Linux users: after finishing distro hopping, where did you land?
I've been running Linux for a little over a year now and, after a recent conversation on Tildes, I decided that I need to wipe and re-install so that I can enable full-disk encryption.
Thus, right now I'm shopping around for a distro and trying out different live environments to find something that works for me. My question isn't necessarily for right now though (my hardware is old enough that I'm definitely going to need to use a lightweight distro, which severely limits my options). It's more for the future, in that I plan to replace this computer in a year or two with something up-to-date, which means I'll be able to run any distro under the sun! Any!
So, I'm curious to hear from people who have found their "forever distro." What do you run for your everyday use, and why? Also, what's your level of technical expertise? I am very far from a power-user at present, but I'd like to be somewhere closer to that when I replace my computer.
MacOS. I love linux, I loved messing around with tiling window managers and scripts and everything else, but now that I'm in a place where I mostly do actual work with my computer I don't have the enthusiasm I once did. For me osx strikes the right balance between power-user stuff for dev work and a nice interface that just works^TM for casual use.
My linux notebook I (very) occasionally still use runs Void though, I love the package manager, I love
runit, and I love that it's actually lightweight.With all due respect, have you tried an stability focused, well-supported, beginner friendly distro? You know, the kind that doesn't give you much trouble and have nice GUIs for everything, just like MacOS? Cause I don't think Void Linux belongs to this category.
A lot of people often select macOS because they'd like to have access to a system that's POSIX complaint, and also has good software support; for example Adobe's Creative Suite, Sketch, Paw, Xcode, etc. The quality of macOS software is frankly incredible.
Also, you'd probably be hard pressed to find a nix distro that offers cohesive platform integration across all devices, for example iCloud syncing of photos, messages, documents, etc.
I don't know if "quality" is the more adequate word here. "Availability" would make more sense, I think.
No, it certainly is. I'd love to see a vector graphics & mockup application rival Sketch.app in terms of quality.
You’re technically correct, but I am too. Because the program is not available for Linux.
Yeah, the software quality on macOS is amazing, head and shoulders above Windows and Linux. There is a core group of developers that care about making high quality paid apps, that are extremely powerful, great looking and most importantly, fit in with the rest of the OS.
Even running something like Ubuntu or Debian I still ran into issues from time to time, but that’s not really my issue, it’s the amount of tinkering and configuration needed to get it into a usable workstation. The fact that Ubuntu has now moved to gnome only exacerbates this in my eyes.
You are referring to two distributions. There are many others. Including Kubuntu, which is the KDE version of Ubuntu.
MacOS has its own merits, and I'm glad it is good for your purposes. Linux systems are not the most suitable for every task. In my case, though, it is much more convenient. But the reasons you presented seemed insufficient, hence my answer.
Do you run it on an actual Mac or a Hackintosh?
Right now I have a 2015 MBP, I don't plan on buying another apple computer though unless they drastically change course.
That's the shame of it. I'm really wanting to try out MacOS and get into the apple walled garden, because I bought an iPhone and am simply amazed at how much more polished and smooth everything is compared to Android, even Android on a new flagship phone. Then I start reading about all the issues, and I really don't want to spend that kind of money if it's not on something absolutely top of the line. Would I be smart to just get a '15 MBP? It doesn't seem like the newer ones offer anything major that I'd be missing.
I have a 2018 MBP; and honestly it does the jobs I ask of it. The USB-C only situation can be frustrating, but hopefully it'll improve with time. The keyboard I don't have an issue with at all, which may just be luck of the draw.
Most people probably don't value this in a pro-level machine, but I do appreciate how thin and otherwise light the laptop is. My 2012 retina MBP was significantly weightier and a touch thicker. If I didn't need the notebook for professional use, I'd be fine with just the entry level MacBook, frankly.
I love my 13 inch mbp (2017). I would love to have a bit more power sometimes . I bet the 4 core models feel nice / the ones with gpus.
For me the weight was a big factor. I carry it around with me through university all day. Last week I didn't even use it. I would have felt super exhausted and I wouldn't have carried my old heavier laptops.
I also love USB type c. But I hope adoption comes fast.
If you travel a lot, USB-PD is fantastic -- I have a big Anker battery that charges my phone, iPad, watch, camera, Switch, and laptop with little 3" pigtail cables, so all I need to do is bring one USB-PD adapter for the battery and everything else runs off that. Plus fun stuff like the computer can charge the Switch, two MacBook Pros can charge each other, etc.
Aside from that, the '15s are great. I don't mind the lack of USB-A, but not having an SD card slot in my '16 is quite annoying.
The software integration between iOS and MacOS is incredible — Universal Clipboard, handoff, and iCloud are features I don’t think I’d want to give up.
Weirdly enough, it was a Modern Family episode that taught me that. Almost (or maybe all?) of the episode is just a computer monitor that's obviously running MacOS. The things the lady is able to do with messaging her family, making phone calls, sending texts, looking up addresses and searching for people's phones...I was amazed.
I’m right there with you. 2015 was peak MBP. The 2018 update has given me some hope, but good lord USB-C is still a shitshow.
Same here. I hopped between all kinds of distros –– Most of the *buntus, Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch, and Void. As much as I loved tinkering with everything, I began to look for something that "just worked;" KDE Neon was my final distro before MacOS, but going from my 2018 MBP back to my old Thinkpad X230 with KDE Neon feels much less refined than I originally remembered.
I’m surprised to see this as the top reply, but as a long user of Linux I switched over to OSX. I started with Ubuntu mainly and then used Arch for a good while. I love Linux, but Arch was just a little more work than I wanted to deal with. I found I was spending more time messing with OS things, and less time programming, which is where my real enjoyment lives. I also have gotten into iOS development recently so that played a pretty big factor. Honestly OSX just feels like another distro of Linux anyways.
I'm surprised to read these kind of remarks from so many devs in this thread. I guess it must vary by the kinds of work or workflow you adopt. I do lots of serverside backend work and OSX has always been a significant downgrade because of the mismatch between what me and the target system. Sure I can use docker (but host bind mounts don't work half as well) or vagrant, but it's faff that I don't want or need. Couple that with the ability to bend the whole operating system to my will and I can't see another platform I'd rather work on.
I can imagine much of this evaporates if you do mobile / desktop / web development.
This kind of thing is constantly surprising to me, but common enough that I don't think everyone is lying about it :D. I find that the only time I mess with the OS is when I spot a workflow inefficiency that I'd like to fix. Other than that it ticks on with basically zero intervention required. I update the packages, I reboot every few days if I get a kernel bump. That's it. I've had the same Arch install for getting on 5/6 years with one hiccup that took a couple of hours to track down and fix. I just wonder why people have such disparate experiences with Linux. Maybe it also helps that I develop on a desktop?
Do you feel that this because you don't like the state of your machine and so tweak to try and move it to something that would please you, and with OS X your workflow feels nice enough that you don't seek to change it any more, or is that you are compelled to mess with the OS because things are broken (e.g. essential program X doesn't start, networking is weird, that kind of thing)?
The former seems very believable to me. I don't think the default (gnome especially) linux desktops are particularly compelling, and the fact that you can choose sometimes can lead you down the path of constantly playing with it. I'd be surprised if it was the latter. OS X ships with a default desktop experience that's more than adequate. I personally hate it, but I can see why many like it.
I'm not GP, but I spent a number of years running Arch, which in my experience (a great one!) required a lot of active tinkering to stay on top of updates, especially if you were using proprietary drivers or installing lots of AUR software. It was hugely educational and lots of fun for me, but still enough of a time sink that I eventually switched to KDE Neon on everything, including the laptop I use for work (something I could never justify with Arch).
