Top 4 Most Exciting Linux Distros For 2019

As much as I avoid debates about Linux distributions, people seemed to really enjoy my previous list of ambitious Linux distros so why not make another?

I thought the video I did last year was a bit too verbose. Conversely, the article I wrote for the video was too sparse. Rather than making a silly list of pros-and-cons, let me explain why I’m looking forward to these distros.

SteamOS

Did you forget about SteamOS? Did you think the project had died? Admittedly, it hasn’t received an update since August of last year. And we all know how well Steam Machines sold…

Despite all of that, I’m apprehensively hopeful for SteamOS this year because of the massive advancements Valve has made with SteamPlay. Also, some SteamVR news went under the radar, such as better support for AMD devices.

But these changes are specific to Steam (the platform) and SteamVR, so how do they help SteamOS? One of the biggest complaints about the Steam Machines was about how limited the game catalog was. SteamPlay helps fix this in a big way.

Unfortunately, enabling SteamPlay on SteamOS is still a bit of a hassle. Hopefully Valve will make it easier to enable it (or have it on by default) in 2019.

Solus (again)

Last year I said Solus had an ambitious year ahead of it. Turns out I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Ikey, the founder of Solus, officially left the project. This was a pretty big deal because not only was he the defacto leader of the project, he was also the primary developer on many of the internal tools.

Luckily, the Solus team weathered the departure well, issued a lengthy blog post & podcast, and kept on trucking along. They’ve been doing live streams if you want to see them in action.

They’ve made a some big announcements for 2019 that I’m pretty excited about. Solus 4, Budgie 11, Sol, etc. And if you are interested in following the development of the project, they have a Phabricator instance that is pretty darn great.

KDE Neon

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you probably know that I have a love-hate relationship with KDE. I’ve made videos about how it is generally buggy, I’ve written articles about Kdenlive, etc.

Truth is, I really like the KDE project. I like Plasma, I like the apps, I like the mascot. It’s a really cool project. However, it frustrates me when I run into issues like the Kwin completely locking up or Kdenlive crashing and wrecking the video I’m working on.

I’ve been planning to revisit KDE Neon in a video this year so I started using KDE full-time in December. My experience with it has been stellar. It’s a far cry from how unstable it was last time I used it.

The KDE project in general is really exciting because of their crazy velocity and how fast they churn out features. But I’ll save my thoughts on that for another time.

Mint

I don’t think I’ve ever said a single thing about Mint Linux on my YouTube channel(s) or here on Medium. I’ve always thought Mint to be a sort of clone of Ubuntu with a different team and priorities.

Mint 19.1 was released late last year and I’m really impressed. The Cinnamon desktop in particular is quite amazing. I would also call it the GTK analogue to KDE Plasma. Mint also has creature comforts that Ubuntu doesn’t have like default automatic updates, backup and restore, along with an easy way to manage PPAs.

The biggest issue Mint has is with its marketing. The team isn’t really active in social circles, especially when compared to the Solus or ElementaryOS teams, and their website is just godawful.

Runners Up!

There’s a lot of cool things happening in the Linux community. These distros don’t have my attention like the previous four do but they are worth keeping an eye on.

ElementaryOS

The long awaited elementary OS 5 Juno was released late last year and it has been getting a lot of coverage from Forbes lately. They’ve also put a ton of work into Code and AppCenter which are both super cool.

Ubuntu

Canonical has been busy making performance and other patches to Gnome. Unfortunately, the Gnome team has been less that receptive to these changes.

Ubuntu is also the flagship distribution for Snap support and as you probably know, I’m a big fan of the idea behind Snaps, though the implementation is less than impressive. Hopefully we’ll see some big improvements in 2019!

Fedora

Truth be told I’m not a big fan of Fedora in general however with IBM buying RedHat last year I am curious to see what effect this has on the project.

Fedora has also been doing crazy things with Podman and Silverblue. Admittedly I’m skeptical that these technologies will pick up any meaningful traction, it’s always good to see innovation happening.

Manjaro

Manjaro was on my list from last year and while not a ton happened with the project in 2018, it continues to gain popularity and people seem to really enjoy it.

There’s been talk about changes to Pamac, the popular front-end for Arch’s pacman package manager as well as a new Manjaro laptop called the Bladebook.