Considering switching away from Fedora and to another distribution. Does anyone have any suggestions for distributions I should consider?
I’m using debian.
Seconded
I live on the more unstable side, I like Debian Unstable/Sid. I also recommend Siduction as it’s based on Debian Unstable.
I’ve been actually trying Debian Testing for past few weeks.
Debian not recommends testing for everyday using. You definetely have to look at the site. Afaik it is basically a bad version of unstable that gets slow updates and it is only for testing purposes.
Packages from debian unstable trickle down to testing in 8-10 days usually if all the other criteria are met. But I have also heard that important security updates go straight from unstable to stable and then come to testing at a later time. When is that later date I have no idea.
Arch Linux
Reasons:
- Pacman
- the AUR
- community driven
- bleeding edge
- pragmatic stance regarding closed source software
- sane defaults
- minimalism, build your own without too much compiling
- the wiki
The wiki is what makes it really hard for me to move out. This masterpiece is where I learned 70% of what I know about linux systems 🤷
My steam deck uses arch btw, and the main reason I didn’t choose arch for my laptop was because I haven’t had good experience with pacman. But I’ll be honest that I haven’t given it much of a chance, so I’d like to learn more. What is it that you like about pacman?
What bad experience have you had with pacman? My favourite thing about it is that it is pretty much the only package manager that has never failed me.
Well on the steam deck, updates will always fail until I reboot the device then try to update again. I also really don’t like the syntax. It isn’t intuitive, and I can’t memorize it because of that. For example, I’m not sure why
-Smeansinstall. I remember install because that’s the one I have used the most, but I can’t remember what is equivalent toapt updateorapt upgrade, and I’m not sure why they can’t just use those terms. Why do I need to memorize arbitrary letters with captialization?I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what’s up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.
Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners,
Sstands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done bypacman -Syu, whereytells pacman to synchronize the package lists first anduselects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for theS.You can easily learn all that by using
fish(orzshwith a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enterpacman -and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.
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Mint, because it works with a minimum of effort.
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OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it’s more up to date than Mint, it’s a rolling distro, it works, and in the rare event of a problem it’s easy to roll back to a snapshot.
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Linux Mint: Debian Edition. After watching a YouTube review I decided to take a break from Arch and give it a try, I’d always like Cinnamon, and I really like this.
Arch.
People think it’s really challenging and brittle, but everything seems to always work no matter how often I update (or don’t) and the wiki is top notch.
I actually chose arch initially because when you go to forums to troubleshoot problems there is always an ubuntu answer and an arch answer, and the arch answer is almost always shorter.
Bang on
I only use Arch, it’s really stable and easy to fix if something goes wrong thanks to the excellent arch wiki.
But I recommend PopOS for anyone who just wants something good looking and stable and who doesn’t need the latest packages all the time.
Do you use arch or do you use manjaro or other?
I use Arch default. Stay away from Manjaro… If you want to try arch with a good installer, try https://endeavouros.com/.
Its really just arch with a nice installer and a friendly community where you can ask questions. It’s specifically designed for that purpose.
Unpopular choice here but Ubuntu LTS with ubuntu-debullshit (vanilla gnome, replace snap with flatpak).
My main factors:
- stability of the LTS
- drivers and HW support
- tons of resources online
- already use Ubuntu for servers and Raspian on my Pi
I’ve had my fun distro hopping in the past but I just want a low maintenance system nowadays.
Ohhh, I’ll have to check this out. I’ve been gradually moving away from Ubuntu toward Debian (w/ GNOME) for a while because Snap is hot garbage and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Were it not for Snap, I still really like Ubuntu.
Drivers are the weak spot of Ubuntu LTS, even with HWE the kernel and Mesa are outdated compared to Fedora.
How does this differ from Debian+GNOME? I’m not familiar enough with exactly what Canonical adds to Debian to know.
Depends on what you’re looking for.
I cannot recommend NixOS enough, it’s such a good distribution but on the other hand it’s quite tough to learn as it deviates a lot on how distributions do things. It still uses a standard stack (glibc, systemd, GNU tools and all) but the nix tools which include the package manager are totally different from what other distributions offer. It’s very solid, yet flexible. It offers a lot of packages by default. I’ve switched my machines to it because of the advantages.
Arch is great as a rolling release distribution with solid repositories (lots of packages and quite up to date) and it’s very close to upstream with a more traditional approach to the distribution tools. In fact there aren’t really any apart from the package manager by default. I feel this is one of the most comfortable distributions if you want to learn how a classic Linux system is structured. I ran Arch for about 15 years and didn’t really have anything to complain about and I learned more about Linux there than with Ubuntu and Debian.
Please note that neither of these are what one would consider beginner-friendly distributions.
I recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed without hesitation.
This is the best answer. It’s the most comparable to Fedora with it’s semi-rolling releases.
Tried it for the first time last week. I was hesitant because I’m forced into SLES for work, and I fucking hate it. But thats because all of the default configs for all packages are overly secure. Like, installing apache required a ton of extra steps to allow HTTP traffic. But I needed to test both HTTP and HTTPS for the feature I was working on, so I needed HTTP.
