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What are the best Text only Linux operating system?

9

Options
Considered

138

User
Recs.

Jul 30, 2022

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 9 OptionsWhy?

Best Text only Linux operating system	Price	Based On	Default Desktop Environment
91 Arch (without a display server)	-	Independent	N/A
-- Gentoo	-	-	-
-- Slackware	-	Softlanding Linux System	KDE SC
-- Damn Small Linux	-	-	-
-- CentOS	-	Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL Source)	GNOME

Arch (without a display server)

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Top Pro

Excellent documentation

Arch's goal of simplicity means there's usually one preferred way to get things done - through organized and well documented configuration files. This focus, combined with the community's recognition that configuration files can be intimidating, has resulted in excellent documentation that's accessible to newcomers, and very instructive about how Linux actually works. The documentation is often so thorough that, when searching for solutions to problems while using other distributions, such as with video card drivers, oftentimes you'll find the most effective solution in the Arch Linux wiki or on the forums. See More

Top Con

Not so great overall

Apart from the ArchBuildSystem/AUR, which brings you very quickly newer package versions, there is not really much where Arch Linux shines. You get better package managers with other systems. The most Linux distributions are far more stable than Arch. You learn more about Linux by using LFS or a source based distribution. You can customize the system much more in LFS or Gentoo. See More

Specs

Based On:Independent

Default Desktop Environment:N/A

Init-System:Systemd

Release Schedule:Rolling

Top Pro

Fast and simple package management

pacman has performance advantages over apt-get and yum in both database operations (thanks to being written for speed) and download times (by virtue of using better mirrors than other distributions tend to select by default). There are also fewer default repositories to download from, and all package management is combined into one tool instead of being split into dpkg, apt-get, and apt-cache like on Debian distros. See More

Top Con

Lost its way

It aimed to be KISS but it has lost iits way and is getting more and more complex, for example it uses systemd which is anything but KISS. It also has now some kind of package post configuration included. See More

Top Pro

Cutting edge rolling release

Arch Linux follows a rolling release model which allows users to stay on the most up-to-date versions of the software they are using. See More

Top Con

pacman is a slow package manager

Compared to other distribution packages the extracting of a pacman package archives is taking ages. See More

Top Pro

No restrictive handholding, pure control over everything

Arch is mainly aimed at experienced Linux users, there is no hand-holding and not much in a way of UI elements when trying to install or tweak settings. See More

Top Con

Occasional upstream package bugs

Most package maintainers look for issues that the packages might have ispecifically for arch. Which means if a package has a bug that applies to all linux distros regardless of the flavor, the maintainer may not be able to: A) catch it before pushing a update or B) have to wait for the packages developers to fix it. This is a minor issue because most issues are often patched before the end of the day if many users rely on it, or if its a less used package there will be specific troubleshooting instructions on the arch site. See More

Top Pro

Excellent package selection with the AUR

The AUR is a repository with a very extensive catalogue of build/install scripts that are contributed by users. While these scripts are inherently less secure than conventional packages maintained by a distro's authors, it's still way easier to verify the security of install scripts than it would be to write them yourself. See More

Top Con

No Graphical Installer

Top Pro

Helpful community

If searching through the wiki or the forums for any problems turns nothing, any question on the official forums, Arch subreddit or the IRC channel will be answered within minutes. There will probably be no hand-holding however, Arch users prefer to point anyone to a resource that may help them instead of trying to outright solve their problem in a forum thread. This is quite helpful for people who want to really learn how their system works but also for other people who may stumble in that thread considering how most problems don’t have a universal solution. See More

Top Con

Works only on AMD64

It is the only official supported instruction set of CPUs. See More

Top Pro

A package for almost everything

If you need to install something, chances are someone in the Arch community has already made a package for it. This makes it incredibly easy for you to install and maintain all of the non-media content on your computer. See More