I've found that Neon hits the sweet-spot for "leave-it-alone" stability and compatibility, while also having the latest Qt/KDE usability/workflow improvements.
When you say tinker I am assuming you mean something more than
pacman -Syu. Were you running bumblebee or something? That seems to be a big source of headaches. I run either shitty laptops with no discrete gpu or desktops (nvidia prop drivers) and shit just works for me. Perhaps I am just lucky.Yeah, I ran Arch on a laptop with Intel/Nvidia, and on my primary desktop. This was back before bumblebee was even an option, and getting optirun/primusrun working reliably involved a lot of hoop-jumping, especially trying to get it all to play nice with Steam. It was also a period of rapid development (leading up to bumblebee), so updates almost always meant going back and rejiggering everything. There were other little things that I'm sure have improved since then, like having to write my own scripts to interface with media controls on my USB headset or keyboard backlights.
On my desktop things were smoother but still had some quirks around the boot process and my 2 monitors + TV set up, seemingly randomly putting the boot menu and primary screen on the (turned off) TV output. I think the blame for that is at least partly with my motherboard/UEFI though.
I also wanted Pulse on my desktop (for managing the desktop speakers, headset, and soundbar outputs independently), and this was still early days for Pulse, so that involved a fair amount of ongoing tinkering.
That makes a lot of sense.
Early pulse was a shitshow (it's been zero touch for a few years now), and multi-monitor does require some careful effort around making sure xrandr sets the primary monitor properly.
Steam is still terrible (imho). I play all my games on windows :D
Even now Pulse needs some fiddling, at least for my setup. My motherboard soundcard has several outputs, including analog (my desktop speakers) and optical (my soundbar). Pulse, by default, sees the entire MB as one sink with a different profile for each physical output, while I want to open the card with one profile providing sinks for each physical output. This can be done, but still requires you to know that it's possible and to manually tweak a config file.
Depending on your choice of games, you should definitely take a look at Steam Play/Proton.
These days I've so far been able to play everything I'm interested in via Proton without issue, the only time I've rebooted to Windows was because GoG (of all things) forces you to use their Galaxy client for multiplayer in Shadow Warrior, which otherwise runs great with Proton.
Granted I'm mostly playing Dota 2 (native) or smaller indie games, but so far Linux gaming is the best it's ever been.
Heh. Interesting. I just remember the days of constantly having to kill it and flip things on and off as I removed or added headphones.
Get hype! I am really keen to see proton succeed. I guess I should do my bit for getting it prioritized by adding another steam system to the mix.
I'm a pretty casual user; landed on Arch eventually.
Post-setup it's the easiest distro to use by farrrrrrrrrrr. It Just Works.
It's pretty much the Ultimate Beginner's Distro with a mildly time-consuming setup.
I'm very skeptic of this. I have used Arch before. It breaks. You gotta figure stuff out. You gotta watch out for bad updates. It is time-consuming. It has one upside: the AUR. But the AUR is also a vector of numerous bugs. People talk about Arch like the other distros couldn't be scripted and customized to death, like every other distro was Microsoft's Linux. They are not. Arch is not better: it is a hobby. It's like a vintage car that you just love to fix. You drive it once a week to show to the neighbors, but you would starve if you used it as a cab.
I've been using Arch for the past five years and that car metaphor is extremely incorrect. You're correct in saying that Arch breaks, but it would be more apt to compare it to the car in your driveway than a vintage car - you have to do a little maintenance sometimes, but if you can't do it yourself you get help from someone else. And while Arch has a culture that is self absorbed, it's easy to use as well as customizable.
What you describe is similar enough to my metaphor to make it at least valid enough.
I've never had arch break on me. I don't get this meme. Can you give me a specific example of it breaking for you?
As someone who uses Arch on a lot of different machines, I find their method of kernel updates obnoxious at best and horrible at worst.
The fact that any time the kernel updates I have to reboot because it preserves nothing from the previous install is just flat-out bad. I've had several times where I've plugged in a USB key shortly after doing an update and spent far more time than I should've troubleshooting why the USB thumb drive wasn't working before it clicked in my head that the
linuxpackage updated and now it can't load theusb_storagemodule even though the update was from 4.16.1 to 4.16.2.Past that, there have been a few package renaming/rearchitecting that I've run into that broke a few things...but honestly, I agree with you that Arch doesn't break much at all. Far less of a headache than my Gentoo systems back in the day.
This is not a meme. It is a description which uses a metaphor for analogical purposes.
Also: for how long has it not break?
In his post, he didn't really use it as a meme. But a lot of the time, when arch comes up in conversation it's "hur dur dur arch break arch bad", "something something spend more time fixing than using" by people with no experience with arch.
And than on the other end is the "I'm an elite haxor man because I hav arch get rekt ubunoob".
And I've used it for about a year now. A few of my programs have needed to be refreshed, but I've never had my OS in an unusable state. It's also not very hard to install. The wiki has extensive documentation, anyone can do it. Arch is just an os and people need to stop treating like some ultimate test of technical skills to keep it running for more than a day.
Listen, as a programmer, I get where you're coming from. But most people simply can't manage that much. They really, truly can't.
I'm speaking as someone who has dealt with users and who has been such a user himself. Technical instructions are intimidating. Really, really fucking intimidating. A few years ago, installing a new hard drive with a new OS was a daunting task for me, someone who had a few years of programming experience and several years of general experience with computers and troubleshooting under his belt. That's a level of experience far surpassing your average user's.
Most people don't user computers the way you or I do. For them, a computer is just a way to access the internet, save some files, and use some programs. They can usually figure out how to download and install a program, but that's about as technical as it gets for them. Just like most people don't know how to repair or maintain their cars, but they can at least drive one. In the end, they end up relying on someone else to do the dirty work for them because they don't know what they're doing and either don't know how or don't care to find out how to learn about it. Asking them to install a new OS is like asking the average car driver to change their own spark plugs or drain their own oil--the task is, relatively speaking, fairly simple, but most people just aren't comfortable with doing it because no one can make them feel comfortable by showing them how to do it right first.
After all, computers and cars are expensive. No one wants to be responsible for accidentally breaking expensive things and incurring additional expenses as a result. They'd rather just pay someone else a smaller amount to help them out and eliminate that risk altogether.
In short: logic and psychology aren't even close to having a lot of overlap. You're thinking with logic, but the psychology of the average person is very risk-averse and prone to confusion and intimidation. For every person you find who can manage to install Arch, I guarantee you that I'll find another whose eyes will gloss over when tasked with the same.
I love Linux, but I'll never recommend it as the OS of choice for the average person.
I totally agree, the "Arch is easy" crowd is pretty blind to the expectations that the "average" user has for their computer. To me, Arch has always been the "project car" distro, like Gentoo, which requires a much greater degree of user knowledge and ongoing tinkering. It's fantastic in that role, but not something that even most "computer literate" users will have the patience for.
Having said that, there is a massive difference between Arch and the likes of end-user friendly distros like the Ubuntu family or Fedora. For the right use cases, there are many success stories of people moving their otherwise computer illiterate family members to friendlier distros like Mint, often with fewer issues and confusion than the alternative switch to Windows 10.
I understand that you were replying to someone talking about the install being easy, but I question if that should even be relevant. Most normal users don't and won't install any OS, and it seems like every relevant figure pushing for people to use alternative and free OSes suggests having a nerd do it for you.
If we throw out difficulty of install, is Arch really that much harder than other alternatives, if someone has already set it up for you? Seems to me like that just depends on what programs they care about having. You could probably put Grandma on something much more stable but for someone who is not an advanced user but still wants more than the bare minimum, Arch might avoid them making a mess of unmanaged installs and such just due to the convenience of the AUR.
