yo you can just turn a choice into a meme and the crowd will go crazy
I’ve used several distros over the years, and out of all of them, the only distro where I’ve faced zero intractible problems has been CachyOS.
Also Linux is just more mature
“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”
reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware
“… which I literally cannot live without”.
I have many other things I’d rather do on my computer, than mess around with the OS. I just want one that works and stays out of my way. Oh, and doesn’t spy on me.
Best of both worlds:
- install boring stable distro
- use Homebrew to install bleeding edge stuff, separately from the base system.
Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.
Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.
I think you meant to say nix lol.
Is Homebrew any good on Linux tho?
Well, if you’re okay using 3+ years old versions of various software…
Step 1: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Step 2: but then again maybe I should try out this little extra thing I just found online that might not work…
It turns out you love installing and configuring software, not actually using it.
I’m in this post and I don’t like it
I never make it to step 1
Step 1: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Step 2: but then again maybe I should try out this little extra thing I just found online that might not work…Step 2: Why is x broken after an update!?
…
Step 99: ah so glad this setup is complete and fully tweaked. So let’s leave it as is.
Is it just me? I’ve had more issues with Linux updates than Windows updates at this point. Don’t get me started with major distro updates.
Either keep things minimal or keep the complex stuff isolated.
To me it kinda depends on what hardware/distro.
Currently running MX on multiple systems for more than a year now and it’s been pretty smooth sailing.
I do remember, however, using fedora and whatnot ages ago having exactly what you describe.
If you want something more stable you might wanna look at debian, opensuse,… (I’m sure someone more knowledgeable will complete this list). They might not be as flashy but you can depend on those and get some work done.
More than a year doesn’t sound particularly long.
I’m running LTS versions of Ubuntu server (and Windows 11 on my PC). Debian would be more stable, but then it’s so far behind that it’s a pain to use at times, especially for running any kind of game server. Ubuntu has been pretty good so far, but LTS to LTS isn’t always easy.
Or could use Gentoo, only using the more unstable keywords for packages you want to be newer than old stable.
Best of both paths in one.
… Though… Do enjoy the increasing dependency wrangling, the more you mix and match.
Pop/cosmic let’s go!
As someone who builds a computer, installs whatever seems like the most stable LTS distro at the time with the longest support period, and only switches to a new one when the current LTS expires, I’d like to thank all of you for being my beta testers. Your support means the world.
I installed the latest version of Pop and was shocked when like a third of the shit I wanted to find was missing. The settings page is barren. Zero VNC support out of the box, and most VNC software doesn’t even WORK! The shop is much better and faster than Pop shop… when it isn’t freezing all the time.
Reverted back to 22.x before cosmic and all the stuff I need is back, VNC is built-in, and the slower Pop Shop never freezes. Nothing freezes, it’s perfectly stable.
Cosmic looks nice but damn, the latest version of Pop is NOT there yet.
you’re welcome mr debian user
This guy runs debian (btw)
I once heard someone say that Debian is like the sound Dads make when getting off the couch. I’ve never felt so seen.
(I absolutely run Debian, lol)
We’ve got to come up with a different acronym. What says old and stable?
“I use Debian, lol (lots of love)”
I use Arch BTW full-time for work and personal for about 3 years now and haven’t had any issues at all.
Around 10 years here. Some issues, but much less time wasted in total than if I had done “dist-upgrade”s the whole time.
One huge advantage of a rolling distro is that generally only one thing can break at a time :)
whats dist-upgrade? this is the first time ive heard of it
It’s what Debian and similar distributions use to switch from one stable release to the next. This happens every half year for Ubuntu and every blue moon for Debian, which makes it a significantly more error-prone process than updating Arch every week in my experience.
The LTS released every other year) is supported 5 years.
Oof, that’s probably almost a full reinstall when you upgrade, depending on how stable your stack is. A lot of services will will have breaking config changes in that time frame.
I worked with someone who uses arch on his work laptop
One day it just died and he had to spend a day or two setting it all up again
I mean, its not common, but it happens
I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.
Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a
.pacnewfile and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.
That doesn’t happen. When it breaks, it’s always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)
I used to do much distro hopping coming from gentoo and settling down with endeavour. My tip for all of you: use lvm for everything outside boot, root and swap (vms, home, games). That way a complete reinstall just takes minutes.
I’d guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.
Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don’t have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven’t had an issue yet.
Yep, the only time things have broken in Arch for me has been with Nvidia driver updates.
Yep. Funnily enough, never really had any issues with the drivers on a desktop, only on mobile, mostly switching between integrated and discrete. But after messing with them on my laptop for a few years, you better bet my laptop was only running Intel integrated and my desktop runs on amd.
Skill issue.
been using Artix and Arch for two years, for work and play, no issues
I think bleeding edge linux is probably more stable than windows
The only issue I ever had was Arch ARM changing the naming convention for network devices and making me have to plug the first Raspberry Pi that I upgraded into a monitor to debug what was going on.
This was annoying for sure, but less annoying than using a 6 year old Python version like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux at work…
I see your 6 year old python version and raise you RHEL5 running python 2.5 in 2022.
That thing didn’t even have a base Exception class.
Yeah, people like to think that bleeding edge means “untested”. As if your OS was directly receiving the dev’s
git push…I wonder if there’s a package manager that does just that, I want the real bleeding edge!
Portage allows that to some extent - you can make it install thr latest of everything. Depending on the ebuild, a lot of that will be straight from git. Master branch, not some random working one, mind you, but still.
I like Fedora for my desktop. Close enough to upstream to get the latest features, but not so bleeding edge that it’s unstable.
It’s balanced as all things should be.
I’ve really started to enjoy Kinonite. Fedora’s atomic version of KDE Plasma.
I’m wondering where people like you and me, using non-LTS but not rolling distros, go in the OP pic.
fence and then grass and then dirt and rocks
And it’s Linus’s distro of choice.
Yeah, but he has stated that he really doesn’t have an opinion. He just happened to install Fedora on the family PC a long time ago and now he neither wants to deal with two separate distros, nor switch the whole household over.
I mean that and being open enough of a distro he can change the kernel out decently often, but not so open things like throwing a new kernel in arch leads to poking at other things.
I’m on Nobara, and if the installation ever dies, i will probably install pure fedora. My previous experiences were all with debian, which drove me crazy as a gamer because when playing current games you want your system to be a lot closer to the bleeding edge of the knife - debian is more like a chain glove for holding it.
Yeah same. Its a little annoying having to wait for certain updates, like when a new application can be built from source on arch, but i’d have to rebuild a core dependency from a scratch to get it working on fedora.
But ive been using it for years, and even if i broke the system, ive always got it working again, which is saying something.
This is the way.
I use Debian testing for… 20 years? I had serious problems with it. Twice. Nothing unrepairable, but still I needed another machine with internet to fix the problem. I suppose that is ok stability-wise for 20 years.
Sounds like the exact reason that official debian backports came into existence.
I’ve been using Arch (btw) for a few months now and have been really enjoying it. I am scared that something is going to break though. I have Timeshift and BorgBase backups but I would rather not deal with that tbh. I haven’t tried Debian yet but I think I might make it my next distro. However, it’s going to be really hard to give up the AUR and Arch wiki.
aur can mostly be replaced by flatpak and the arch wiki generally works in every distro
Consider btrfs for your next install then. Won’t boot? Fine! Just select your last automatic snapshot in grub.
This but new Linux users. They get attracted to the worse newbies distros every time
What’s the best one, apart from Mint?
Pop was mine,
Yep I outgrew it and moved on to better and worse distros. But pop helped me kick windows to the kerb
Min- oh.