Top Con

Requires some background with Linux and the command-line to setup

Going in with zero Linux knowledge is not really recommended when wanting to install Arch, though it can be a good learning experience for those that are dedicated to trial and error as well as reading many faqs. See More

Top Pro

As slim or copious as you want it

Arch keeps its core repositories slim and free of unnecessary dependencies. At first installation only a bare system is set up. You can easily get the other applications through the package manager. The repositories are nearly as full as those of Ubuntu, while they are often more up to date. That way you don't have to waste time with software you don't need or want. See More

Top Con

Package manager is so naive

For example, it doesn't allow you to purge (remove package and its configuration files). See More

Top Pro

Simplicity is absolutely the principal objective behind Arch development

The design approach of the development team focuses on elegance, code correctness, minimalism, and simplicity, and expects the user to be willing to make some effort to understand the system's operation. See More

Top Con

Too many package upgrades that require manual intervention

Every year or so there is a update to ArchLinux that will break your system unless you first read the front page of archlinux.org. This happened with SystemD and with a few other updates that require you to do prior steps befor pacman -Syu. See More

Top Pro

Support for a large variety of hardware

From latest wacom pads to obscure wireless cards in laptops Arch's hw support has been and continues to be good. It has worked on laptops where other leading distro's like debian/ mint/ ubuntu failed to detect and work with all hardware. See More

Top Con

Multiple Aur helpers

Arch has strict reasoning behind what goes into the official repositories accessible by pacman. As a result, many other projects end up in the Arch User Repository (AUR). Effectively using Arch, and getting easy access to all of the available software, means either manually downloading and installing from the AUR, or installing an AUR helper - these work along side the main package manager (Pacman), but are a bit less standardized or heavily supported. See More

Top Pro

Excellent package management with the AUR

The AUR is a repository with a very extensive catalogue of build/install scripts that are contributed by users. While these scripts are inherently less secure than conventional packages maintained by a distro's authors, it's still way easier to verify the security of install scripts than it would be to write them yourself. It's very usefull. See More

Top Con

Fragile packages

Updating an Arch system is always a gamble. The problem could be as simple as a package having a bug causing a program to crash on start or it may be something bigger like the WiFi or Bluetooth no longer working. There is also the slight chance the system may not even boot at all after a large update. If the user does not plan to read the forums weekly/daily or update fairly often, things can go wrong very fast. See More

Top Pro

It is Linux at the core

This distro is barebones enough to make a new distro from. See More

Top Con

Rolling release requires bandwidth

Arch uses a rolling release model for updates. Unlike, for example Ubuntu where a new version is released every six months, packages are updated when they are ready. The advantage is a very up to date system and that the work of upgrading can be spread over a longer span of time to a point where it is hardly noticeably effort. However it can be difficult for people without a high bandwidth connection, or with limits on how many GB can be downloaded imposed by their internet service providers. A GB a month of downloads is quite possible. This can be somewhat offset by Arch being lightweight, besides the relatively small core, the user selects what is installed (and has to be updated). See More

Top Pro

Stripped down to the bone

Since its stripped down, it is fast and you don't have to deal with bloatware. See More

Top Con

Documentation only makes sense if you know how to adjust it

While the documentation is a very valuable reference for experts, the recipes often don't actually work on your own computer. Some articles are outdated, incomplete, contradictory or duplicated. Only if you are expert enough to know which steps to skip, to adjust or which other documentation parts to plug in, you can make it work. See More

Top Pro

Helpful 3rd-party installers

There are extremely helpful 3rd-party installers such as Anarchy Linux (Formerly Arch Anywhere). See More

Top Con

Not for the faint of heart

Arch only holds your hand a little bit of the way. While documentation is great, you are expected to know what you're doing. The result is that when you find the solution for a problem on a forum or elsewhere, the response may be completely over your head. If you're not well-versed in Linux, what would be a minor issue on another distribution can become a drawn-out research project on Arch, as you learn all the inner workings of the operating system, until you understand it well enough to solve your problems yourself. See More

