The best one, of course
Mint, judge me
PS anyone have any favorite resources for absolute tech illiterate noobs? I’m trying, but without a baseline understanding of the subject, it’s hard to find the right guides
Put any distro in front of me and provided I don’t need to master it, I’m good. Ubuntu is fine. Debian is fine. RedHat is fine. Fedora is fine. I even have a tiny low-end system that is using Bohdi. Whatever. We’re all using mostly the same kernel anyway.
90% of what I do is in a container anyway so it almost doesn’t matter; half the time that means Alpine, but not really. That includes both consuming products from upstream as well as software development. I also practically live in the terminal, so I couldn’t care less what GUI subsystem is in play, even while I’m using it.
This is great. Just to let you know, whatever decision you make is wrong. Cheers!
Mint Cinnamon. Fight me.
Hannah Montana Linux
Just curious does anyone actually care about what distro people use or more just a meme?
Linux Mint. Cinnamon. With a Windows Vista theme. It confuses and/or irritates everyone who sees it.
I was going to go Mint/Cinnamon, but now I’m going to more.
kde has some impressive windows themes that are REALLY convincing
I’m using the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper on my Fedora PC at work. I’ve had a few people ask about it haha. Most of the company uses Macs.
What’s it called?
Windon’t
Linux does what Windont?
^ this ^
Not sure but it’s by B00merang-Project. Check their site.
LDME/Cinnamon
Nice! Not my thing but I’m glad that you can enjoy the Vista theme (I remember enjoying it when it came out)
Distro wars, like the old vi vs emacs wars (showing my age, I know) is not entirely serious. I never understood sportsball fandom, but it’s kind of like that. Debian is my home team; if you use Fedora, you’re from out-of-town.
This is dumb because it’s making it out to seem like there are Super Distro Wars and not just folks calling out bad decision makers like Ubuntu and Manjaro, and non-free-as-in-beer distros like Zorin and Elementary
I’m pretty sure outside of those two categories nobody really cares
I’ve been a Windows… Let’s say a power-user, no expert but I could install it, find a way to troubleshoot most problems. Then at high school a friend lent me a bit outdated Knoppix CD. I never managed to make ppp work on that so no internet, but I loved the old KDE. Somewhat later, when we had a normal DSL line with a proper router, I got Fedora. Then Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian for a while…
Finally I found Gentoo. And there I am, some 10 years later, still on that. After a bit of a bumpy road of the first install (no automation, but the handbook is very helpful if you know the basic Linux and HW terms) it was almost flawless. I remember two problems, and both of them were my own fault. The first one was some testing kernel version that had a bug where small files on ext3 filesystem would get randomly corrupted. The second was when I was trying to remove some hidden files, mangled the command and ran basically rm -rf /* (seriously, don’t do that, it will delete everything on your system). I reinstalled the system (I had data on a different drive that either wasn’t mounted atm or it didn’t reach them before I Ctrl-c’d that command.) and all was well.
Finally I did last clean install when I bought new (used) Ryzen build to replace my old i5-2500k, I would’ve had to recompile world anyway and I had pretty much dependency hell of my own making at that point (I was testing tons of unstable stuff, new Plasma 5 from testing repo and so on).
Now I’m running mostly stable system with only bunch of packages unmasked from testing and there are no problems with that. I never had that with any other distro. No matter if Deb based, rpm based, sooner or later I inevitably ran into some variant of “I need a package that’s not in basic repo, and the package I found requires a version of some library that’s not available as well” or something like that. In Gentoo, the packages either compile against the version you have installed, or if not possible, you can have more versions installed at the same time in different slots. Also if you need something that’s not available in repo, you can just write a text file that downloads and compiles the version you need and it integrates in the package manager automatically, no need to create whole Deb/rpm package.
Openbsd
The one that does what I need it to do on the device I’m running it on. I’ve currently got four different Linux distros on x86 PCs around my house at this moment.
Hannah Montana FTW
RebeccaBlackOS > Hannah Montana Linux
It’s Saturday not Friday
Does that mean you don’t have to get down to the bus stop?
Is it really a choice?
TEMPLEOS
So going off the chalice in the movie, the distro that will save you from judgment is the plainest one – the one with the least bloat? That tracks.
“the cup of a
carpentercoder”Is this going to be Arch or Debian?
Debian.
That’s just what I was going to say - that will either be Arch or Debian…
More like Alpine or something else without systemd. I mean no shade (well, a bit of shade) since I’ve got Fedora myself. Alpine doesn’t even have glibc IIRC.
In 2024, having systemd is less complicated than not having it.
