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My GNU/Linux distributions of choice in 2026

Continuous operating system tests and distro-hoping is what I enjoy a lot. This not only helps me discover how each performs on the hardware I own, but also gives me the freedom to stay as far away as possible from several practices in the computing landscape that I don't approve. However, in recent years and following many announcements and considerable path changes from software foundations and developers of operating systems, revisiting the choice of software I use has become a routine. Back in 2018, when I replaced Microsoft Windows and other proprietary software with free and open source alternatives choosing was much easier as the research was rather straight forward: check if a software respects all four freedoms by looking at the source code and its license. Nowadays, if you want to avoid bad practices including the use of LLMs in projects, you need to go through the history of each repo and try to find signs of such practices. There is also no black and white this time but a rather wide spectrum of software to select from which (intentionally or just by going with the flow) contribute to techno-fascism and enshittification1.

This post is the summary of my most recent review of GNU/Linux distributions spanning through 2025 and 2026. It is worth mentioning that after Linux Foundation gave in to the push from Google to allow Rust in the kernel, removed Russian maintainers from kernel development to "meet compliance requirements" and allowed LLM to be used for kernel contributions, I would have preferred an operating system which does not use Linux kernel but each time I tried to use one of the alternative OSs like BSDs, I did hit one or more dead-ends, mostly dealing with hardware support. Also in the Linux world, not every single distro was tested and while being rather subjective and far from comprehensive, this post tries to detail the logic behind my requirements and list the distros which match those the best.

Requirements

Minimalism (or freedom to pick only the components I need)

Throughout the years, I have tested and settled for a minimal, resource efficient, yet functional set of services and applications for my daily operating system use. These include Sway, Pipewire, NetworkManager, Noctalia shell and their dependencies, all of which together use around 600MB memory after boot and in idle, allowing the computer to have enough resources handy for other daily-used applications. The distro should allow me to install these on a clean slate or allow removal of other, more resource-hungry defaults such as Gnome and KDE Plasma. Even XFCE has shown to be less efficient compared to the selection mentioned above.

No systemd

I never liked systemd as it is a monolith managing everything on modern distros. I like my init to be just an init. However, since major distros had decided to go for systemd, this was a compromise I let myself make. When the project decided to embrace questionable government and social pushes by pre-emptively implementing age verification and adopt a permissive LLM policy, respectiveley, it crossed the line between a simple compromise to a major ethical and security culprit I cannot approve to be running my whole compute stack. So the beginning of 2026 was the end of systemd for me, wherever I have the freedom to use alternatives of course. Thus, there are very good distros which meet my other criteria like PostmarketOS, Arch Linux and Elementary OS, but they are not included in the list of chosen distros because of systemd.

Minimal LLM-slop2

This is a big one for me, although, thanks to the tremendous hype around LLMs, there is only so much one can do to avoid LLM-generated, LLM-assisted and LLM-reviewed code that find its way to projects. If we put the moral, environmental and ethical concerns aside (which we shouldn't) you can like the slop machines as much as you want but even then we are talking about the most fundamental software layer which is meant to contain and sandbox those LLM agents itself. How can one secure a system which is already potentially compromised?

This is the reason I find myself consulting the Open Slopware project several times a week to find the best, LLM-free software including items listed in the operating systems section of the project.

Conventional GNU toolchain

There are several good distros that use musl, LLVM, etc. instead of GlibC, GCC and other more conventional toolchain. This is mostly a matter of preference and I prefer the GNU stack over other implementations. I also prefer GPL license over other, permissive licenses. So distros like Chimera Linux are not listed here because of this reason3.

Package management

While source-based distros like Gentoo and Funtoo, as well as Guix meet other criteria mentioned above, the time spent in package managers is significantly longer for these distros (for the case of Guix when substitudes aren't available for a given package) and as someone who keeps reinstalling these distros and updates system software, I prefer a binary-based package distribution mechanism.

Hardware support

Operating systems based on FreeBSD (except for FreeBSD itself which is tainted) are also very good at the items above, however, they lack full hardware support on my newer systems (most importantly on Intel® Core™ Ultra 5 235T for which the GPU support is missing). The same goes for Linux-Libre kernel used by default on GNU Guix. In the Guix case trying to use nonguix channel to pull only the required firmware does not work as the kernel actively blocks non-free firmware and I found that changing the whole kernel on a distro is usually not a good idea.

Selected distros

Best LLM-free and systemd-free distros of 2026

Artix Linux

I like rolling release distros like Arch better than others. Besides, there is virtually no GNU/Linux applications that cannot be found in AUR. Artix takes Arch Linux and removes systemd from it. It also introduces several packages for system services working with all alternative init systems. As an example you can install pipewire, pipewire-openrc or pipewire-dinit which allows you to use them with the init system you picked during installation. I run Artix on some of my machines and am very happy with its stability, speed and ease of use. The only issue with this distro is that it uses connman as the default network manager. Switching to NetworkManager is easy but introduces a delay after the computer wakes up from suspend state, causing network mounts to time out and get unmounted for me.

GNU Guix

I was positively surprised when I gave Guix an earnest try. I had tried it several times before, but since I didn't have time to read the documentation well enough, I dropped it without serious consideration. This time however, I read most of the documentation and went into full test mode. However, some issues made me go for other options at the end.

Hardware support

Guix uses Linux-Libre kernel which as mentioned before can be replaced by Linux using the nonguix channel giving you more hardware support. However, I always prefer to use the kernel the distro developers optimized and used to optimize their distro around.

Speed

I find Guix package manager extremely slow. Updating from upstream guix pull always takes long, no matter when you ran it last. Also while the software I use every day can be found in packages, e.g. Librewolf and Tor Browser, they aren't offered as binary package (substitude in Guix language). I found command guix weather <package> very helpful to see which ones are going to be built from source, but having to compile browsers can take very long on slower machines. I am also aware of the fact that you can build Guix packages once and share it with other computers but this is also an extra step to perform on each installation/update.

Devuan

Finally Devuan is my current default choice for new installations. It is based on Debian and checks all the criteria above (unlike Debian which uses systemd and recently decided to use LLMs). No distro is perfect and Devuan is no exception here. There were several issues with Devuan which are around for quite a while. First one is that the installer tends to corrupt the bootloader on other disks during the installation. So I tend to disconnect other disks if they have other operating systems installed. Secondly, the Devuan installer has an issue when selecting a guided partitioning scheme with full-disk encryption (luks) on the root partition. It weirdly throws an error regarding some missing installation files on the USB stick. The workaround is to always pick LVM with encryption during the installation.

Footnotes

  1. Of course there is a difference between how much a distro like Omarchy contributes to the status quo to that of Debian.↩︎

  2. The more streamlined Artificial Intelligence (AI) term used nowadays was originally coined by computer scientist John McCarthy and meant teaching computers to process formal logic. Formal logic is almost completely opposite to what LLMs do. That's why I think using the term Large Language Model (LLM) is more appropriate.↩︎

  3. I was surprised to see how open to LLM contributions GNU has become when they don't even mention concerns regarding LLM usage in their GCC "AI" policy and active LLM utilization in projects like LilyPond.↩︎