Top Con

Manual install process

The installation process for Arch Linux is not as streamlined as it is in other distributions. You have to install the OS, Desktop Environment, Network software and configure everything by yourself. See More

Top Con

Problems with driver/kernel/gpu consistency

Arch has no proper desktop support, you must craft your system together. Things may work for the first but generally it takes days to configure a stable and working system. This is NOT ideal for a desktop user. See More

Top Con

Instability can be an issue

8 Other Options Considered

Gentoo

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Top Pro

Portage's emerge is powerful

Top Con

Not beginner-friendly

You have to read a lot of instructions to start, even if you are familiar with Linux. Furthermore, as you have to configure the kernel and init system, expect some boot failures at beginning. See More

Top Pro

Documentation and community are second to none

Top Con

Customized package installation can take a long time and cause installation failures

The Gentoo package management system allows you to configure what compilation flags packages should support - i.e. specific processor flag support (SSE, SSE2, etc.), -O1, -O2, -O3 optimization, etc. If you accept one of the default flags, Gentoo downloads binaries from the server. However, if you decide to optimise, it can and will download all source packages and start compiling ALL the programs and libraries on your system. If your chosen flags don't work with a particular library, installation will fail. See More

Top Pro

Can be officially systemd-free

Gentoo's default init system is OpenRC. Gentoo also officially supports systemd-free Gnome and udev. See More

Top Con

Very steep learning curve

You should already have some clue how a Linux distribution's internals work. The wiki is a great help in learning, but it requires some experience to not struggle at basic problems. The less you touch in gentoo, the easier it is though. See More

Top Pro

Full control of the software

Top Pro

Fully customizable

The usage of advanced features like USE flags makes it more customizable than any binary distribution. See More

Top Pro

A very large collection of software is available

Top Pro

Portability

Top Pro

USE flag system for extreme flexibility

A feature called USE flags control how packages are compiled from source, and what options are configured to get compiled. That means you can have per-packages USE flags to enable or disable certain features in them, or system-wide USE flags to enable or drop support for something you don't want entirely. See More

Top Pro

Great for anyone who is serious about learning the intricacies of Linux

It's useful for both beginners and professionals. For the installation, Gentoo offers various types, which are referred to as stages. Basically meaning how in depth you would want to go into the process of installation. For beginners it's useful to choose for a starting distro due to its various stages that can be very time consuming but beneficial as you learn the composition in general of Linux. See More

Top Pro

Gentoo does not impose a standard look-and-feel

Top Pro

More fine-grained control over packages

Thanks to the Portage package manager, you can forbid the installation of certain packages by "masking" them, adding packages to different "world sets" for maintaining them separately, using stable and unstable branch of packages individually or system-wide and installing different versions of the same package in "slots". And unlike Arch, because of compiling, linker errors after package manager actions are less likely to happen, and when they do, you can build dependencies reversely. See More

Top Pro

Vast possibilities and options for system programs

While having less official packages for desktop applications compared to something like Arch Linux, it has many options for system programs and utilities. For example the choice of glibc, uclibc and musl. Also the choice of kernel, vanilla kernel, gentoo patched kernel and even GNU/Hurd. You also have the choice to have a Gentoo FreeBSD. See More

Top Pro

Can by optimized to any given CPU by using proper compile flags

Since everything is being built on your PC you can fine-tune the code to make use of your CPU. And all it requires is two lines of string variables in a global config. See More

Top Pro

Live USB

Installation via a Live USB allows you to go back and fix mistakes from it without having to restart the whole installation process. See More

Top Pro

Freedom

You are free to do whatever you want with it. As a result, its configuration reflects your unique taste and personality. See More

Top Pro

Creating and updating packages is easy

With the e-build overlays, you can easily add, change and update packages. Many e-classes are available for helping you package specific languages, build systems without redundant invocations. See More

