That was 3 years ago. I understand they made a mistake (twice) but ok since then. I think most of the Manjaro criticism is no longer warranted. All distros had made mistakes.

For those of us that despise Red Hat, sorry, but increasing the user base of Fedora, dramatically helps Red Hat’s marketability and profitability (and IBM’s). These companies not only make decisions bad for the FOSS community but way too happy to do business with a country massacring kids as we speak too. Now, I still recommend using Fedora since, as you say they are not straight IBM and they are at the vanguard, yet, for those with a conscience on these matters, there are as equally comparable offers out there.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is pretty solid and 98% of the refinement of Fedora, that in my opinion, it is the most polished of them all. Now, using Fedora supports companies like Red Hat/IBM so it is a no-no for me.

The only thing OpenSUSE has is that is independent so does a few things differently than Debian or Fedora based ones, but after a few retouches that you will learn in no time you will be at the level of Fedora. It is perfectly OK for beginners, just that there are a few things differently, sometimes for the better like many utilities from YAST, but will be different from what you find in most non OpenSUSE forums. Again, is minimal, 95% of the staff is the same. Unfortunately, it does not have the costumer base that Ubuntus/Mint/Fedora has, but the supporters are technically highly committed and competent, they just need to improve in their marketing arena that is what is holding them down.

Another KDE that I like is TuxedoOS. It works perfectly in non Tuxedo devices and very stable in my experience… I even had better stability experience than Kubuntu, and that says a lot.

Did not play enough with Manjaro and will try in a few days. It had some bad press but I think is more due to diverging a bit from Arch philosophy of instant updates than anything else. CachyOS I recommend only for latest computers or those willing to adjust things a bit once in a while.

For older devices, MXLinux KDE is the ideal in integrated graphics chips.

Of course they would get GrapheneOS phones but does not make user a suspect, they also carry cash rather than credit cards, but not all people with cash should be a suspect!

The mayor problem in Barcelona is being the pickpocket capital of the world and the unregistered Airbnbs! Both are relatively easy to address (in conjunction with the legislative and judicial system), but are have not been tackled for 2 decades already. And please, don’t start suspecting guys with Nike sneakers and cross bags as pickpocketers now too! There are plenty, plenty of genuine methods to go after the bad guys than cheeking their phones or shoe wear… gosh, even civilians are tired of pinpointing at them to end up being completely ignored by that police!

Screw me! I feel bad because instead of welcoming those now disenchanted MAGA, we are shunning them away and pushing them toward Musk’s new party and the like. We did same mistake after Trump’s 1st term too.

The Proton CEO is quite active in twitter and participates in podcasts. Well, one day he praised one action of the Trump administration on antitrust and a whole community attacked him for “praising Trump” when he did only a nomination for Attorney General for the Antitrust division. I highly doubt he is a MAGA supporter and listening to him for 30min on any of the multiple appearances he was on, will confirm you that. Several things concerns me on Proton, the CEO’s ideology ain’t one of them.

Unrelated to this, I wish people was more forgiven of Trump voters, it is not the monolithic the Left tries to portray it is. Trump sold himself as fighting the establishment, being anti-war and pro-antitrust (many small business owners supported him). People voted for him even suspecting he most likely was lying. Many people, both in 2016 and 2024, voted for Trump because Hillary was very pro-war (for instance she say she would attack Russian military directly in Syria) and Kamala proudly said she would not change anything on Biden’s policy in the middle of Gaza’s massacres. MAGA has many racists, many! (Democrats has is share too, but usually quieter but one can notice them at the grocery stores!) But what made Trump win was desperate disfranchised Americans with no other alternatives that promised Change. Europeans should keep quiet too… in the last elections they voted as different as they could demanding change to end up with Ursula von der Leyen for another term. Democracies in both sides of the Atlantlic are heavily ill and people, in desperation, vote for whoever promises change, independently of anything else.

I haven’t play much with them but this is my take:

Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets… for better or for worse, but I like their take.

Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven’t tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu’s or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.

OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch…). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.

There are others but for niches.

China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.

We don’t know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know… Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.

Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.

OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years… I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.

Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won’t be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today

The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting… but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross… partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don’t see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.

Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won’t be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public… maybe KDE’s new bet?!