare and reproduce my system without hacking together a bunch of PZIX SH scripts is why it's not go. It's really close though and I recommend Gen 2 to anyone who wants to be in full control over their system without going insane on Krux Linux. All right, so one of the few forks that I'm going to cover today is Artix Linux. And I'm going to be putting Artics in mid tier. This is because it's literally Arch Linux but not as well maintained. The benefit over Arch is obviously that you have access to different init systems such as Runit, S6, and Open RC. But if you want to use Open RC, in my opinion, you should just be using Gen 2. And if you want to use Runit, you should just be using Void Linux. Artix is definitely daily drivable for me, but it's, as I said before, literally just Arch with a different init system. You can install different init systems on Arch directly and that allows you to keep first class AUR compatibility while doing that.

[00:09:55]Artix breaks a meaningful chunk of the AUR packages because they assume systemd and their repos also lag behind Arches sometimes by hours, sometimes by days which really matters for security updates. I do like Artics. It's an incredible DRO, but it's as DT referred to it before a protest DRO and I sort of agree with him on that. It's literally just Arch with a guey installer, which doesn't matter for me, and it has a different suite of init systems available for you, which is operator respecting, but combining with everything I've said, I'm going to have to throw Artics in mid tier. And another mid-tier DRO for me is Alpine.

[00:10:32]If the rubric was changed to what is the best DRO to run in a container, then yeah, Alpine would be goat tier. But since our rubric is more about what is friendly to the operator, Alpine falls short. It is an incredibly lightweight DRO based on Musel instead of Gibbc C with Open RC instead of systemd. And honestly, for my workflow, it is daily drivable for desktop Linux. I do like that you can get a solid system idling under 200 megs of RAM with ease, even with a bloat that comes with X11, but besides that, it's nearly impossible to get stuff like Caden Live or OBS working correctly without some flat pack madness, which I don't condone anyway.

[00:11:09]So, yeah, sits comfortably in mid tier for me, and that's where I'm going to put Alpine. Another muselbased system is Chimera Linux and this is also going in mid tier for me, but I think it's slightly better than Alpine for this rubric. And here's why. Alpine ended up with Musel and stripped out of userland because it was built for containers. But Chimera made the same choices on purpose as a coherent project that questions whether the GNU userland belongs in modern Linux distributions at all. It has Musolib C. It has a free BSD style core utils and it has D in it as it's in it system instead of system D and it's totally daily drivable for me especially because my workflow is simply a terminal and web browser but similar to Alpine it won't be daily drivable for most people mostly because it's still young and the package coverage isn't quite there yet.

[00:11:56]Even though it's quote mid-tier for 20XX I think it's still an excellent DRO and I wouldn't be surprised to see it in peak within a couple years. All right, let's move on to the BSDs here. And we'll start with FreeBSD. I'm going to be putting FreeBSD in peak tier. And yeah, I know it's not technically a Linux distro, but I'm doing a tier list on operatorfriendly operating systems.

[00:12:18]I've got to handle FreeBSD here. The big difference between FreeBSD and every Linux distro on this list is that the kernel, the userland, and the ports are all in one project. It's all developed together. Whereas on Linux, you have the Linux kernel, you've got whatever user land that DRO chose to put on top of it, and then you've got the package manager.

[00:12:38]And since FreeBSD is really just one conglomeration of everything, it is one operating system, and you can actually feel the difference when you use it day-to-day, which makes it operator friendly, which is again the rubric of the tier list. ZFS is the file system of choice on FreeBSD, which works out of the box. No third party tools or what have you. The handbook is the second best documentation on the entire internet after the arch wiki. Of course, the pkg package manager has the best name of any package manager in existence. The ports are incredible.