Top Pro

Good for people who want to compile everything

Based on everything being compiled from source which means it comes with a very flexible system for compiling packages - USE flags, CFLAGS, and company, both global and per package. With USE flags you can select what is included in each package and with CFLAGS you can set various compiler optimization options (it's recommended to stick with the more common ones for most packages except those known to benefit from more extreme optimization as overdoing it can actually produce slower binaries, make compiles take forever and introduce weird bugs). Binary packages are available for some packages, especially those that are hard to compile correctly or those that take very long. See More

Slackware

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Top Pro

Stable

Uses stable, plain-vanilla packages from upstream. See More

Top Con

You're obligated to use current (testing) version

Version 14.2 is too old for desktop use. See More

Elias Van Ootegem's Experience

Slackware is a trusty warhorse. It's arguably the daddy of all distro's, and its KISS (from a system point of view) approach means that when there's a new version, you're pretty much guaranteed nothing will break. Its main aim is to be as stable as humanly possible. There's very little in the way of surprises, and it puts you at the helm of the system. Ideal if you know some of the inner workings of Linux, but want to get stuck in and learn how a system actually works. See More

Specs

Based On:Softlanding Linux System

Default Desktop Environment:KDE SC

Init-System:SysVinit

Release Schedule:Point or Rolling(Slackware - current)

Top Pro

Doesn't use systemd

Top Con

Not the best for running business with IT departments that don't have Linux experience

Suse Linux Enterprise, is the largest enterprise Linux in Europe. The main thing to remember is: the more automated a system is, the more hidden bugs can pop up unexpectedly. Which is why it is good to at the very least, read the excellent manuals which Suse provides, in PDF as well as physical hard-copy format. See More

DreamerBorvo's Experience

I have been exclusively using Slackware since 1997. Coming from Windows, endless crashes, freezes, reboots, viruses, trojans, and way too many performance issues and heavy system requirements to list here... finally witching to Slackware Linux was a breath of fresh air. It's so simple to configure; simply by editing a text file, and then restarting whichever service that configuration file belongs to. No more endlessly rebooting or waiting for unwanted forced updates of Windows nonsense. For example: A clean installation, from format to installation & configuration, to actually using the operating system; takes all of 10 minutes. And did I mention that the system is responsive and rock-solid? Besides, Slackware Linux is still the most pure Linux experience out there. If you want to Learn Linux, choose Slackware. See More

Top Pro

OLD

Originally developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991. See More

Top Con

Old

Like you have to help it cross the hallway to the bathroom kind of old. See More

Top Pro

Ideal to learn more of Linux

Top Pro

KISS system

The system is pretty bare-bones. everything is where you'd expect it to be, and configuration is done mainly through you directly editing the config files. Very old school, very good to learn how Linux works See More

Top Pro

No surprises

Something like "Help, I upgraded my system and now X doesn't work" is something you'll rarely (if ever) hear. See More

Top Pro

Package Management

Uses standard tar archives with shell scripting as packages. See More

CentOS

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Top Pro

Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries

Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries. See More

Specs

Based On:Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL Source)

Default Desktop Environment:GNOME

Init-System:Systemd

Release Schedule:Point (Concurrent with RHEL)

Top Pro

Greatly favours stability over anything else

CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else. Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other. This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug. See More

Linux From Scratch

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Top Pro

Best for learning the components, libraries and configurations of the whole system one-by-one

It is an opportunity for the learner to learn what's behind every piece of program in the system, because you will install and configure all the packages manually. It is also as an advantage to expand your knowledge by searching the possibilities of crafting your unique flavor, for example your own package manager and update schemes. See More

Top Con

Not recommended for Beginners

Some instructions in the LFS books are missing, so you should have a background with bash shell. See More

JollyHybris's Experience

Aside from gaining learning experience, you can customize the entire system by installing the system manually to take advantage of configurations or what program you must only include. See More

Specs

Default Desktop Environment:N/A

Init-System:SysV-init

Release Schedule:N/A

Top Pro

For those who wonder what it takes to create an actual Linux distribution

It's a very useful learning experience; showing the user what is required and in what order, to obtain a running Linux system - from the inside out. See More

Top Con

Takes a while to create the system. Only for those people who would like to create their very own distribution, or just to understand what makes a Linux system tick.