This is the crucial roadblock to even gaining experience with Linux in general. Nerds have a large presence online, but most people don't have the kind of ready access to a nerd with Linux experience to get help without paying out the nose in tech support fees to have it done for them. And quite frankly, no one wants to go through the hassle of finding someone or paying the extra money when their Mac or their Windows machine gets the job done, can be bought from pretty much any electronics department, and can be used almost immediately after being powered on.
That aside, even if you can get help with the OS install, installing additional software on Linux can be a bit funky for normal users. Command lines are like black magic to them. To my knowledge, from my prior experiences with Arch in a VM, there was no graphical interface for package management by default, so that makes it an immediate no-go for most users.
Users are stupid as a general rule. Believe me. When I first tried Kubuntu years ago (i.e. easily 15+ years), when I didn't even know there was more than one OS, I thought the name "Kubuntu" was the name of the manufacturer, and my family and I tried to use it just like a Windows machine. We got frustrated, could never get anything to work, didn't understand what was wrong with it, couldn't get any help from tech support, and ultimately ended up ditching it. None of us even knew how to conduct a proper Google search, and we'd had a Windows machine or two prior to this point.
People are obviously more accustomed to technology now, so I wouldn't imagine that people would have nearly as much trouble as in that little anecdote, but people are still intimidated by technology that doesn't hold their hand and help tell them how to do things. They don't want to learn, they just want to click a couple of icons and have everything working the way they want it to. They especially don't want to use an OS that won't support the software they want to use.
With that being said, if someone only needs to use their OS for really basic shit like storing files or accessing the internet, then sure, set them up with a stable distro and call it a day. Hell, if said person has someone around who can help them keep everything maintained, troubleshoot problems, and install new software, then great, said person can use the distro more generally. But Linux just isn't suitable yet for most people. It's definitely getting there, but there are some crucial hurdles that need to be overcome first so that your average user can use the OS as independently as they can their other devices.
I love Linux, don't get me wrong. I especially love being able to install a program and all of its dependencies straight from the command line with a single line and practically zero thought on my part. It truly is a thing of beauty. But what's easy to you or me is often frustrating, intimidating, and painful to others. The only reason I can do everything I can do now is because I'm actually interested in learning how to do it. Most people aren't.
If someone who doesn't have the knowledge to install an OS on their own and also doesn't have any access to nerds to do it for them (or to have it pre-installed), that's valid. That's why part of advocating for it requires being willing to help people out, doing it for them, or (though I don't know if anyone does this anymore) setting up events to do it for others. I just wanted to make the point that installation shouldn't be considered the user's job for any OS, and shouldn't really be part of a conversation about how viable it is since the average user that you describe wouldn't be able to do it...across the board.
I'm not really trying to be a big defender of Arch here, I just think the approach of talking about install is silly. The hurdle there is the availability of people to do it for them or pre-installed setups, which is something we can definitely work on...I will never expect an average user to do that themselves, it isn't even worth mentioning. I should also clarify that I think installing it for someone else would almost certainly include setting up enough basic software for it to be usable. I don't literally mean just the install and leaving them with a command line.
Also:
So...it's good enough for most people? Hell, with the way most software installation goes, it's more akin to an app store on a phone than it is finding a program and installing it on Windows (I know Windows has a store, but it isn't quite to the point where you can rely on it to the degree that you can sticking to your repos...and if you can, then you won't be able to tell the difference). There is a "mid-range" user who wants more out of their machine and they will need to put some effort in, but I think that's outside of the scope of this conversation since those people are nerds too.
Lol okay, I definitely didn't articulate that one point clearly, it seems. Nice work pointing out the absurdity in the overlap of those two statements. I was thinking primarily in terms of maintenance and installing programs, but it definitely didn't come out that way.
You raise some good points here, especially about the approach of discussing OS installation. I'd ordinarily like to discuss this a bit more, but I think I'll just throw in the towel this time.
My only issue is with people that defends Arch by saying it is a really stable machine. I'm happy you never had any major problems, but for many people
is not something they would call "stable".
I've had one problem in 5/6 years of running the same install. Uptime is mostly around 10-15 days before I boot it, I use it most days for at least 8 hours for work. If this computer was a cab I wouldn't starve. I'd be fine. I know i'd be fine because my income as a contractor depends on working hardware and software.
How much time do you invest in your Arch install for it to remain stable?
I update packages maybe once a week, which involves about 10 seconds of keystrokes.
I'm glad it's working out for you, but I consider it anecdotical. According to the Arch Wiki:
I tend to believe in documentation, and this is not something I'm willing to do on a regular basis to update my system, nor something I think is compatible with what is usually called a stable distro.
Ha. I can see you have made up your mind on this, but you are assuming that I don't include reading the news in my 10 seconds of keystrokes. I do. It's part of the package workflow. My cli tool lets me know if there is a new news item before running the update. There is a news item less than once a month, and on average once every 6 months for one that requires me to do anything.
You can dismiss my direct experience as anecdotal while hand waving about what you think is "most peoples experience" with nothing to back it up. That's your bag, not mine. You can keep putting stable in italics like you are proving a point. You aren't. I have used just about every Linux distro going, Arch is up there with the best of them in terms of having a working system, and beats damn near everything for package availability and ease of expanding that package ecosystem.
You can keep telling yourself that it is the exclusive choice of ricers and show offs and I will continue using it as I build systems for household names.
Hey buddy... I just don't like to read, think or ponder about updates in my interactions with my OS. Even if that's only a possibility, it might happen. I have been using MX-Linux with zero breakage for 3 or 4 years, and I honestly don't even look at what the package manager is bringing on each update. I don't use forums, I don't open issues, I don't ask about it on IRC. It just works without intervention so I can do other stuff.
I also never said Arch is shitty software or anything like that: I just don't think it is on the "stable focused" spectrum of Linux distributions, and even the wiki makes sure to point this out for the users. Even if it doesn't really happen that often, on Arch there's an assumption that the user is responsible for certain tasks. Some people like that and that is fine. No one's forcing me to use it! But it bothers me a bit that many that Arch users (and I'm not talking about you) exaggerate its merits like it was some kind of customization heaven as opposed to all the other distros. This, again, is not about you. Your responses are actually very reasonable.
edit: why do you think the issue here is that I
Whether my mind is "made" is not the matter, but:
A better analogy would be:
It's like the brand new manual car that some people crash in, and frequently. These people should not have licenses, likely, or at least should have bought a different car or perhaps a bike with training wheels.
That's both false and a bit obnoxious, to be honest.
Sorry for being rude, it was not my intention.
No problem, my friend! ;)
But, to make it clear, I don't think "showing off" is necessarily obnoxious. To revisit the metaphor, I happen to love old cars, and I love meeting people riding their old, pimped up vehicles during the weekend. What I wanted to convey is not that Arch users are pretentious show-offs, but that the system itself is not as reliable as the other options if you depend on Linux for "serious", regular or professional usage. I'm not even saying it cannot be used for that: but I think there are many options that are more reliable than Arch while offering a very similar same feature set.
As an example, even if you wanna stay on the DIY side of things, there's always Slackware.
That's hardly rude. It's just true.
For a large portion of Arch users, there are better distros in terms of providing what a person really needs.
Those people who enjoy customizing like to show it to others. Unix Porn on reddit is evidence.
I would say most linux users in general are partially hobbyists but it's the arch crowd that's doing 90% of the show and tell.
I responded in kind.
Is it either?
I think the analogy works well. People definitely try Arch because it seems like the most powerful and most impressive but don't have the skills to use it well. Thus, having a bad experience.
Hardly. It's got several design choices that make life easier for the maintainers at the cost of making life slightly harder for the end users. Not liking those poor choices or getting caught up in them does not make anyone less capable of using Linux. Arch users aren't some elite class of pro drivers.
