Linux is an operating system with hundreds of distros & flavours. Linux has been evolving from its birth & with its evolution comes more & more distros in the market. There are hundreds if not thousands of distros listed on DistroWatch.
Best Linux Releases Of 2020
Firstly, this list is not presented in any order. Why? Because all of these releases are awesome, albeit in different ways. The ranking is a) hard and b) ultimately redundant, as what scores points with me might not be what scores points with you.
Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS
Pop!_OS 20.04. This uplift to the Ubuntu-based distro debuted a major usability change: Pop Shell.
What’s that? System76 devs describe it as “…a collection of technologies which enable a keyboard-centric workflow experience using auto-tiling, workspaces, and keyboard navigation with a wide array of new shortcuts”.
It’s a very solid modern implementation of a workflow often seen as utilitarian and functional. You don’t need to be a keyboard power-user to appreciate Pop Shell either. You can use the features that work well for you, and ignore the ones that don’t!
Other features in the LTS include Flatpak integration in the Pop Shop app store, better hybrid graphics support, offline firmware upgrades, and more.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
This year played host to one of the best Ubuntu releases in many years: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ‘Focal Fossa’ — and readers seem to agree!
Marrying stable foundations with top-drawer hardware support, Ubuntu devs dished up a superior LTS that outperforms the previous ones, all while offering newer, securer, and more up-to-date technologies for users to toy with
And with 5 years of critical updates and Linux kernel uplifts to come, Focal enthusiasts can rest easy knowing they’re enjoying the very best that open source has to offer.
Manjaro 20
Manjaro is technically a rolling release distro but it offers freshly spun ISO images throughout the year. In 2020 there were four such spins: Manjaro 19, 20, 20.1 and 20.2. It was the second of these, Manjaro 20 released in April 2020, that got the most attention on Twitter. Manjaro is based on Arch Linux, make sure that you read our comparison between Arch VS Debian before installing Manjaro.
Manjaro 20 ‘Lysia’ was made available in Xfce (flagship), KDE, and GNOME flavours. It shipped Linux Kernel 5.6, added Flatpak and Snap support to the. well-regarded pacman package manager, made zsh the default shell, and debuted with a ZFS installation option.
Subsequent refreshes of the Manjaro’s ISO offer various advances over these. The most recent version available to download (and now the recommended starting point if you’re new to it) is Manjaro 20.2, released in December.
Linux Mint 20
Linux Mint is a hugely popular Ubuntu alternative (not to mention a Windows one) and a large reason for that is its laser-focused attention to detail.
See, some Linux distros based their user experience are what they think works best for users. Linux Mint is different. It prefers to ship an out-of-the-box experience whose design and direction is based explicitly on user feedback. The result is a highly usable yet highly customisable desktop operating system that “just works”.
Linux Mint 20, released in June 2020, sticks to this winning formula. Instead of adding superfluous bells and whistles, it focuses on delivering the features that its users say they need, For Linux Mint 20 that included fractional scaling support (including different scale values per monitor), an easy to use file transfer tool, theme accent colours, and a faster, leaner file Nemo manager.