I don’t really know a bunch of distros, but I helped convert some normies so here’s a list of pain points I rather not have as a first experience
- No rolling distro. While some people may never see an issue in their life, some may see it right away. Bad first impression (Someone insisted on starting on fedora, then noticed the hard way that the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel)
- easy Nvidia driver install (only for gamers on Nvidia)
- Has a gui app store
- has a common package manager that is often shown in tutorials (like apt. You always see exemple apt commands)
- sudo is configured
- doesn’t have a DE that tries to revolutionize UX
New users are dumb, so it needs to be easy for them
the current Nvidia drivers were incompatible with the shipped kernel
A more common issue with Nvidia is older hardware no longer being supported by Nvidia’s current drivers and the kernel not supporting the old drivers. For older cards, you need to run kernel 6.8 or older for the binary drivers to work. The open source Nouveau driver is noticeably slower and getting hardware accelerated video to work can be difficult. So you can easily end up with mesa-llvm, meaning your CPU emulates OpenGL.
The easiest way to get this to work is to install Linux Mint 22.1.
Sudo is configured in the Debian installer, if you click the “root not allowed to log in” checkbox. So it literally checks all your boxes.
Oh? Didn’t know about that. Thanks
Just checked, and sadly it’s not as straightforward as that.
Sudo is configured if you leave the password field blank for the root user.
Which is of course documented in the installation guide, but hardly anyone ever reads that.RTFM I guess
The typical advice is:
- Mint
- ElementryOS
- Fedora
- Pop!
- Ubuntu (unpopular with Extremely Online people, but is pretty good at the Just Works for normies)
- Debian Stable for older hardware
As usual OpenSuSE gets totally forgotten. Tumbleweed is 5the most stable rolling release I’ve ever seen.
Oh yeah! I’ve always heard good things about OpenSuSE, just never tried it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my other old laptop.
Fedora
really? I haven’t touched regular fedora, how is the “vanilla” version different to derivities and other “vanilla” distros like debian or arch?
Fedora’s philosophy is free software only. So vanilla Fedora ships with FOSS only. Imo, they’re really good at this, but I personally couldn’t live with that. The community maintained fusion repository is essential because of Nvidia drivers and full ffmpeg. Steam is in a separate non-free repo as well.
Other than than tidbit, Fedora is easy to install, well maintained, has a large community and wide third party support (as in software devs often build “native fedora” binaries available on their repo).
I prefer it to any other Fedora based distro, but for the reason above, it may not be best suited for the average lemming.Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community. For noobies, a good, familiarish desktop environment and comprehensive hardware support are really the most important things for them not to immediately bounce off.
Fedora is pretty good. However in order to install drivers or firmware for specific hardware can be more difficult as it involves adding extra repositories.
Yeah, vanilla Fedora comes in both KDE and Gnome flavors, with good hardware support and a large community.
I have never installed Arch, but I guess it doesn’t; but debian does come with various DEs , including KDE and Gnome.
For Arch, I’d go with something like EndeavorOS. The installation is easy for someone who knows what a file system or software repository is and I absolutely loved that you can install a bare bones system: just the desktop and almost no apps and you can go from there and install what you like (I wish fedora offered this).
I ended up not using Arch/Endeavor because of rolling releases and I found the AUR dangerous. I mean, its not dangerous, but anyone can put anything on there and its your job (and the communities) to make sure its good. I think a “build all the software yourself” is a great philosophy, but it only fits computer geeks (and I mean this in a good way). We cant all be Richard Stallman. I think for somethings, I can accept an “arbiter of software” who curates what gets on the repo and what doesn’t and that its shared via compiled binaries instead of code.Arch can be great and you can install whatever desktop environment you like, but there are just too many concepts for the average new user. Making a USB install stick is “difficult” enough to make a lot of people give up.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops. It’s easy enough to install whatever drivers you need, but again that can be just one thing too many for a new user.
Arch takes a long time to install, even if you have done it before.
Debian is great, and my personal preference but it tends to be a bit behind on the latest hardware support, particularly for laptops.
ah ok, so fedora is generic and more up to date for new hardware, but debian lacks … cutting edge support, otherwise, it’s just as good for newbies.
And arch is still wiki based to install, even if you use archinstall.
Just use nyarch /s
