Linux

Fedora Atomic/Kinoite, just so relieved when one day I fucked the bootloader, and it didn't boot anymore, and I only needed to rollback in grub to a perfectly working system

Spiral Linux. It's like Endeavor, but it sets up Debian with sane defaults for people who want a GUI installer experience.

I liked that it basically felt like any other distro, but it was surprisingly fast to boot and shutdown.

Second impression of Garuda (Arch based). My first impression was the dragonized version, which is KDE with lots of mods to make it Mac like, but with extra window animations.

I like things simple, so when I tried Garuda again, I installed the Gnome version. Other than some weirdness getting my Nvidia card working with Wayland, it has run better than anything else on my laptop.

before 2010 when a suse disk was put into a laptop and installed and the network card and everything worked just fine no tweaking.

I tried Pop!_OS alpha1 with Cosmic Desktop and I even if the general software quality is still what you might expect from the first alpha release, I was impressed on the high-level design decisions they made with Cosmic. As a sway user who would like a bit more structure and hand-holding in my desktop, I think I'm gonna like Cosmic in a year's time.

The old Pardus, YALI was, and still is, the most awesome installer i've ever meet. Also Kaptan was amazing

Tuxedo OS, as preinstalled on my Tuxedo machine. It is just a heavily tweaked Ubuntu flavor with Plasma as a default desktop and sane defaults (firefox not as a snap, but as a .deb file). Everything worked so well out of the box that I did not see the point in installing Arch. I also love the fact that Plasma is kept very much up to date. In comparison, Kubuntu 24.04 still has Plasma 5., whereas I currently run 6.1.4.

Pop OS has worked out well for me even better than Ubuntu & Fedora.

Arch Wiki

Nixos

Kurumin Linux, which was a Brazilian distro based on Knoppix. This was back in 2006 or so, and that was my first hands-on experience with Linux.

I don't fully remember whether everything worked out of the box, I think it connected to the internet no problem (cable), but what amazed me was:

1 - It ran off the CD drive without needing to install anything 2 - It had loads of preinstalled utility software 3 - Less than 700MB

Fossapup 9.5 how fast yet compitent it is at what it can use. Loading into ram with just 300mb or so HDD space being used, it's blazing fast the newer the machine it runs on. It's downside is it's smaller community driven development being in need of consistant conversion of regular apps to it's own puppy .sfs format which is needed to install them, if they had people churning new .sfs apps out all day every day of the year then eventually it would over-shadow many mainstream OS's it's just nitro level speeds and very stable to boot. It needs more love from the dev community to go that extra mile.

Chimera Linux. You'd think that a distro using its own bsd-like userspace and dinit instead of systemd is janky and unusable, but it's been one of the most painless experiences I've had.

Genuinely recommend trying it if you don't have an Nvidia GPU.

Sabayon. It worked perfectly till I tried to update some stuff 💣

This was one the most stable and at the same time the most unstable distribution I ever tried.