It's just elitist memes. People desperately try to make themselves feel smart and special. Arch may be slightly harder to install than Ubuntu, but anyone who knows how to follow directions can do it eaisily.
The only time I ever tried to install Arch, I followed the instructions down to the letter and everything ended up broken. Needless to say, I've since chosen to stick with something that isn't going to break if I so much as breathe in the wrong direction.
Lemme get this straight: you've never managed an Arch Linux install but
You can't possibly know this.
Unfortunately, you didn't, otherwise you would have wound up with a working system rather than a broken one.
No, I definitely followed the instructions precisely as they were given in the installation guide in the wiki. I'm not exactly a stranger to following technical instructions. It's practically part of my job description. In typical Linux fashion, I read the fucking manual.
Something somewhere got fucked up. I don't know where and your average user sure as shit wouldn't have been able to get nearly as far as I did. I was at least able to get a different OS installed after the fact, because again, I know how to follow a set of instructions.
Let me be generous, though, and follow your assumption that I managed to not follow the instructions down to the letter despite my certainty. How does this assumption change the end result of the argument? Someone who is accustomed to following instructions like the ones for an Arch install managed to royally screw it up. That pretty strongly contradicts the suggestion that "anyone who knows how to follow directions can do it eaisily [sic]".
My point is that it's ridiculous to assume that the average person is capable of an Arch install. Hell, most couldn't manage an Ubuntu install without some hand holding, and I would peg that one as "easy".
Neither you nor I nor anyone else who can perform an OS install unassisted can be considered a model for the average user.
That's cool, I never made that argument. I commented on the fact that you made strong assertions about the stability of a working install when by your own admission you never managed to produce one.
I would not consider myself an average user, I haven't sold myself as one. I work as a distributed systems database engineer cum SRE. I think that's as far away from your average computer user as it gets.
Lastly considering the population of people that have successfully got themselves a working Arch system don't you think it's a tad silly to assert that you made zero mistakes and somehow everyone else that has succeeded in getting a working install has accidentally not followed the instructions in such a way as to lead them to success?
I never commented on the stability of a working install. I was commenting on the installation process itself.
I'd like to touch on a couple of different points here.
The first is only tangential: this is probably survivorship bias. You don't see the users who run into install problems and just give up, and you probably don't see the potentially many users who run into some weird edge case issue and manage to find the solution that isn't officially documented. Yes, this is conjecture, but hypotheticals are important here. It's important not to look at only the successful cases and forget that there may be quite a few silent, unsuccessful cases.
The second is that all documentation is written by humans. Fallible, non-omniscient humans who can't account for every possible problem before those problems make themselves evident. For all I know, there could have just been a problem with my particular combination of hardware that wasn't accounted for. Maybe my install media itself was to blame. Maybe a file that was supposed to be renamed by the install media didn't end up getting renamed. It could be just about anything. I honestly don't know why the install failed and it's been some years since then, so I can't exactly troubleshoot the problem anymore. All I know for certain is that I followed the install instructions, again, down to the letter.
I've run into a few analogous issues in the past with software. Hell, a few months back I ran into an undocumented problem with MongoDB replica sets with a legacy driver version, specifically with connections dropping when a secondary is syncing. Sometimes random, undocumented shit just happens and there's no good source of information anywhere for resolving the problem. Is it really all that surprising that someone would run into such an edge case with an OS install?
Fair enough
I am having a hard time understanding how to reconcile these. If I sub "something" for "Arch Linux" that really doesn't seem to be a comment on the install process. Moving on.
I certainly don't deny that lots of people get it wrong, get frustrated etc. The plethora of arch install projects demonstrate that there is a demand for a process that is more automatic and asks for significantly less intervention from the user. However
I think this is where we disagree. Installing arch consists of:
That's it. That formula hasn't changed in years, and the tools to do it haven't changed much either in their interface. I have installed arch onto a bunch of laptops and desktops and bajillion vms with zero problems. People even have one liners for installing it.
I can see we aren't going to agree on this, but that isn't serious. Anyway, I don't really know why I keep participating in this conversation: I genuinely hope you have found the best platform for doing your work, and that your systems are always stable, and your hardware always cool, quiet and functional.
Peace.
Yeah, that's a pretty bold assumption of installing everything exactly right.
The install guide has multiple sub articles with further specifics that vary by hardware so easy to miss something.
I addressed this in my reply to the parent comment, but I'll address it here as well. Assuming you're correct and that I overlooked a sub article addressing specific hardware, because it's "easy to miss", how does this support the suggestion that anyone who can follow directions can install Arch easily?
I spend hours every day staring at code looking through every tiny detail. I configure software on multiple web servers and keep them maintained. If I did manage to overlook something, what do you think an ordinary user without that background is going to do?
There are always possibilities of missing something even if you do it all the time.
Isn't it more productive to be skeptical rather than feeling certain?
I don't know how that "this" supports that suggestion. I don't think that.
And as for the ordinary users, probably give up??
I think "bold" was the wrong word choice, didn't mean to call anyone out.
Back to Ubuntu, I like simplicity, ease of use and resources when I need help. I don't have time to tweak and customise my OS to death, I just want it to work and get out of my way. When I run into problems I want to be able to find a solution based on someone else already have this problem and it being answered, Ubuntu has given me the greatest chances of that happening. Plus now that gaming via steam is really becoming and alternative on Linux and they tend to work from a Debian distro I want as much compatibility with that as possible.
Yep. Tried loads myself and always find my way back to Ubuntu.
Debian. It's rock-solid, and "just works". I'm not sure how the Ubuntu team managed to make a Debian-core product so unstable, and so slow.
In the past I've used Arch, Guix and Gentoo, and my preference is for Arch - but I've had some problems around my SSD and Arch that sucked... But Debian has all my drivers in mainline, though a couple are nonfree. It's easy, it works.
Because I use XFCE when I'm not in a tty, most people don't even realise my laptop is Linux-based, and just think I have a cool theme.
I do have a fairly extensive setup of scripts, but they're all backed up in multiple places. A full system restore to put my preferences onto Arch, Gentoo or Debian is a single command-stroke away, so I don't much care what my core distribution is, it doesn't really affect me day-to-day.
I like XFCE because of how minimalist it is. I actually had someone look at my screen and ask if I was running Windows 98!
I'm happy for you, I guess... :P
(but Xfce can look really good and modern)
What's the ATI GPU support like nowadays? Last time (a year+ ago) I tried out Ubuntu and Debian I got constant crashes. It worked fine with 1 monitor, but I have 3 and that seemed to have been an issue. I have an ATI Radeon R9 390
You'll might still get constant crashes on Ubuntu, as they track drivers a bit differently to Debian.
However, Ubuntu report:
Which means you wouldn't have to futz with anything.
Debian has two lines of ATI GPU drivers, proprietary and open source.
The proprietary driver, tends to lag behind the open source driver in performance and stability.
Instead, the
xserver-xorg-video-amdgpupackage is all you need, and has official support for your graphics cards.If, on Debian, you experience some lag, its because Debian disable the DRM in your graphics card by default. They take the 'free' in free software seriously.
However, you can fix it by installing
firmware-amd-graphics, and then DRM takes over, and performance becomes what you'd expect.You can create issues for yourself if you install the nvidia drivers, surprise surprise. That'd happen on any platform.
You can fix that, with a nice and simple:
apt-get purge nvidia.(Don't forget the dot! It's a regex thing.)Then update, and install the packages you need.
And... You can find all of that on the ATI help page.
Thanks for the info! Last time I tried it was around the time ATI dropped their support for linux drivers (I don't remember the details, I just know that proprietary drivers didn't work anymore and open source ones weren't great).