[00:13:08]Jails are containers but not corporate slop. So overall, I mean, FreeBSD is an operating system that is not a gimmick and it really is daily drivable. So why is it not goat and this matters? It's license. The license is literally an empty text file. Nothing is stopping Palunteer from taking the BSD kernel and putting a thin proprietary wrapper around it, calling it Palunteer OS and installing it on every governmentmandated laptop that you will be required to use in 2035 which you won't be able to read, modify or redistribute the source code and essentially it'll be unfree BSD. So in terms of operator friendliness, yeah, you can make an argument that the license doesn't matter but for me it does and that's why I'm not putting FreeBSD in the go tier. Moving over to OpenBSD. If the rubric was what is the best operating system to run as a firewall or a hardened server, of course, OpenBSD would be GOAT, no question. But since the rubric again is operator friendliness, it's got to go in mid here. OpenBSD has the best security model in the industry and it's based on excellent first principles such as the principle of lease privileges, but daily driving it is going to be a pain for desktop use. If your daily flow as a user is a tiling window manager, terminal Firefox and compiler, then yeah, it is daily drivable. But since FreeBSD is out there, you already get ZFS, faster GPU support, Linux binary escape patches, and a fresher selection of ports, which would make FreeBSD better than OpenBSD on the tier list here. And of course, there is a trade-off to all these conveniences. And in this case, it's going to be less code auditability and weaker default security ops, which definitely matter of course, but are not enough to move the needle on pushing OpenBSD to the peak tier. So, we've got about seven distros left here.

[00:14:52]Let's go ahead and move on to Void Linux. And for me, Void is almost peak.

[00:14:56]It's a super minimal system. It's got run it and it's on a rolling release schedule, but it can't be peak for a couple reasons, and I'm going to explain why here, but I'm going to have to put Void in mid. I would say overall void is operator friendly, but there are a few nitpicks I have that differentiate it from the peak distros. First of all, the package manager's name is Xbps. Now, this may sound like a dumb reason to dock points from a DRO, but having to remember whether the name is XPBS, XSBP, Xbps, or whatnot is actually a big deal in daily use. And having to create an alias to fix this is a silly workaround. Also, Xbps doesn't have parallel downloads. And to combat the void shills, yes, it is incredibly fast anyway on a small update, but on a fresh install, not having parallel downloads in 2028 is noticeably slower for me. Not a huge deal, but something to point out for sure. The main problem about this is not necessarily the benchmarks, but it's about the signal. Not having this feature in the package manager signals to me that it's not a priority for the maintainers. And yeah, they are working hard and for free, so I get that, but it is a minor minus one on the tier list rubric for me. One thing that doesn't affect me personally, but a lot of my viewers will resonate with this since a lot of you guys use Hyperland, is that the void maintainers rejected Hyperland from being merged into their package repos for political reasons rather than technical reasons. And for a minimal DRO that just ships software, I don't think packages should be rejected on non-technical merits. This is not a problem for me, even if I wanted to run Hyperland because I could just build it from source. But it is something worth pointing out. And to play devil's advocate here, I do think it's totally up to the maintainers to accept or reject whatever they want for whatever reason they want or no reason given.

[00:16:43]It's really hard to maintain open- source software and the void devs are genuinely really working hard and doing really great work. So that being said, for me based on the rubric of what is friendly to the operator, void is kind of just Arch without systemd and with optional musul and less packages. So it belongs in mid tier for me. Sorry you tucks and sorry Jake. All right, moving on to Linux from scratch.

[00:17:08]Meh. Honestly, it is a really fun project and I think it's a right of passage for anyone who wants a hands-on way of learning how a Linux system is crafted. But I mean, come on. We're talking about friendly to the operator here. The LFS video took me 17 hours to record. So, I had to condense 17 hours of footage into three and a half hours for the tutorial video. You can learn what literally every package does on your machine this way during chapter 8, which is really nice. But if we're talking about 17 hours to set this up, sometimes longer. And we want operator friendliness, why are we locked into systemd or cisv and gcc and gibbc? I mean, yeah, there are forks of LFS that allow for mucil, open rc, etc. We're talking about mainline LFS, not these forks. and it's an excellent hobby and it is daily drivable technically, but no, it's not even close to operator friendly. That being said, it is meh on the list. You should go and watch that 3 and 1 half hour video and install LFS on your own system at some point in your Linux journey. If nothing else, just to say you did it. But it is a right of passage for the Linux hardcore enthusiasts. But yeah. All right, let's move over to Debian here. And I'm going to apologize to Drew in advance for this, but yeah, this is meh. The only reason this isn't going to go in slop tier is that I can in good faith recommend this to people who want to run some random Apache 2 PHP web server because there's so much documentation out there for boomers who think Debian is God's greatest gift to the Linux stability community. Debian is the opposite of stable and the opposite of beginner friendly. For me, apt literally doesn't have Zigg in their repos. Zigg.