But overall I have been very happy with Tumbleweed. I like that the packages are more up to date than Ubuntu LTS (what I was using previously), and I haven’t had as many driver issues either. Oh, and snapshots are amazing. It already saved me once when I accidentally deleted the wrong config file, I just cp’d it from my last snapshot.
I try so dang hard not to use Linux Mint because I have been using off and on since 2008 but always come crawling back to it when I run into some esoteric issue on another distro. It just hits the sweet spot of what I understand computing to be. I have desperately tried to use various forms of arch. OpenSUSE, fedora, debian, and a whole host of others and eventually get frustrated for some probably solvable reason and go back to my sweet, my love, my wart covered X11 using, 5.15 running, stale boring life mate Mint.
My journey roughly went like:
- Mint + Cinnamon
- Mint + i3
- MX Linux + i3
- Debian + i3
Right now I’m using Debian + i3. It’s pretty lit
My main reason is that Debian is a very stable, very popular distro, that isn’t a fork of another distro. The fact that it’s stable means issues are more rare; the fact that it’s popular means when issues do pop up, there are much higher odds that I’ll find others who ran into them before; and the fact that it isn’t a fork means that I can just prefix “debian” to any search, rather than say having to contend with it being potentially a “debian” issue, or an “ubuntu” issue, or a “mint” issue. In fact, debian is popular enough that most of the time I could just prefix “linux” to a search, rather than “debian”.
While there are distros that market themselves on other merits, it seems to me that the main goal of an operating system is to be a stable foundation. I wanted to pick something that would let me have a good time with i3; Debian seems one of the most straightforward choices. I considered arch, but in the end Debian seems like the lower-effort option.
agree. you mention debian and arch. I have also tried both of them. the problem with arch (rolling distribution) is that you are forever updating and you never know what exactly has changed in the system and you have to look. You can still have so much experience and solve problems, but they always cost time. all this from a daily user perspective is crap.
from a security point of view, new software can contain security loopholes just like old software. i’d rather have a stable base where i can easily keep an eye on changes than daily updates.
I was going to say Arch but I typically install EndeveavourOS these days ( lazy man’s Arch ).
What are your feelings about EndeveaourOS vs Arch vs Manjaro vs Garuda?
Sorry I did not see this sooner. EndeavourOS is my favourite by far. I loved Manjaro when I used it and thought detractors were exaggerating its problems. Then I had a string of problems all clearly linked to poor management and now I strongly recommend that nobody use Manjaro ever. Once I started to use EndeavourOS, I realized that Manjaro incompatibility with the AUR was causing me constant problems without me realizing it. I was attracted to Garuda and did use it for about a week. It was not for me in the end but that could just be preference.
The thing about EndeavourOS is that, once installed, it is essentially just Arch. There only only just over a dozen EndeavourOS packages on top of the 80,000 or so vanilla Arch ones. So, EndeavourOS is basically just easy to install with decent defaults. Manjaro has its own repos and they are incompatible with the AUR ( trust me ). Garuda departs from Arch a lot more. That could be good or bad depending on your preferences.
One thing that drives me away from Endeavour is that it bills itself as terminal centric and I am trying to go away from terminal hell that most Linux installs get to. Just in OpenSuse, I was having to dive in and debug xone when I just wanted to start playing rocket league. I used Linux as a daily driver from 2008 to 2012 and eventually bounced back to Windows due to wanting to play games. Every year I check back in with distros people recommend and I just don’t have the care to maintain a Linux install. I don’t need to maintain a Windows install, windows literally does it for me and very successfully in my experience.
They do bill themselves as terminal centric but honestly I do not get that.
The whole point of the distro relative to Arch is the graphical installer. It sets you up into a nicely configured desktop by default. There are graphical tools for configuring most things.
I think the main reason they say that is that there is no graphical package manager by default. So, even to install one, you need to use the command line at least once. They pre-install yay though so yay -S pamac-gtk or yay -S octopi will solve that problem ( I do not like pamac myself though ).
It is basically just Arch once installed though so I guess it has fewer tools built in than many distros.
Anyway, I don’t own EndeavourOS stock. No big deal if you prefer something else.
No worries, thanks for your input. I’ll certainly put Endeavour on the list to check out.
Debian only household here …
I’ve been a long time Debian user. Debian 12 has been almost a perfect release so far. Highly recommended.
I know the FSF wouldn’t approve, but I am glad that they include the firmware on the regular network install image now. I need it to connect to wi-fi.
I know they always offered one with the firmware, but you had to do some digging on cdimage.debian.org to find it.
So were Woody and Potato (memories…).
Woody was my first Linux distro ever! My family only had one PC with dialup at the time, and you could buy the entire repo on CD-ROM. I actually keep the CD images around in case I want to play with a VM and feel nostalgic.
Void. I like xbps, and I prefer distros that make as few assumptions as possible.