I'd love to be using Debian, but it wouldn't recognize my network card for the life of me (I tried the non-free ISO and many other methods). Because I had other matters to attend, I went to MX-Linux, which is kind of the next best thing.
Linux Mint. I tried out Debian before that, and I think Ubuntu. I'm tech-literate, but not a Linux power-user.
For me at least, Linux Mint seems to be the sweet spot. I dropped Debian because I had to keep tinkering with things repeatedly when installing new programs (not every time, but enough to be annoying). Mint is pretty much Ubuntu under the hood, which means that pretty much every Linux program out there supports it.
With Cinnamon, Mint is similar enough to Windows that it was immediately familiar and easy to use, but it of course allows for all the customization Linux does normally.
Outside of Cinnamon, what are the main differences between Linux Mint and Ubuntu?
I ask because I've searched around and legitimately haven't found a great answer, and Linux Mint's own website doesn't have a breakdown (that I can find). Everything I've read has pointed to how Mint used to add some quality of life features but also that Ubuntu has pretty much caught up on that front.
I'm interested in this question specifically because Ubuntu MATE and Linux Mint MATE are serious contenders (I'm actually posting this from Ubuntu MATE right now, and I'm about to reboot and try Mint MATE). I really like the DE (this is my first run with it, coming from XFCE), and it seems lightweight enough to meet my needs.
Aside from Cinnamon? Just less bloat. Mint doesn't have as much bundled software, afaik, which is exactly what I, personally, was looking for.
Honestly, I had the same exact issue as you when I was looking for my linux distro - as a layuser, there's no good way to figure out the differences between them without checking it out yourself. Which is what I ended up doing. Installed each distro, set it up the way I liked it, used it for a bit.
Mint won out in the end, but it's not a huge margin. I could easily still be using debian and be happy with it.
Honestly, most of theh differences between the various distros are cosmetic. The most consequential, for me, has been the package manager - I prefer Ubuntu's over Debian's, just because the former is more popular (and therefore better supported, but only slightly).
Personally, I'd recommend that you try a few distros that sound interesting. Once you settle on one, use that for a bit until you inevitably outgrow it, and then search for another one that fulfills the needs you've discovered.
Isn't one of the big advantages to mint (And something that's got them into trouble in the past) the preinstalled media codecs?
Isn't that just a checkbox during Ubuntu install these days?
Mint is the best version of Ubuntu. In my experience, It has a lot fewer bugs.
Screen tearing is the only issue I ever had with Cinnamon. It wasn't as easy to fix as in Xfce because it wasn't just a question of enabling Compton. But this was a long time ago, so it might have been fixed.
I'm a software developer with twenty years of experience. I abandoned Linux entirely in favor of OpenBSD on my personal equipment last year after almost 20 years of distro-hopping.
Despite what you might expect, OpenBSD is a solid workstation/desktop OS. It works fine on my secondhand ThinkPad and ThinkCentre equipment.
Kubuntu. Ubuntu in general has the best hardware and software support; the only thing really holding it back IMHO is the desktop environment. Kubuntu uses KDE, which I really like for a number of reasons. Lubuntu with LXDE is a very close second choice. There was a time when I would have preferred a lightweight distro, but I have much nicer computers than I used to.
The ironic part is that right now I am kind of stuck on Windows because I was doing a class that required it and never bothered to go back. I hope the community can forgive me.
I really like KDE. If I wasn't addicted to i3, it would be my DE of choice.
I tested a half-dozen distros and ended up on Manjaro. Everything worked really well out of the box, and it felt quick and polished. No real complaints except for a few graphics driver issues.
I also liked Solus a lot, and stayed with it for a few months. I'll likely try it again in the future.
Manjaro tends to introduce annoying breakages with updates. So be careful and don't update if you need to do something important in the next days.
On that note, I've actually had a more stable experience on manjaro since I've been using their unstable repos (I think they run about 3 days behind arch?) - seems counter intutive to me, but could be because I'm running relatively new hardware?
It is hard to say. Maybe they have different teams for each repo, and the people looking for the
unstablebranch is better than the other ones. And when thestablepeople get the packages, their fixes actually break stuff for some people. There's also the issue ofunstablegetting fixes quicker.But I don't really know.
I'm a pretty beginner-level Linux user. I've used Linux on and off for a few years and only in the past few months have made the switch permanently. I went from Ubuntu, to Linux Mint, finally settling on Debian 9.5 running XFCE. It's easy to use and after some fiddling, it just werks™. XFCE is also very lightweight and highly customizable, as opposed to Cinnamon or Unity. I had privacy concerns with Ubuntu due to it's association with Amazon, and while I do believe Linux Mint is better, it's still based on Ubuntu (If anyone who knows better wants to tell me why I'm wrong, please do).
IIRC all the stuff about Canonical selling data to Amazon (I think? The referral links that give them money.) no longer exist - as it's no longer based on Unity - instead based on GNOME. If data is shared between Canonical and Amazon, forks of Ubuntu most likely won't have the same tendencies. (Sorry for poor wording.)
If you're looking for something even more lightweight and even more customisable, there's Arch and i3wm. They require some drastic changes to your workflow however, and many aren't comfortable with them. However, after some fiddling, it just werks™.
I don't know if you've tried Manjaro xfce, but that's a distro you might like. Based off Arch and not Ubuntu, so no worries about privacy. As for privacy, Tails goes to the extreme, and you might like to try it on a live DVD or USB, but it's not for main use. If you liked Mint's UI, you could try installing the Cinnamon DE on a Debian install.
This implies it's still a problem innate in Ubuntu. :/
I'm happy with Debian right now, and I need my computer every day for school, so I don't plan to switch any time soon lest I fuck something up. But if I do decide to, I'll definitely check out Manjaro, thank you for the suggestions! I've used Tails in the past for more clandestine purposes, but I'm not so far down the privacy rabbit-hole that I would consider using it for daily use (yet).
That's a fair point. Thanks!
Since you use your computer for school, have you found a way to make LibreOffice a little less ugly?
No, but I admittedly haven't tried. I like to my rice my desktop but don't really care about LibreOffice in particular. I do use Arc theme which applies to LibreOffice but it still looks pretty ugly.
Thanks, I'll find a way to make it look better ^somehow
Thanks!
As a fairly casual user who has distro hopped for fun for years and only recently moved away from dual booting with Windows or having whatever distro I'm playing with be on a secondary machine, I've been comfortable with Mint for a while now and any change would simply be because I want to play with something new.
Moreso than any setup I've had in the past on any OS, everything works nicely and Cinnamon nowadays is so comfortable and intuitive that I'd have a hard time justifying any move away.
I haven't really done too much hopping; I've tried Ubuntu in the past, and have used Oracle Solaris 11 on one of my workstations in the past. I'd consider myself computer-literate, but I'm not so hardcore as users can get.
Windows 10 has been really pissing me off, more and more as time goes on. A couple of weeks ago I made the impulse decision to install Arch on one of my spare SSD's and see how that went. I'd heard that it was one of the most customizable distro's with minimal bloat, if a little unfriendly for newcomers to GNU/Linux. A few hours and just as many drinks later, I was setting up my DE and installing everything I thought I'd need.
I've been running Arch as my main OS since, and while it's been a learning experience I was really expecting this to be more difficult. I haven't riced my DE yet, but most of the functionality I need is there to be my daily driver. Although I'll still boot onto my Windows drive if I want to play Overwatch or do some 3DCG.
I'm basically in the same boat, but for me it's my school/work laptop with arch (but actually manjaro) and my main desktop with a windows partition for some games, but a now using mainly Debian since proton dropped. (also, is your name a reference to Va11-hall-4 or something else?)
