I always see people talking about the best they have used, but what about the worst?
I am sure this will all come down to personal preferences and while I don’t think there is a “bad” distro, I think there are bad distros for individuals depending on their needs, skill set, and what they tend to prefer.
That being said - For me, the worst has to be openSUSE. It is pretty outdated and loaded with bugs and issues that I couldn’t make any use of it.
Windows System Linux, haha. Regards.
Have some gold sir. That was the best comment I’ve seen. 
I would have to agree. 
Don’t think I’ve ever used a bad Linux distro. Is there such a thing? who messed up Linux??
Who messes up Linux? Caldera did, like really really bad. It was made by the same place that tried to sue everyone for Copyright infringements a few years back. All I can remember about the company was they were based in Utah and Novell shut them down on the lawsuit back when Suse was owned by them.
My least favorite Distro was Gentoo, why they felt the need to create a whole new command structure when it’s not needed was beyond me.
Bad might not be the right word.
Maybe a “dissatisfactory” distro? I think you are right that it just comes down to what you need Linux to do for you. Certain distros will be better for gamers while others will be better for multitaskers. It all comes down to the needs but I do agree, openSUSE is not an ideal one in my book. I just didn’t like it!
Haha. Yes.
Gentoo is ok. I could have been a Gentoo user im sure. But Arch’s KISS messaging got to me first.
What are your thoughts on Slackware?
I’ve never used it actually, it’s on my “someday when I grow up I’ll try it” list. Along with Linux from Scratch. Then again so is Arch, but I need a better computer first 
Arch taught me so much via their incredible Wiki pages (most of which applies to any Linux distro). I no longer use Arch but spent a good 5 years with it as my daily. I will go back someday. I want to run Arch + xfce + i3wm setup.
I don’t know if I will ever try Linux from scratch. 
Oh, here’s an example of how amazing Arch’s wiki pages are: Arch compared to other Linux distributions. You may have already seen it.
Hands down, that would be PopOS, Ubuntu and Linux Mint. In this specific order.
Welcome to the community 
Cant remember the exact distro name but i came across a “pentest-distro” once with a built-in backdoor on the OS:rofl:
Thankfully ran it inside a VM,it might not got placed there by evil means,but it sure wasn’t good…found it and removed the whole OS…often you will want to have tools with you,not against you:) A pre-installed listener that sends your info to a remote Command center is not great😂
Other than that,the worse for me is Gentoo as it was just a pain to get setup and all different flags to configure and the overall time it consumed 
Okay, you are going to have to fight me. LOL
I need to know though. Can you go into detail why you feel these are both the worst you have used? I can understand PopOS as it is not for everyone but Mint and Ubuntu!?
@Cache Hey, no fighting, just exposing my experience:
Having a centralized package management is a pain in the back when breaking changes are introduced.
Ubuntu doesn’t have the software that I use or if they do, it’s probably an ancient version. For this, there are those PPAs that you can add, which are basically personal repositories made by contributors. They break the changes and lead to package management hell. So, in the Debian world, it’s best to stick to just Debian and throw everything else to the trash bin.Have you ever tried installing Steam on PopOS like Linus from LinusTechTips did? This problem was there way before it was discovered by Linus and there are probably more issues alike lurking in those repositories.
Naturally, this applies to Mint too, but I specifically mentioned all those 3 distros based on really poor user experience compared to something like Arch Linux or Manjaro and even Fedora.
I’ve lost count of how many times I broke my install just by using Linux Mint graphical tools instead of terminal commands and this also applies to Ubuntu sometimes.
Can’t say I’ve tried them all, but for distros, I prefer the real one, which is RedHat, where you can easily install proprietary software (as it should be possible on every Linux Distro out there) and it’s robust and stable. Too bad the interface is from 4-5 years ago. For the more up to date stuff, there’s Fedora.
Okay, I’ll say it. EL8 (CentOS 8/RHEL 8) is the worst I’ve ever used. In fact, EL8 is so bad, it is the very thing that caused me to switch to Ubuntu – true story. I had been an EL fan for years (was RHEL5 and RHEL6 certified), and I used Red Hat Linux and then RHEL since the mid/late 1990s. Don’t shoot me, but I still run a RHEL5 (32-bit) VM… I really need to retire that thing and move its services to a newer distro.
Back when linux was pretty new, Slackware was pretty solid. It wasn’t flashy, but neither was anything else.
Then came Red Hat, which was the only distro I can recall trying and not liking. Memory vaguely tells me it was because they tried ‘fixing’ some things that weren’t broken.
Ubuntu managed to piss me off over something (can’t remember now) at one point, and I left in favor of Debian. That’s one nice thing about linux: the distro is your choice. And, for the record, I’m pretty sure I’ve used Ubuntu since then.
Welcome to the community @Mat
I know once things settle on my end, I will be moving back to Debian. Most likely via Kali so that it will be a rolling release:
As per the article, I did that in 2017 and eventually Kali devs pretty much decided to default more in that direction as well.
So Kali is a great choice now more than ever for a rolling Debian.
Thanks for the welcome @hydn ; I’m enjoying this space.
Hmm, Kali (and many of its features) is new to me, but it seems security conscious, which I like. You’ve given me something interesting to look into. Thanks!
Glad to hear it! Not to hijack the topic, but I had to search Google for “optical scientist” to better understand what exactly you do. A pleasure to meet you!!
For some reason, Linux Mint felt really underwhelming and outdated to me when I tried it recently. I loved it when I was first getting started with Linux, but I mostly use Linux from the CLI exclusively.