I don't know a single person that uses MX Linux and yet it's always at the top of the distrowatch list
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Distrowatch list is just how many people click the page on Distrowatch. It's not a general metric how many people use it.
I've always thought of it as being a measure of the "WTF is that one again?" factor of a distro. Maybe it represents how unmemorable the name is.
We know, who is clicking at MX Linux? And the other distros that are currently at the top?
My top distros:
- Debian
- Fedora
- Gentoo
It runs on an Intel compute stick about a decade old, and quite well. I use it on a couple of them I have.
Thats about it though.
I use MX Linux because it provides a simple way to use both the NVIDIA 340 drivers and the latest kernels with my 14 year old laptop.
I used MX for a bit. Its actually pretty solid and I liked their Fluxbox setup. Very similar to Mint as it provides quite a solid suite of tried and tested tools and is fairly easy to get started with if you have basic computer experience. It also has non-systemd options for those who are into that. Quite a few reasons for folks to check it out so I am not shocked its towards the top of the list.
Personally my favorite distros that I tried this year are the following:
General:
Gaming:
I am willing to elaborate on my choices.
I've been using CachyOS for a couple of years now, so I suppose that makes it my favourite distro of 2025
I have been liking CachyOS as well. I reluctantly switched from Fedora after I kept getting weird problems (definitely a "my PC" thing, I wish I could upgrade).
Features I like about Cachy:
- Auto-setup of snapper btrfs snapshoting (my fav feature of openSUSE) on all bootloaders (I like the simplicity of limine)
- Gaming ready fork of kernel-hardened, with some changes, including allowing use of unprivileged namespaces (needed by Bubblewrap/Flatpak/Firefox/Chromium to avoid the need of a SUID binary)
- AUR (cus it is Arch)
- Update service which updates from all installed sources (pacman, Flatpak, AUR)
What I wish was different:
- Inclusion of a full system Mandatory Access Control policy (SELinux preferably)
- Compatibility with hardened_malloc (idk why but on Cachy, GTK apps crash because glycin bubblwrap commands fail)
How can you say a distribution is the best? There are lot of use cases where many distributions are optimized for. They are just not an allrounder general one like "Ubuntu" in example. There should be some categories, at least some popular categories like "Gaming" that is separate from "General Purpose" or "Server".
I'm surprised Bazzite was not mentioned. I'm glad EndeavourOS was mentioned.
This year I have been mostly using:
- Debian 13
- Bazzite
- Vanilla OS
I currently use Mint (with Cinnamon; formerly MATE, considering to go back), but I used LMDE a lot before. This was LMDE 1 times, though, the distro fancied itself as a rolling distro. Might be interesting to see if Debusine makes it more popular, even without it LMDE was already damn great.