My current favorite distros

Last updated: 2017–01–09

6 min readJan 16, 2017

This is a constantly evolving and to-be-updated article of my Linux distribution experiences. I haven’t got that many years of Linux usage behind me so there’s no full reviews presented yet.

At the moment my current favorite distros are (in this order):

Xubuntu (needs some tweaking after install but all around great and light)
Zorin OS (12 Beta) (great for beginners or people coming from Windows)
Ubuntu
Solus OS (great for beginners but feels a bit unfinished for me)
Ubuntu GNOME
Lubuntu
elementary OS (great for beginners, or people coming from Mac OS X)
Manjaro XFCE (a bit technical but great and light. Krita OpenGL was slow, though)
Debian
Kubuntu

Xubuntu

Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
Nice, light and fast XFCE desktop environment
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
Awesomely quick to go to suspend mode. Although sometimes it works and sometimes not
Almost all artists used this in Blender Institute back in 2015, I got used to it :)

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

— No good Wacom configuration application

— Dropbox had flaw with system tray icon, needed a fix

— Sometimes won’t go into Suspend mode or doesn’t successfully come out of it. Pretty annoying :(

— When opening a browser window it spams you with some unneeded keyring password popups multiple times in a row, very very annoying

Setting up Xubuntu after installation

Zorin OS (12 Beta)

Very polished/usable straight from the first boot
Feels very good to use somehow
Very Windows 7 like
Good, nicely modified GNOME desktop environment
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
Okay Wacom configuration application
Suspend mode works (hold down Alt while pressing the shutdown button on bottom-right corner, it turns into pause-symbol)

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

Ubuntu

Popular, thoroughly tested, stable
Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
Functional Unity desktop environment
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

Solus OS

Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
Very sleek looking!
New, under development Budgie desktop environment, which can be installed even into Ubuntu. There is, however, a specific Ubuntu Budgie distro for that.

— A bit unfamiliar base and new eopkg package manager (not apt, like in Ubuntu)

— CUDA works for downloaded Blenders but not for the ones installed from the Software Center

— Can’t seem to get suspend mode to work

However, I’m really keeping a close eye on how this distro develops in the future. I really like it!

Ubuntu GNOME

Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
Good GNOME desktop environment
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
Okay Wacom configuration application

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

— Colors in the images that are viewed with the default image viewer look grayish when compared to Gimp, for example

Lubuntu

Extremely light and fast LXDE desktop environment
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)

— Takes a bit of time to configure it to work well for me

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

— No good Wacom configuration application

— A bit …. ugly (but can be configured to look a lot nicer)

elementary OS

Elegant Pantheon desktop environment
Very sleek and nice to use
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
Good Wacom configuration application

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

— There are some annoyances that push me away from using it

Setting up elementary OS after installation

Manjaro XFCE

Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
NVIDIA drivers and CUDA actually working in Blender straight after installation without any hassle (when Manjaro has been installed via the non-free drivers installation option)
Because Manjaro is based on Arch Linux, which is a rolling distro, it installs the latest Blender build straight from the Add/Remove Software application as well as the other needed applications in their latest state like Krita 3.0, GIMP, Kdenlive, etc.
Xfce is a nice, light and fast desktop environment, I haven’t tried the Manjaro KDE or other community flavors yet
Somehow weirdly the Xfce feels even faster in Manjaro than in Xubuntu, for example. Maybe because of Arch, hard to say

— Krita’s OpenGL mode, like rotating the canvas, acted very slowly for some reason. Xubuntu was way better in this regard

— No good Wacom configuration application (might be available in the Manjaro GNOME version, maybe, don’t know) — in the meantime, I use my small Wacom shell scripts.

— Easystroke doesn’t work as consistently as in Xubuntu, which is annoying.

Debian (GNOME)

Stable Debian
Good GNOME desktop environment. There are many other DEs available in the installer.

— Harder/techier/non-user-friendly to get NVIDIA drivers and CUDA work in Blender

— Harder/non-user-friendly to install latest versions of applications from repositories (Debian doesn’t support PPA, at least without hassle)

Kubuntu

Quite polished/usable straight from the first boot
Good, very configurable KDE desktop environment, which takes a bit of time to get used to, though
Familiar Ubuntu base (easy to use the PPAs to install latest Blender and other applications)
Okay Wacom configuration application

— Getting CUDA to work in Blender is a little hassle

— Has weird annoying glitch with the background on my pivoted monitor

Other distros I’ve tried

Antergos

— Before getting even into the installer it went to black screen with a ‘Kernel Panic’ message, no matter how I tried to boot from the USB stick.