[00:18:47]It's 2028 and we don't have Zigg. Not to mention Go is behind, like six versions, and Hugo is like 40 versions behind.

[00:18:55]Rust is 10 versions behind. This is unacceptable for friendliness to the operator. You're going to have to compile all of your software from scratch anyway. If you're doing any serious development work, I mean, Neoim is on version 10. We're on 12 on regular DRO. That's two full versions behind on just your editor. I mean the list goes down forever but you get the idea. It's definitely better than yubuntu and if you're somebody who's married to apt I definitely recommend this over yubuntu but again this is not saying much because yubuntu is well yubuntu. So debian sits comfortably in the meh tier.

[00:19:32]So let's go ahead and move on to slackware. For slackware, I do respect it from a historical perspective. And the fact that Patrick Vulkering has done so much for the Linux community is really a great feeling, but that doesn't affect its position in the tier list.

[00:19:45]And Slackware is going to go into meh as well. Sorry, Patrick, and sorry you tux.

[00:19:52]Slackware's package tool doesn't have dependency resolution, so you're going to have to chase libraries by hand.

[00:19:59]Similar to LFS, you should definitely go install Slackware and try it out as it is sort of a right of passage at this point, but really daily driving it is not operator friendly when we have the arsenal of Gen 2, Nixos, Arch, etc. at our disposal. Super cool historic distribution and super cool story with Patrick keeping it up to date for this long. But yeah, I really don't think it's that good for daily driving and I don't really think it's operator friendly. Moving on to Red Hat. We're obviously going to be putting Red Hat in slop tier. And honestly, it's not because re is technically bad. It's actually fine from a engineering standpoint. The slop is everything else.

[00:20:37]You literally can't install re without a subscription, an account, or agreeing to the corporate toos, which if you compare that to Fedora or Arch, where you just grab an ISO and go, that's obviously not operator friendly. In 2023, Red Hat went further and shut down public access to the real source code. So the company that built its reputation on open source is now hiding its source behind a payw wall or a paying customer portal. And this is why Rocky Linux and Alma Linux had to completely rebuild how they build their distros in 2023 2024. They used to be exact rail rebuilds and now they have to reverse engineer AI compatibility because they can't just read the source anymore. This is just like using yubuntu. Why would you use canonical slop when Debian exists if you're married to apt? Well, the same question applies. If you're married to Yum, just switch over to DNF and use Fedora. And those of you who are actually married to the Yum package manager are probably creating drones for the US government anyway, and you're probably not watching this video. So, the last DRO on this list is the only remaining non-leacy DRO, and this is Geeks system here. I'm going to be putting that in the goat tier where it belongs. Geeks is the goat dro that you probably never heard of or never used. It does almost everything Nixos does. It has a declarative system configuration, atomic upgrades, rollbacks, per package version pinning, reproducible builds, etc. And if you already understand why Nexos is goated, then you will definitely understand why Geeks is also goated because it's the same idea. The big differences are the configuration language. Nixos uses the Nyx lang which is a functional DSL that you have to learn and nobody uses outside of the Nyx community even though it's an excellent language. Whereas Geeks uses guile scheme. The other big difference is that Geeks takes a hardline stance on free software. It has the Linux Libre kernel by default and GNU Shepard as the init system and they don't put any proprietary garbage in their official repos. So G scheme an incredible programming language. The free software philosophy is great. GNU Shepard rejects system D and Geeks has all the nicities that Nyx has. So you might be asking why am I daily driving Nyx instead of Geeks on 90% of my machines? Well, because I only have one machine I can run the Libre kernel on and it's my favorite machine. So that's two goats in the tier list here. Same architecture, same operator respect, just different config languages and different software philosophies. All right, that's going to wrap it up for the tier list. Thanks for checking out the video. If I didn't include a DRO or BSD on this list, it's either because I haven't daily drove it long enough to talk about it or that I didn't feel the need to put a fork of a fork of a fork on here. If you disagree with any of these placements, just let me know in the comments. And if you'd like to see any Linux, BSD, or free and open source software related content in the future, drop a comment and I will put it in the pipeline. That being said, as always, I could not end the video without an obligatory Neochetch.