I haven't heard of this before now, it looks like a pretty interesting VN.
My handle has a few origin stories. Mostly I'm very fascinated by the Golden Age of Piracy, and Calico Jack is one of many of the interesting figures of that time.
Ah! Gotchya, Calico Jack is certaintly interesting - If I remember right, CALICO's the name of the computer full of drink recipes in Valhalla - I just finished it recently so I guess it's still on the brain
I didn't distrohop too much or too often, but after tried Ubuntu (and several of their DE flavors), Mint and Mint Debian (both DEs), Debian (stable and testing), FrankenDebian (by mistake), Centos, Antergos and Fedora, I stick with Fedora.
I've been a sysadmin for Debian, Centos and Ubuntu and I found the problems in the "apt-distros" are (for me) more complicated to resolve than in the "rpm-distros".
I've been using Fedora on my desktop PC since F16 (7 years ago) without any mayor problem (even having a Nvidia card) and I was very surprised that when I installed F27 in my notebook e v e r y t h i n g just worked out of the box... like even the touchscreen, orientation sensors and light sensors... that amazed me, honestly.
Now I mostly do web development and devops work and Fedora is the sweet spot where everything is easy to install, configure and administrate. But nowadays I'm intrigued for the future because of the Silverblue project.
I landed on Fedora as well. It strikes a nice balance for me; updates fast enough to not have to constantly be installing from outside the repos (Ubuntu), but not so fast that things are always breaking (Arch).
I'm on arch. I started with mint, switched to Ubuntu to see what the differences were, switched back to mint because I liked cinnamon a lot more than unity (Before Ubuntu switched back to gnome). I saw the Gnome DE and thought it looked really nice, so I switched to fedora because I was ready for a change and heard it was "the gnome distribution".
I used fedora for a year or so, set up a few Debian servers, and started to get more comfortable with Linux. During this time, I was frustrated with how slowly somethings would update, and when I asked about it I was told that old things are fine if they're stable and if I wanted something newer I should just download it from the internet instead of the package manager. In addition to this, half the time I looked something up I would get an arch wiki page or instructions to do it on arch. Thirdly, I started reading up on I3 and it looked great as a vim user. I didn't really want to gut my current install and switch to it, though.
All of these things lead me to switch to arch, and I couldn't be happier. Highly up-to-date, the best documentation I've come across, and extremely lightweight and customable. It's really not as hard to install as people make it out to be, and it hasn't broken at all. In fact, it's less likely to break on update than mint (lol).
Ubuntu (and especially lately Kubuntu). Not because I don't know my way around Linux but rather I prefer that some of the details are taken care of for me. Like programing and code reuse, there is no need to reinvent the wheel to get e.g. display drivers working when it can be largely automated these days.
At some point I realized that constantly babysitting an OS just wasn't worth it for me. The beauty of a distro like Ubuntu is that you can still fairly easily pop the hood if you want to as well.
I'm just a casual user - so I haven't hopped much (although I probably will.)
Hopped from Mint (didn't like the Cinnamon DE - sorry!) to Ubuntu (kinda clunky) to Manjaro (had wifi problems) to Puppy (worked fine - but didn't like the looks, and hard to use) and now on Elementary (which is nice, even if no dark theme.) I personally wouldn't recommend elementary for your use case, though.
Comments on Deepin redacted.
Try looking on Distrowatch - it's got loads of reviews for each one.
I didn't know - thank you! I've redacted my comments on Deepin and linked to the Wikipedia article. I didn't do much research, only read a few of the Distrowatch reviews.
Re elementary OS and dark theme: There's a "prefer dark mode" (or something like that) in elementary tweak.
I can't seem to get it to install, however.
https://itsfoss.com/install-elementary-tweaks-in-elementary-os-freya-luna/
The instructions are exactly the same for Freya, Luna, Loki, and Juno. You open it through the settings. It'll be in the personal section.
I've installed it on both Loki and Juno, so I'm not sure what could be going wrong.
I like void a lot. I dislike runit immensely. It does exactly what it sets out to do but I would like it to do more. I am hoping to find sometime this year to replace runit with anopa or the s6 dependency management thingy, but conceptually I think I like anopa a bit more. I am also hoping that if I do a good enough job of it I can get it upstreamed, but I am not too optimistic. I am however pretty optimistic about me getting what I want which is a good enough reason to try.
xbps takes some getting used to but it's so ungodly fast I sometimes wonder if it is actually updating my system!
Yeah, I am sure that most people get along with runit just fine. It is rock solid and dead simple which are two things I tend to appreciate in an init system. s6 in and of itself when running as pid 1 looks an awful lot like runit (by design), so moving to just s6 is really sideways. Anopa just builds a thin layer to add dependency management on top. So if you want to say have a service that requires the docker daemon to be up, but you don't want either to be always on, that's easy to define. Now of course, you can make that work with relevant calls to
svin the init script of the depending service but it feels ghetto to be editing run scripts to talk about dependencies.Hi.
I've been using Linux a while; mostly for programming and college related stuff. However, I don't really understand the inner working of it (have been meaning to get around to LFS, hopefully over the next semester break). I know that an init system has PID 1, which means that it's the first process which starts, and I'm assuming it then gets around to starting other processes. Is that right? What else should an init system be doing? What use-case do you have which isn't fulfilled by runit?
I've been trying to learn more about Linux. I would be grateful if you could explain this. Thanks!
You should read @apoctr's wiki article, you could also look at https://www.skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-svscan-1.html#stages. Tons of info s6's site.
I tried a dozen or so distros around a decade ago. Then started using Ubuntu and its variants for a few years. Settled on Debian stable 3 years ago. Currently considering a migration to something with more up-to-date packages. I'd like to stay in the Debian ecosystem, so maybe I'll go back to Ubuntu, or use Mint. Anyone have advise on using Debian testing/unstable?
I run a mix of Debian Sid on my desktop and Arch on my laptop. Sid isn't bad as far as rolling release distros go, but you have to both be comfortable with Debian specifically and the nature of rolling releases in general to work well with it; packages do break in there more often than they do in Arch IME, but so long as you're doing an
apt dist-upgradeand haveapt-listbugsinstalled, you should be fine.My laptop is staying on Arch because it's a dirt cheap (~$130 new) one running on a newer Celeron (Goldmont based), and being able to tweak a lot of things re: newer Intel graphics drivers and power optimizations for this thing that I haven't been able to set up as easily in Debian make it actually get slightly better battery life than it did with Windows originally.
How frequent and how severe is such breakage in Sid? I've been considering moving to it because pinning big things like Firefox you end up being unable to upgrade because sooner than later something requires a newer version of libc and an upgrade becomes a move from stable to Sid anyways. I've been reluctant to switch because I don't want much (any, if possible) friction from the OS on my workflow.
Started my journey with Crunchbang, after bouncing around a lot after it died, I've eventually landed on good old Debian Sid. It's not the base of literally everything for nothing. Massive repos (turned me off Solus) with sanely split packages (turned me off Arch) and good defaults (turned me off Funtoo. Not that Funtoo has bad defaults but sorting through all those USE flags really got to me), it's hard to go wrong with Debian Sid. It's solid, up-to-date, has everything I need and is probably the most widely supported distro.
I've been using MX-Linux for the last 3 or 4 years. It's basically Debian Stable, but it works out of the box and has a few very nice extra GUI tools, like package configurations and easy, reliable snapshots. It comes with Xfce, which is considered a very stable desktop environment. Like Stretch, MX-Linux is indestructible but the packages are kind of old. But I only have three software I must use current versions of:
And I never had any trouble installing them from source or tarball. To me, it's the best of both worlds. I think MX-Linux really deserves more attention, but I guess a distro that just works forever is kinda boring lol.