Can you explain why everyone hates systemd
I started and still work in rhel
I think it is breaking the Unix philosophy, it is an enormous piece of code that does so many different things. My ideal is smaller components with smaller dependencies. When distros or software becomes inextricably dependent on systemd they are then beholden to whichever direction the maintainers take it.
My take on it is somewhat based on “what if.” Other people have some pragmatic discussions on security aspects if you search around.
I’m not a systemd guru, but I do find it relatively easy to work with.
I’ve noticed that a lot of it is actually made up of separate binaries and daemons. Is it wrong or misleading to think of systemd as a collection of utilities that share a common DSL as opposed to a strict monolith?
Musl can be a bit annoying compilation target sometimes. Usually it works but I’ve debugged bugs a few times that were due to musl target.
I prefer my distro with glibc…
So… Slackware?
Of course. No other distro existed when Jesus was alive.
BTW…
Also kudos to you for your modding last couple days.
Possibly a perfect use of this.
I use arch, err nixos/nix on macOS btw. Do I win or have I made the Linux nerds angy?
I recently installed Manjaro. It works for my games right now
I highly recommend avoiding manjaro like the plague, their team is incredibly incompetent (see: https://manjarno.pages.dev/ ), I say this as someone who has given people manjaro for years and regretted it, I was also their it person, manjaro regularly broke every few months and gave people a very bad taste of linux
for example, why are kernels given version numbers in packages? This caused 3 separate peoples computers to break multiple times. Everything good about manjaro comes from arch, everything bad about manjaro comes from the manjaro team.
Y’know how it’s not rolling release because they delay packages by 2 weeks? They actually do no testing in this time. How do I know this? They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips… this is something that should have easily been caught, and yet the two week window did absolutely nothing.
the truth is for manjaro there is no real usecase, there’s no set of desires that align with manjaro being the best choice for you. I am not asking you to switch away from manjaro, but I do not think we should ever recommend it to anyone, and on your next machine, I recommend trying the arch installer.
But if what you’re looking for is an easy pre-setup arch, use endeavoros
If you want something simple and up to date, use fedora kinoite
If you’re a power user and want to configure every little thing about their system, use arch or nixos
If you don’t care at all about updates and want the most rock solid system possible, debian.
I hear you. I was looking more for Arch with less of a hassle. Something similar to my Steamdeck. I guess I should just wipe this weekend for something else. I really want something for playing my steam and GOG games that works with my Nvidia 3080.
Luckily for me I keep every game installed on different Steam Libraries so wiping my install drive to put something else in isn’t difficult.
What about arch is it that you want?
I do a ton of distro research because I try to convert people to linux a lot so I might be able to help you with that.
https://bazzite.gg/ this is probably what you want, make sure to install the nvidia version.
If openSUSE Slowroll wasn’t experimental I’d recommend it in place of Manjaro. It’s a rolling release with monthly releases.
I really like Tumbleweed. Sure it updates a lot, but it doesn’t force updates so you can take it at your own pace.
SUSE’s Open Build Service absolutely rules, too. I use Fedora personally, but would switch to Tumbleweed any day. I’ve gone back and forth, eventually settling on Fedora only because of familiarity with Red Hat.
There are things I miss, big one being Zypper. It’s slow as balls but it’s usability and ability to dig through packages is unmatched, in my opinion.
Screw that You’re all great everybody from slackware to steam deck.
to steam deck.
to SteamOS
Slack where?
Slack there!
Slack where?
Slack there?
Slack here!
Slack there?
Steam Deck is weird. I mean, I love it, but coming from vanilla Arch it can be frustrating at times. Discover is terrible. Luckily, Distrobox is a thing.
Portage Prefix is a thing too
I wasn’t aware of it. It’s certainly an option, but Gentoo isn’t for me.
I putz with Discover sometimes. Though I have no idea how it resolves package updates under the hood, as it often will produce a different manifest than running dnf itself.
What would you like to see improved?
I usually can’t find what I’m looking for, so a larger catalogue would go a long way. I also had problems with some software versions. The one that comes to mind is that Firefox had behavior with the save dialogue that I don’t like. It’s a minor issue, but one that I don’t have with the build in the Arch repo. I have a vague memory of something just not working, but I couldn’t tell you what at this point.
Ah, I see! Yeah, a bigger catalog would be nice. You can add more repositories to it, enable Flathub, which provide more options, but something about it does feel hamstrung.
The Firefox thing is something I know about! You can set a config option in the
about:configpage to tell Firefox to use your desktop’s standard dialogue. It has to do with XDG Desktop specifications, I thinkIt uses the system dialogue, but it starts from the same directory each time. If I’m saving files it’s usually multiple files in succession, so I want the dialogue to start off pointed at the last directory I saved to. The Arch build does that.
Ooohh! Interesting. You’ve got me curious about that now. I’ll have to look into it.
