i started with Ubuntu. i think it’s fair to respect the distro that works towards getting any rando started
Stock Ubuntu is not the only and possibly not the most sane choice for newbies. An uncomfortably different UI with relatively complicated customization, a lot of catches, myriad of package sources, and little progress in general usability make it only preferable in terms of binaries selection and amount of accumulated knowledge specifically on Ubuntu.
Linux Mint is the most sane pick for an average newbie, though mileage will vary and other distros can be better entry points for some. For example, what clicked with me against all warnings was Manjaro, and if not for that, I could still be sitting on Windows today.
Nowadays, I use Fedora KDE Spin, though if a sane Arch-based alternative arises (think Manjaro done right), I would consider going back.
though if a sane Arch-based alternative arises (think Manjaro done right)
If ever you get the Arch itch, check out EndeavourOS. It’s basically vanilla Arch but with a GUI installer and basic defaults/programs preconfigured. They use the main Arch repos, so no weirdness with AUR stuff like in Manjaro.
I tried Endeavour and Garuda, and they’re bad for me exactly the way Arch is - it’s a bit too bleeding-edge to run exactly as stable as I imagine my perfect system to be, and it’s also too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. It sure is possible to run it smoothly, but that requires a lot of user attention and consideration with updates and tools.
The premise of Manjaro is good - like, let the packets go through some testing before being delivered to a wide audience, this is pretty much common sense. Should they implement something like Chaotic-AUR, but with the delay for dependencies to catch up, AUR could actually work for most of its purposes. Combine that with more careful considerations here and there, and you might get your perfect Arch.
That said, I strongly prefer distros based on Debian (except Ubuntu and its derivatives) or Arch, as they are the only major community-driven options that are not exotic and obscure. Debian is too slow, Arch is too fast, and there’s little in between, which is my personal frustration. For now, the Arch edge was closer to my spirit, but the only sane premise on that front, Manjaro, is essentially even less stable than plain Arch in the long run. So…neither works, and I reluctantly go Fedora.
Your entire comment is screaming for OpenSUSE Slowroll.
Slowroll is certainly on my radar, but as things stand, there are two things that are stopping me:
- It’s still experimental and it does break, which ruins the premise of stability
- It is not community-driven, which, while not being a total dealbreaker, is considered by me to be negative
Thanks for the suggestion, though!
But they teach them Linux in a way, that it just feels like cheap MacOS, where you have to hack your own OS in order to get some little stuff as you like.
Bah. Me, I’ve been using Debian since 1997. I’ve tried Ubuntu (and, what was it called, Progeny?) a few times but decided it was just Debian with extra steps.
It’s better than Windows at least.
that’s a pretty low bar tbh. i think a programmable calculator would beat windows
And they actively work towards an abomination like windows with the decisions they made.
lol just ignore the karens
“Don’t feed the trolls” has ended up with the trolls running the place. I’d rather Lemmy not become yet another “lol ubuntu sux” echo chamber.
Why would it? It’s already an echo chamber for Linux as a whole, so I really, really doubt that’s going to happen
Yeah, I don’t get the hate and intentional division being sowed there.
I’m not a fan of Ubuntu since they went all Thanos Snap (the final straw was replacing
debpackages inaptwith snap stubs), but I can applaud that they’re using Linux.Just seems like low effort, pointless gatekeeping to me.
Yeah I never understood the hate but today I did read a comment saying Canonical (the company that develops Ubuntu) had injected some amazon telemetry into one of the search functionalities, that and using Snap is what makes some people shit on it. I didn’t verify the telemetry thing FYI.
I can definitely understand people being upset at telemetry injections.
The above is to say I don’t think it’s exclusively people gate keeping, dome people have legitimate issues with it.I haven’t seen people shit on mint a lot and it’s an easy distro. Honestly most people are super supportive of mint. That being said there is definitely some amount of gatekeeping.
That was the point where I stopped using it.
They included a global search function which in a default installation sent your search terms to Amazon and returned search results from them.
It also sent them to a web search (with real time results while you typed, including image previews). So it was possible to get shown NSFW images accidentally inside your OS, without opening a browser.
It was just really bad design, and a heavy-handed attempt of monetizing their OS.Of course that could all be removed with a bash one-liner, but it showed where Canonical was headed,
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The thing is, that noobs see linux = ubuntu, and ubuntu makes sure it stays like that.
I do not like that.
I don’t care what some distro snob thinks… I use ubuntu and have few problems. I replace the snaps and move on. I’ve been using Linux longer than most of them have been alive. They can pretend that makes me behind the times but somehow I always seem to be ahead of them. Having made my stance clear.
I don’t care what distro they use. Why would I?
Ironic - one of the reasons I like Ubuntu based distros is the easy access to snaps.