Here's a positive review from Dedoimedo, a guy known and hated for his ruthless reviews (mostly because he does the unthinkable: expect distros to work out of the box).
I've tried almost everything when I was younger because I thought I was finding the "best one", I eventually realized that if I understood the system and did more of the "heavy lifting" I could shape things to what I wanted my experience to be.
I landed on Debian. Stable, logically organized, well documented, strong community, efficient, etc. I think I've pretty much used just Debian for 7 years or so.
I'll be honest, I thought I was set on Debian for life. But Arch is looking more appealing and less of a challenge than it used to be so I'll probably try it out again soon.
I do a lot of work in the terminal now, scripting, tools, etc.
I just don't feel like the hassle of getting arch to a point where it's actually a good system (not just functioning) is worth the effort of switching right now.
I'm probably just going to mess around with it in a virtual machine until I like it more than my regular system. I've tried a few times but my packages or a PGP signature keep getting corrupted, it's a bit harder to pin the issue down + other issues with the VM though.
I started with SuSE 7, I was 5th or 6th grade, so it's been around 12 years that I use some GNU/Linux distro. I started with the SuSE 7, then tried Pardus and Mandrake, probably Fedora too, maybe some others. For a couple years during high school I didn't have a computer. Then around when I graduated I got one again, and some time later I guess I used Ubuntu for a while. Toyed with Fedora (which always had the boot process hang up on the Plymouth screen for me), then on 2013 I switched to Arch Linux which I used for some years. Then I moved to FreeBSD which I gladly used. When I switched to a proper laptop that has some battery life, I switched to Xubuntu and stayed there a while, I wanted to make use of the suspend/resume and couldn't ever get it to work on FreeBSD. I swithed to Debian shortly after that, and stayed there for a while, then recently I tried out some Ubuntu flavours, Arch Linux and GuixSD again, but came back to Debian w/ XFCE desktop, and am rather content with it.
So currently I'm settled on Debian for more than a year, but with interruptions. Here is my setup. Debian XFCE gives me a clean slate XFCE4 desktop, so I don't need to micro manage every bit of the desktop experience (which I used to do, using one of i3, xmonad or (v)twm at different times, but becomes tiresome) but can customise w/o much friction and to a great extent. Also XFCE config is the easiest, among popular DEs, to version control. All combined, I theoretically have a consistent, replicatable system in my hands now.
My next stop will be GuixSD. I can't resist it. But I can't just switch at a whim, I only have one computer ATM and I need it to be online and my config to be fully working. But I'll start trying it out in a VM. I need to get a custom kernel working, linux-libre doesn't work for me. When I got it streamlined, I'll do the switch. In the meantime I can possibly try out moving to Debian unstable, because the stable branch is a bit too stable for my tastes (I like stable software, but Debian stable is on the stale side). Ultimately I'll decide between a GuixSD setup or possibly and OpenBSD or NetBSD workstation if I can buy a computer with supported hardware (my wifi card is incompatible w/ OpenBSD, if it wasn't, then that could've been the final decision for me). I'm leaning on the GuixSD side though, because the many practical possibilities: see this talk for an intro and this one to see how incredible the practicalities are. Both talks are by Ludovic Courtès.
Edit: Oh, I didn't provide a direct answer to your main question: Just use Debian with your desktop of choice. Totally lightweight for me with XFCE4, also stable, reliable, deeply configurable, nicely documented (though nowhere near FreeBSD or OpenBSD quality). Vast amount of packages, quite up to date if you can risk using sid (the unstable branch).
Oh yes, apparently I thought about it but forgot to write about it :) Sorry about that. I tried it a few times but had problems, some video issues with my old laptop (X session would be tinted red, like using f.lux but with an extreme setting. I have a video of the problem.
WRT why I'm attracted towards GuixSD, well, two things: functional package management and use of Lisp. If I start from the second, which is quicker to explain, having a common language to configure almost entirety of the system is very handy, I hate having to dabble with subtle differences with how every program parses .conf or .ini files, or suffering reading through manpages for weird syntaxes. Just use some Lisp, and GuixSD just does that: it uses Guile Scheme. Programming in Lisp is very enjoyable and provides many opportunities which are possible but harder with sth. like the NixOS' language. The second video talks about that, and has some cool examples. GuixSD is very Lispy and very integrated.
Functional package management is huge. It means that once you have a config laid out, you can instantiate it any time with one command and anywhere. Also, you can have your configuration rolled back or forward easily, with one command. You can replicate your configuration in a container or vm with one command. This is very useful because it means I can create a very stable, very reliable, totally reproducible base system on which I can work, and never worry about. I can test changes to that system w/o any friction and being sure that I won't break my setup. All that and the fact that I can do all of that in Scheme (which is a more functional and smaller dialect of Lisp) is just great. I keep my eyes on it and wait for it to be polished enough so that it can be my daily driver (and I don't need much polish, but I'd rather not bother with drivers or stuff).
I suggest you watch the videos when you can, they're worth the hour and a half even if you're not interested in using GuixSD, NixOS, or even GNU/Linux at all; that's because GuixSD, together with NixOS, constitute the bleeding edge innovation in operating systems.
Certainly, though Lisp is not very practical these days, from a jobs and libraries perspective, unless you're doing Clojure, which has some traction in the industry. It's a really nice programming experience IMO, though. Most of the Lisp I deal with is Elisp (my Emacs config and a couple packages I wrote), and it's by far my favourite experience. Both it, Scheme and Common Lisp allow for a very interactive sort of programming, and minimalism of syntax and homoiconicity helps you to really make use of metaprogramming safely. It's one of those languages, like Haskell, which teaches you some things about progamming, but unfortunately can't land you jobs except if you're very lucky.
I ran Ubuntu and derivatives for a little while, but quickly got sick of the flakeyness and general incoherence of the family. Hopped to Debian for many years, which was excellent. Began to feel like they had pulled the rug out from under my feet (largely due to systemd-related shittiness and other ttechnical blunders) and started shopping around for a systemd-free distro.
I briefly ran Gentoo before jumping to Funtoo. Which is a bit nicer, mostly due to
egoand related tools. I'm happy with Funtoo for the moment: OpenRC is excellently designed --- it makes sense --- and fast, and flexible. I can write short, declarative services if appropriate, or more more complicated ones involving control flow and logical reasoning. Importantly, OpenRC is actually really well documented, with no hidden features, and thorough examples. Actually, the distro as a whole is well documented. I rarely google issues because the man pages are so good. Would recommend if you're looking for a coherent distro, that makes sense, and can be tweaked as much as you want.I ran Ubuntu and derivatives for a little while, but quickly got sick of the flakeyness and general incoherence of the family. Hopped to Debian for many years, which was excellent. Began to feel like they had pulled the rug out from under my feet (largely due to systemd-related shittiness and other ttechnical blunders) and started shopping around for a systemd-free distro.
I briefly ran Gentoo before jumping to Funtoo. Which is a bit nicer, mostly due to
egoand related tools. I'm happy with Funtoo for the moment: OpenRC is excellently designed --- it makes sense --- and fast, and flexible. I can write short, declarative services if appropriate, or more more complicated ones involving control flow and logical reasoning. Importantly, OpenRC is actually really well documented, with no hidden features, and thorough examples. Actually, the distro as a whole is well documented. I rarely google issues because the man pages are so good. Would recommend if you're looking for a coherent distro, that makes sense, and can be tweaked as much as you want.My main system is still MacOS, but I've got a second Chromebook (Toshiba CB2 Swanky) on GalliumOS, which is a modified xubuntu. I'm running i3-gaps-next... and fell in love.