Linux From Scratch, requires the user to download and compile, all the various required system libraries and programs in a ch-rooted environment. This is usually done from within an existing and already running Linux system. This is not really a con, just a note to the new user. See More

Funtoo

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Top Pro

No systemd

Still allowing one to run, for example, full desktop environment such as Gnome 3.20. See More

Specs

Based On:Gentoo

Default Desktop Environment:N/A

Init-System:OpenRC

Release Schedule:Rolling

Top Pro

`boot-update` to take care of bootloader configuration

A tool to update your grub config. See More

Top Pro

Funtoo Linux offers a variety of stage3 builds

Customized to a variety of CPU microarchitecture variants from AMD, ARM, and Intel. See More

Top Pro

Stage3 sources are built using the Funtoo Linux tool 'metro'

It's a sophisticated replacement for Gentoo's build tool 'catalyst'. See More

Top Pro

Portage tree split into kits

This allows more fine-grained control over package updates, and packages can be now tied together inside the kit to minimize dependency breakage while upgrading. See More

Top Pro

Use flags that are suitable for a task or environment are grouped into Profiles

It allows selecting, for example, gnome or desktop profile with most of the sane use flags enabled inside the profile. See More

Top Pro

Stage3 archive coming with pre-compiled kernel based on Debian's kernel

Top Pro

Simpler template-based network configuration

openSUSE

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Top Pro

Easy installation and administration

openSUSE makes use of a GUI tool called YaST to install and setup an openSUSE system. YaST is very easy to use and makes the process of installing and maintaining an openSUSE installation a breeze. See More

Top Con

Short lived distro

Every release lasts 18 months only before needing a major upgrade. See More

CuriousAmm's Experience

OpenSUSE is a great console linux for experienced and new to linux users. It includes YAST, which gives you a menu driven interface to configure things. The ncurces version of YAST is identical to the gui version. Yast also has deep package support and zypper, which is an excellent package management. In my experience, openSUSE has the best hardware support of any linux. It's also simple to configure the network and wireless using YAST. I find that documentation also tends to be better for OpenSUSE, especially if you are looking for console directions. Other linuxes have prolific how-to's, but they are often poorly written or not using a correct security base, for example, fixing things with chmod 777. OpenSUSE seems to have a more professional community. See More

Specs

Based On:Jurix>SUSE

Default Desktop Environment:Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, LXQT

Init-System:Systemd

Release Schedule:Point (1 year minor releases, 3 years major releases)

Top Pro

Extremely reliable

The packaging team is dependable resulting in system updates that come in a timely fashion and systems which rarely, if ever, break due to packaging. The versions of software that are selected and the configuration of them is typically extremely high quality. See More

Top Pro

Convenient package management with Zypper

Fast, reliable, powerful and almost impossible to leave a broken system. The Yast interface will also give you access to a Zypper GUI if you are uncomfortable with the command line. See More

Top Pro

Dedicated professional community

Directions on other desktop Linux's often force you to use GUI packages or have steps that introduce security issues. OpenSUSE has a professional community and directions are usually geared toward GUI and CLI with similar steps. See More

Top Pro

Supports RPM packages

Popular format shared with distros like Fedora, RHEL, Scientific Linux, Mageia etc. See More

Top Pro

Very stable

Stable, reliable, rock solid. See More

Top Pro

"Tumbleweed" Rolling Release

Regular and easy upgrades to stable and well tested software. See More

Top Pro

Outstanding community support

OpenSUSE has a VERY active user community. Questions on forums are generally answered in minutes. See More

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