Fascinating. I was just wondering if anyone could actually like snap and I personally knew no one until now.
FWIW I’m a long time Kubuntu user and I like it very much. But the snap experience has me on the brink of switching to a different distro.
I’ll use one if it is something more obscure. I do however replace things like firefox and vlc with the source repo.
Switching Firefox from the apt repo to the snap is one of the things I did when using KDE Neon on my laptop (on my desktop with Nvidia I did the opposite on Kubuntu).
I don’t know what you mean about VLC though - while it’s available as an official snap published by VideoLAN, it’s also in the apt repos on all Ubuntu versions.
Its probably fixed now but for years vlc suffered from several bugs on ubuntu the worst being it launching multiple windows despite having that disabled in settings. I started using the PPA and now I just skip ubuntu maintained versions.
Ahh, well that’s a different thing. The snap though is maintained by the VideoLAN folks and part of their official repo.
I’ll keep it in mind but will probably just keep doing what I do. I only reload every three or four years.
Canonical deserves most of the critics they get.
Ubuntu users on the other hand don’t deserve even the slight amount of critic they get for just… Using Ubuntu. like, at least they use Linux, we should be encouraging them to keep using it.
I have my own criticism of Canonical, but most of what I hear from the anti-Ubuntu crowd isn’t even grounded in reality.
My favourite one recently was that upstart was Canonical NIHing systemd.
NIHing?
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Not Invented Here-ing? lol
Not Invented Here. Basically, reinventing the wheel just so they can have full control of a project.
Didn’t upstart show up in jaunty jackalope? I don’t recall systemd being all that big back then. Also, jaunty booted in 30s to desktop on a 4200rpm spinning rust IDE drive, Intel m processor. In my book they succeeded there but yeah, the attitude they have about contributing to current projects is bullshit.
for me it’s snaps and the release model that suck. Also, apparently, arch-based distros are more noob-friendly, thanks to ArchWiki
I use snaps on multiple non-Ubuntu systems because they solve problems for me in a cleaner way than anything else has done so far.
I also find arch-based distros to often be quite obnoxious to manage, but that’s just me.
what are the usecases for snaps and flatpaks in the home desktop environment anyway? What are their benefits? Isolation?
In both cases, you get isolation of the applications, yes. In the case of snaps, you can also isolate your system services from each other, limiting the effectiveness of attack chaining since an issue in cups (for example) won’t leave an attacker able to (for example) access your GPU.
They also decouple the application releases from your distro if you don’t use a rolling release distribution.
it’s either you’re too paranoid about the attacks, or i’m too careless
They let you run a rock solid stable base OS with updated user applications.
Flatpak makes Debian actually great and removes its biggest drawback.sounds like an unnecessary overcomplication tbh
arch-based distros are more noob-friendly
I’ll take some of whatever you are smoking. And I am typing this on an Arch Linux system.
Sure, I love that I have a high degree of control; but, if I were planning to ask a new user to install Linux, I would not be handing them Arch. The Install Page may look nice; but, it’s a minefield of “oh go chose something” and you come back three hours later having read way too much detail about bootloaders.Arch is fantastic for choice, but the KISS principal is not available via pacman. It may be available in AUR. So, go learn what AUR is, spend way too long picking an AUR package manager only to learn it’s not available their either and you need to build it from source.
Joking aside, I do need to try the SteamOS install. That might actually be a noob-friendly Arch distro.
That’s why i said “arch-based” not “arch”. I don’t know about manjaro actually, lots of people on the internet complained how broken it is (or rather was broken, idk), so i decided not to try it. But i’ve tried and am currently running EndeavourOS. The installation process is as easy as the one of Ubuntu, while OS remains stable, despite me using AURs and manually compiled packages. AURs are far more friendly compared to PPAs. Not to mention the fact that i wasn’t always able to find the package i needed among PPAs, and manual compilation often did not work due to Ubuntu’s update model.
I don’t quite understand, what do you mean by “KISS is not available via pacman”, so please, elaborate. To me pacman is as simple to use as apt.
Also, didn’t know SteamOS is already available for public, good to know. Gonna try it some day.
I don’t quite understand, what do you mean by “KISS is not available via pacman”
I was making a joke about Arch not being simple and pacman not having packages one would expect, often having to turn to AUR to find such packages. Seems the joke failed to land and now we’re in “explaining a joke is similar to dissecting a frog” territory.
guess, you sould’ve kept your joke a bit simpler, stupider even :D
Why would you need 5 distros?
Different use cases! One each for: my desktop, my laptop, my home theater PC, my tablet, and my gaming handheld.
(This is a joke. But, I do use a different distro for my tablet [due to the touchscreen] and my gaming handheld.)
Which tablet do you have?
