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Review: The best open source operating systems of 2025
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
As the calendar draws to the end of 2025 I would like to take a few minutes and look back at some of the highlights of this year. Every year I end up trying around 50 to 75 Linux distributions (and other open source operating systems) and writing about around 40 of them. Many of them are good, some perform poorly, and a rare few provide an amazing experience. Here are my picks for the best operating systems experiences I got to enjoy in 2025.
Before diving in, I want to point out that this list includes only projects I used and reviewed myself. Each year a few people e-mail me to ask why one distribution or another didn't make the "best of" list and it's usually because the project in question either did not have a new release during the year or wasn't reviewed in the past twelve months. To see what I have reviewed in the past year, please visit our archive of past articles.