Over the past few nights I've been working on an install on an external SSD to use on my MBP. I went with xubuntu after trying arch, manjaro, and normal ubuntu. Being fairly new (but not fresh) to Linux, it took me some time to realize that I had to update the kernel to the absolute latest to get the Magic Trackpad 2 working properly. But with some time spent tweaking it, I'm fairly happy with it.
I love i3 so much. With macOS I'm using BetterTouchTool to have designated areas that I bounce specific apps to set regions (like this.) It's a compromise, but it works well enough. I've tried Amethyst and the others, but I just can't get the same layout working nicely.
I love Linux. I love how I can pretty much make it do whatever I want. I'm bent on dark mode for nearly everything, and modifying GTK themes is a total breeze compared to the non-existent macOS themes or even the Windows 10 styles, which are nice, but never complete.
I was on Ubuntu for about 4 years but I switched to Fedora about 2 years ago and I have no plans to change. Fedora is just amazing, I'm surprised its not more well known.
Fedora's pretty well known especially given the fact that they are sponsored by Red Hat. I can only echo your positive experience with the distro. I used to hop from distro to distro just tinkering around with different operating systems and it dawned on me that I hadn't done that for awhile; it was a pleasant surprise when I realized that Fedora is just satisfying to use. Have you checked out Gnome extensions?
For once I didn't distro-hop. My main computer came pre-installed with Ubuntu 16.04, and that's still what I'm using. I'm debating with myself whether I should upgrade it, reinstall with something else, or keep using it as it is. 16.04 is a LTS release, so I'll be getting updates until april 2021. I'm not thrilled about Unity though, but I guess I can try out a few different desktop environments without reinstalling the system.
When I do distro-hop, I always make sure to try at least one distro not based on Ubuntu, and I make sure to try at least one DE I've never used before (or haven't used in many years). I somehow always end up landing on something Ubuntu based though. Last time I did openSUSE with GNOME, Antergos with Budgie, before ending up on Mint with Cinnamon, which I used for near two years before I bought my current computer.
I tried a lot of distros, but settled on Fedora w/ GNOME Shell and, on my other computer, Solus w/ Budgie. Ubuntu always seemed to be breaking from their customizations, and Mint was, well, Mint. I really want to like OpenSUSE and KDE, but it just feels unpolished to me. I'll keep trying it though.
Fedora/Gnome and Solus/Budgie just work with my workflow, look polished, are fast, and don't break when I want to tweak something.
Agreed - Fedora 28 is my distro of choice. I wanted SELinux. Have you played around with Gnome extensions?
Yeah, a little, but I really like vanilla GNOME shell. I use EasyScreenCast, AlternateTab, Refresh Wifi Connections, and User Themes (Materia-light for GTK & Materia-dark-compact) for the shell.
Have been using Linux for 20 years now. I have seen a lot of distro's. For a while now I have been using Ubuntu for server, and Solus Linux for desktop.
For me, it's Arch. I started with Ubuntu and derivatives, decided to move upstream to Debian, as well as a stint with Fedora, but in May 2010, after six months of off and on Linux use, I decided to try Arch, since most of my Linux use was on a netbook that needed me to be able to squeeze every single ounce of power out of it, and Arch seemed to be the best way with its minimal dependencies (it didn't automatically install optional dependencies like Debian with recommends or Ubuntu with suggests). I tried Slackware periodically which was nice, but too much work with its lack of dependency resolution basically requiring you to install the full distro, or hope you didn't need a library later.
When I first tried Arch, I wanted to really learn Linux. What comprises a desktop distro? Which desktop environment do I like most? I liked XFCE after trying Xubuntu, but still tried every desktop from Equinox to KDE to AfterStep, and every window manager (excluding stumpwm and ratpoison I think). I'm sort of stuck on switching between a customize Openbox session, i3, XFCE, and Plasma 5 these days, and will probably just stay on XFCE when 4.14 drops.
The whole time, I still used Windows on my desktop (still do, but I dual boot Arch), and could never get myself to accept the stale packages in stable distros. If I can have up to date packages in Windows, an "inferior" operating system, why can't I in Arch? So I stuck with Arch. I used it for about five years and wanted to switch to something else, Debian. It wouldn't work. It's a great system, don't get me wrong, but I kept breaking it, or it kept breaking in weird ways, so I couldn't stick with it because it kept bugging me. I always found myself, when using another distro, thinking through the install process, or when something weird happened, saying "This wouldn't happen in Arch!" and wound up just switching back to it. I did this often enough I could just about do the process blindfolded with one hand behind my back.
I always close these posts by saying that if Arch were to die, I would switch to $distro, and today that distro is probably Void. It's got a small community, and so the drawbacks from that (some packages don't upgrade as fast as users would like being the only real problem), but it's an amazing distro, and the runit init system is probably my favorite (and I'm not usually picky or opinionated about init systems). It is the closest distro to Arch in use, even if xbps is five separate tools for package operations, and it doesn't have a AUR (it does, however, have package scripts to automate packages, which they use to compile them via TRAVIS).
The only machine I have that runs Linux is my Synology. I really don’t know much about Linux distros at all. Say I have an old spare laptop lying around to tinker with - where would be a good place to start?
Thanks for the tip. What's a DE budgie?
Windows.
Seriously though. All my *nix work (which is the bulk of my technical work) is done on remote servers, which I do with a desktop that runs Windows, and a Surface Pro.
The *nix user experience on desktop is dumpster fire levels of shit, and no amount of '20** is the year of the Linux mainstream' has changed that. I keep trying, because it would be nice, but I don't have nearly the care factor to want to invest the time to manage my own desktop environment on a daily basis. I need it to get out of my way.
Oh, look, a comment from ten years ago!
One can easily use something like Ubuntu or Elementary (maybe even Fedora, but it's been a while and I've never used it extensively) w/o ever going to the command line. All GNU/Linux lacks is a certain set of productivity tools like Adobe stuff and big name games.
I'm fairly technical. I have installed Gentoo a few times and even though I never used it for long, I found it extremely helpful to learn how the basics of linux works. However at the moment I'm running Fedora 28. I've had to fix a few issue since installing but I like it.
Ubuntu minimal, lol.
I know everyone hates on Ubuntu, but I like it's stability and package selection, plus
aptis the package manager I'm most familiar with. I've tried a ton of distros, but I always land back with Ubuntu Minimal.I use i3-gaps as my de with Compton, and I'm very happy with the setup, it's pretty slim, and extremely fast.
For an easy to install, easy to setup, easy to operate, and easily of least bother to keep up, I recommend Linux Lite. It is the distro I installed on clients' PCs for several years before I retired this past year. The dev has added some really nice GUI services that make some in-depths housekeepinjg (like removing unneeded kernels) intuitive and automatic done for you. This is the Xfce desktop, so if you don't like that you'll need to go elsewhere. I found over the years the easierst to use for someone migrating to Linux.
I'm all over the place OS-wise. Prefer using my Macbook Pro, my desktop runs Windows 10 for gaming and with Hyper-V it makes a pretty great virtualization host. My virtual servers mostly run CentOS and whatever Linux version Docker for Windows comes with.
My Raspberry Pi cluster runs Raspbian Lite (Debian based), I have a different ARM dev board running Armbian Stretch (also Debian based) as a Tor relay.
Arch for desktop. It's got a lot of software, and everything or almost everything is up to date. It almost never breaks and requires surprisingly little maintenance once you know the basics (especially if you refrain from customizing everything). The documentation is great. Also has the best package manager. I have a six or seven years old installation on my main desktop machine. It runs like the first day.
For servers that need to be absolutely stable and don't want to spend time maintaining, either Debian Stable or RHEL/Centos. I've used both with great success. Currently I have a debian stable server with unattended-upgrades: zero maintenance.