I’m using Ubuntu (well Kubuntu everywhere that I have graphical displays) on most devices, but I have:
- SteamOS on my Steam Deck
- Arch on my PinePhone
- Debian on some development boards
- Fedora and OpenSUSE in VMs because I’m interested in their development
How can it suck the least if it has snap?
Snaps can be annoying, but are no deal breaker. A deal breaker would be having to put a lot of work in over and over, like manually resolving dependencies or compile/install errors, breaking system, etc.
I like user respecting operating systems, that is the deal breaker.
If you insert snap into apt package management, so that you can go behind the user’s back, re-enable snap and install a snap anyway if a user tries to
apt install firefox, you don’t respect the user’s choice. It’s the kind of thing we give Microsoft shit for.And yes I know it can be worked around and disabled and whatnot by jumping through various hoops, but that’s beside the point. As a matter of principle, I will just use something that doesn’t do this. KDE on Debian works just as well as Kubuntu anyway.
Yeah no it does suck it made me think the Linux experience was at least 3x worse before I tried another distro.
And not just a DE thing, every part of the distro feels like it was slapped on without actually thinking of the consequences.
- netplan
- apt
- default systemd dependencies
- ubuntu GNOME
- snap
- ubuntu pro
- cloudinit conf
You can find forums and docs from as old as Fedora 11 that’s still relevant yet Ubuntu utterly fails to keep consistency across a single version update because they changed something that’s only mentioned in the changelog.
Every downstream of Ubuntu is essentially focused on removing all the BS the upstream has so you can use your computer without something breaking like it’s
Archan overused meme about Arch.There is no right answer to the correct distro, only a wrong answer, and that is Ubuntu because practically anything else including its downstreams like LM are better for you as a user.
I had similar bad luck with Linux mint. So many things just didn’t work, or didn’t work correctly. Wifi issues, sound issues, graphics issues, issues setting up particular things for software development. I’ve switched to NixOS and I’m having a much easier time. A significant amount of my improved experience could be attributed to more patience or just an improved ability to deal with problems. I also suspect cinnamon was causing some of my problems, somehow whereas now I have GNOME on my main rig and lxqt on my laptop.
without something breaking like its arch
I have had seven full-system failures across the last two decades using Ubuntu that could not easily be troubleshooted and fixed.
I have had exactly zero with Arch.
Take that as you will.
Fair enough, edited lol
«an overused meme about Arch» was a very nice edit I must say xD
xD
You clearly didn’t try <insert favorite distro> then!
idk, I’ve been using xubuntu for more than 10 years now, I’m not happy with absolutely everything, but the trouble I do have is definitely less effort to fix than learning a new, more elaborate distro.
So, it’s a pretty good, common denominator, and as long as it keeps working it doesn’t really need to be anything else?
I’m sure there are differences and niches that other distros fulfill better, but until there is a killer feature I’m interested in that only works on a specific distro or works extremely well on a different distro, I don’t see the “push” factor that would make me leave?
(btw, that there is no “report bugs here” button that’s just built into the window manager (besides the -,+,x buttons) and takes me to project home pages or bug trackes is wild to me, on any distro as far as I know. Like they don’t want to interact with users? I don’t get it.)
All operating system elitism is stupid. Just use what you like and are comfortable using. I grew up on Linux and mostly use Mac nowadays.
It’s even sillier to make fun of someone for the distro they use.
When you’re a boring person and the only thing you have to be snobby about is your operating system I’m not sure that says anything good about you.
I use (K?)Ubuntu (I installed KDE on Ubuntu so now it thinks it’s Kubuntu? Weird) and I don’t get the hate. I worked with raspberry pis and such on Linux for a bit so when I got a new computer, I decided to main Linux on desktop as well, since I felt confident enough in it and I went with Ubuntu as I felt it was an obvious choice.
I heard of Linux Mint, but I hate mints and didn’t want to live with a distro named after them.
Only regret is that I didn’t fresh install Kubuntu as I have some gnome ghouls left behind, but eh, if I really wanted to I think I can get rid of them. Just don’t want to risk deleting other preinstalled stuff.
Ubuntu works just fine, the problematic part about it is how it shoves its proprietary app store down everyone’s throats, which is very much against Linux ethos, both in terms of proprietary software and user freedom.
If you don’t mind that and are comfortable with Ubuntu in other ways, hooray, you’ve just found your distro.
What app store? Apt get?
Snap
Never heard of it until now 😂
I just looked it up in my system and I see “app centre”. I vaguely recall that opening when I first installed Ubuntu, haven’t seen it since.
That’s how well they integrated and hid this atrocity in plain sight :D
But it gets worse. When you try to use apt, it looks up if there is a snap package available, and may install that instead, so you may have used the store without being aware of it. They also consider phasing apt out completely.
