I’ve messed around with Linux before, mostly in VMs, but I’m looking to switch over from Windows permanently on my laptop because I think Linux is cool.
Most people in this community talk about pros and cons of this distro or this other distro, but I’d like to hear your opinions based on entirely subjective factors.
I think Arch is neat, I think Ubuntu isn’t as neat, why? Who knows. Tell me about how you chose a specific distro because you thought the name was cool or because it ships with some completely unknown utility no one uses.
Let me start with my unbiased opinion. There’s something for everybody in the Linux land. You have to try different distros out and settle with the one you like most. I usually advocate for the path of least resistance - ie, to start with the easiest distro. Mint is a good first distro. Fedora and Debian are also reasonable choices. But I have also seen a rare few cases where people start directly with a high effort distro like Arch - so it’s not impossible.
For a lot of people, Mint may satisfy their needs - a user friendly distro that needs no tinkering and meets all of their needs. Some people though, like to tune everything. Such people can eventually grow into something like Arch.
I personally like Gentoo. Not because it’s compiled from source, but because it’s easy to work with its Portage package management system. Another one worth trying out is QubesOS, if you’re into security.
Well, you don’t really have to try anything. You can pick a suitable one and just use it. Don’t like something? Configure. Want software? Install software. Yes, that works for desktop envs. Got problems? File reports and/or ask for help.
If you pick one that isn’t going to die out in a while, you can probably keep using the same distro for life. Debian is highly likely to outlive us all.
I have a tendency to use “DIY” systems, basically systems that leave the administration up to me, and either have a minimal base or a customizable, powerful but convenient installer. Then comes the package manager’s strengths and weaknesses, and the package repository and its release cycles.
My favorite OSes of all are:
- NixOS
- FreeBSD
- Arch/Endeavour
- Debian
- To some extend Alpine
I never used Gentoo so I don’t classify it, but i believe I would like it a lot if I used it.
And yeah, I have a logo bias lmao. NixOS, FreeBSD and Debian have amazing logos. Something that is neat is when a distro has multiple kernel versions in the repository.
If you want to create a Hannah Montana branded version of ublue kinoite plasma 6, that would be as neat as it gets.
Also there is Cosmic, I am just gonna say
Rust
I used Fedora on my laptop for like 4 years. It came with gnome, and was very stable. I didn’t know a lot about Linux at the time, but it treated me well.
Eventually, I was learning graphics and the mesa drivers in fedora’s repos were lacking specific OGL support I wanted to try out. I tried installing mesa from source, but it didn’t go very smoothly.
This is when I learned about arch’s rolling release model. I ran antergos for a while, then manjaro, and now endeavor, and more recently I’ve heard arch has a fancy installer wizard so I might just do that next.
I would still recommend Fedora (or Mint) as someone’s first go at Linux. I don’t think you need to try arch until you know why you’re using it.
If you are on endeavour, I don’t think there’s much point jumping to plain Arch if you are all setup and comfortable. I say this as a pure Arch user 😛 Not much will change for you, you’ll just be pissing away a day to setup everything you’ve already setup on endeavour again.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be for no reason, I still have a desktop on Manjaro that I’ve been meaning to swap to endeavorOS. But I pretty much just use arch flavors rather than arch because they’re quicker to install lol.
Part of the appeal is getting away for corporate control. With Fedora, you roll into Baghdad.
Meanwhile Debian might very well be the single largest anarchist project in the world.
That’s part of the ideological and principaled choice.
Past that it offers long term support for servers and testing truly is pretty good if you want a rolling release.
Arch, Gentoo, NixOS, the BSDs
Arch indeed, but I said largest, not that it’s the only one. The BSDs less so as they are all non profits and have paid staff. As does Gentoo.
I usually don’t order my distros on the rocks, so they’re all neat.
NixOS has a cool logo.
There, I said it.
I installed it three nights ago.
It has a lot of neat
It has a lot of wtf
You start out, I want x, then you realize you want y, then you find out to get y, you need z. Then you put follow some instructions and defining unfree in one spot no longer works. Then you find out there are no safe facilities to deploy secrets and you’ll have to make that anyway.
I don’t hate it at all, but I’m slowly realizing it’s not what I thought it was.
Still cool though.
Yeah, it’s very much one of those “steep learning curve” distros, and requires a lot of background reading and perhaps a bit of functional programming knowledge.
For secrets storage, I’ve been using agenix, but you can probably get away with just putting the secrets as plain text files in
/var/secretsor similar.
Mint is super comfy. Garuda is cool. Pop_OS! is as annoying to use as it is to type.
I like lizard, i use tumbleweed
Just gotta crank the desktop effects up to 11 on kwin
I made the switch a few days ago. At the moment I’m running a dual boot setup as unfortunately I can’t completely drop Windows for work sessions. I settled on Linux Mint as I couldn’t get Nobara (a fedora fork or sth) to run stable.
I have no experience with Linux (except for owning a steam deck and using live CDs some years ago), so I was looking for sth simple and able to run games.
I’ve been doing more tweaking than I thought but that’s mainly due to my hardware, e.g. getting the stream deck and the rodecaster to run. I’ve learned a bunch of stuff while tinkering with all of this and I can recommend Linux Mint due to its ease of use and very large community where someone probably had your exact problem before and even documented it in some way.
Can’t say much about other distros but I don’t think I’ll switch to another any time soon.
For me it’s just Linux itself that’s cool. I mean, I get the different distros have different opinions and things that make them neat, and that in and of itself is what’s so cool. FWIW I use Ubuntu (server) and desktop.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I like it too. And Debian has its own screenshots website, https://screenshots.debian.net/ how neat is that ?
silly code comments
Wanna share some of those? :)
I unfortunately haven’t found that many I can remember. But a comment on Busybox cat that linked to a talk titled “cat -v considered harmful” did send me down a rabbit hole once.
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I think what you mean with “neat” is the desktop environment (DE), which hugely defines how a distro looks like.
Most major distros (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) have have the most major ones.Here’s my post about distro choices if you’re interested, since it’s mostly more about DE choice: https://feddit.de/post/9087676
