I actually want to try a LFS install, mostly to gain a deeper understanding of how Linux works. To anyone who's done an LFS install: good idea or waste of time?
Except for Manjaro with their expired certs and DDoSing AUR. Or niche remixes that don't patch stuff and don't have a warning saying that our stuff is old, don't use it if you care about that.
My wife and I haven't had any issues with it, they're just easy to paint as the bad distro because it's supposed to uncomplicate Arch for your average user, but has had some certs fall through the cracks and they had kind of an asshole response to address it (thank God Gnome and Linux devs are never contentious folks), and apparently people don't read the warnings about enabling AUR in the package manager. Don't get me wrong, it's not the perfect distro, but it doesn't deserve nearly as much hate as it gets. It's not Canonical, pushing Amazon and telemetry by default 😆 besides, it's got some cool features out of the box like one of the better default dualboot grubs I've seen by default, the ability to have multiple kernels installed simultaneously from multiple streams, and while it's common anymore, was one of the early adopters of providing Nvidia drivers on install. Lots of people have strong opinions on what distro is best, and Manjaro manages to be an easy one to point fingers at.
There are legitimate criticisms of Manjaro, and these days there are better options like Archinstall or EndeavorOS, but yeah it's mostly just become a popular distro to shit on.
Canonical deserves way more hate than the Manjaro devs tbh.
Oh for real, I won't deny there's legit plenty to call them out on, and as well we should, but I was always baffled that they just how much they get, especially compared to Canonical.
Manjaro piggybacks off of Arch and some Arch users want to be obnoxious about it.
There's nothing wrong with the distro, itself.
The maintainers have done some inconsequential noob-ish things with the site's website, and the in-house package manager (pamac) had a bug that took down the AUR once and Arch users that couldn't host their own website if they wanted to like to point fingers and troll.
Mostly the admins. They've forgotten to renew their SSL certs multiple times, causing various issues, and they introduced a bug that briefly DDOSed the entire AUR.
The distro itself seems fine. Although, I don't see why you wouldn't just use Arch with Archinstall or EndeavorOS if you really want that GUI installer. Both are much better managed imo.
Both arch and endeavor OS don't have the gui pacman interface they are terminal based distro. Manhor makes it easy to use without even opening up the terminal to do anything. Most people and new user are not too comfortable with using the terminal. So the gui helps to make things simple.
Both arch and endeavor OS don't have the gui pacman interface they are terminal based distro. Manhor makes it easy to use without even opening up the terminal to do anything. Most people and new user are not too comfortable with using the terminal. So the gui helps to make things simple.
It's usually recommended to read the Arch news before doing an update because if there are any known issues they will be reported there. However, I've been using Arch now for a few years and I've never encountered any issues during updates (I know that others have not been so lucky. There was an update that caused grub to break for many that I recall, but I wasn't affected by it.)
Oh, I wasn't the person you were originally responding to. Just someone that came by later and had an answer to what I thought the question was you were asking.
I swear that when I was a student, my department had a good mix of distros.
Most students were on Ubuntu and Mint VMs.
Students in system or HPC labs had to learn CentOS. However, my entry condition to my lab was to install FreeBSD as a guest on VMWare ESXi. Everything must be specifically partitioned and must be done in one sitting. (This happened illegally in the server room. I could not exit and hope to reenter, hence the rule.)
MacOS on an FX-8350 (pre-OpenCore), with nvidia graphics was legitimately one of the most difficult and unpleasant projects I have ever undertaken in all my years of stupid projects, worse than the time I managed to fuck up fstab so badly I turned 6 drives into 6,000+ drives.
i'm about to take my first peek into linux on mint. i'm not completely put off learning some new things but being able to do that in a desktop that is familar makes everything a lot easier to pick up on. who knows, if it all goes smoothly maybe next week i'll be running arch (i won't)
just works "almost" is pretty funny but i know what you mean. i wasn't having much trouble with it testing it with a virtual machine. the nice thing is a lot of the applications i use on windows are already free software that im realizing are a lot of the go to's for people running linux, so really a lot should "just work"
I've been using Linux on and off for ~15 years and I run Mint on my main desktop PC just because it's so intuitive and stable. I want my gaming PC to "just work" and not need any tweaking, so Mint is perfect.
i havent really looked into that, been mostly researching debian based distros specifically ubuntu and it's bunch since a lot of recommendations go to it. nobara looks interesting for the big gaming spin it has though i'm still iffy on being at home with linux for games, but from the outside looking in things like proton seem to be doing a lot of good in that space recently.
I started with Mint and then moved on. Honestly I think Debian based ones are not nearly as good as Redhat or Arch based. You can get easy to use versions such as Fedora or Manjaro without being a headache at all, and their systems are superior to PPAs (which in itself is far superior to windows updating). Obviously my opinion is not the end all, but I highly recommend branching out a bit and trying things with the different base systems. I thought Debian was the bees knees, then tried the others and really haven't looked back.
Getting the damn thing to install was a total nightmare for me .
The instructions on their site had nothing step by step, -still no idea how to work checksums- so I had to figure out how to get an ISO onto a flash drive (turns out it needs additional software), how to get it onto the hdd without bios access (thanks Windows 10), then fight through tpm errors.
Hell, even having to torrent the file in the first place was a pain since the machine I was installing on didn't want to download the ISO.
Took me all morning, but could've been worse in my mental fog, I guess
Using Mint right now, started off with Kubuntu but decided to stick with the Gnome desktop environment for a bit, at least until KDE works out some of its kinks lol. I will say, KDE worked better with my drawing tablet than Gnome so...
Arch is easy enough to install. If you ever get tired of overhead, ala all the apps on the OS which you never use, just start from scratch. It's not hard to install the base, desktop envo + a browser and start from there. The cleanest desktop you can imagine and probably the resulting OS too
arch is interesting to me and i'm not too worried about the install, the rolling releases and stability of the system are what i think would snag me in using it. though the minute regular updates are probably more an issue for people who delve into the system more to get the absolute most out of it. it'll be more stable, works out of the box-type distros for me while i get a grasp of things like the file system and using the terminal. but i do think the setups people post of their riced out installs look pretty cool ngl
The rolling release being unstable is wrong. You don't get the "dev" version of update with bugs and instability, you get a proper update, just in small increments usually.
A lot of people who actually run arch will tell you the same, sometimes it's even more stable than the major release type systems.
It is a common misconception that rolling release distros are inherently less stable than other distros. My experience has been exactly the opposite. I've used, for extended periods, Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch. Both Manjaro and Arch were far more stable than my experience with Ubuntu. With ubuntu, every time I had to do a full system upgrade it was a crapshoot about whether or not I would be spending the next day or two fixing my system. But with Manjaro and Arch, it's never a full system upgrade, as long as you are doing updates regularly, they tend to remain small and manageable.
I've never had an update brick my system on Arch and have never felt the need to restart from scratch because an update went to shit. But that was an experience I was getting used to on Ubuntu.
Disclaimer, this is just my experience, and your own mileage may vary.
I used mint for a long time, the only reason I switched is that my Nvidia card was preventing mint to boot/install on my new laptop. I didn't want to spent hours on it tried a few distros until one worked (Manjaro). I like Manjaro now, but might have to try mint again (laptop is a few years old so it will probably work now).
Nix hype has been high the last several months for some reason despite it being around for awhile. I think DevOps guys are just now discovering it or something.
Disclosure: I haven't used it. I've just watched a few videos and have been following the hype. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
My understanding is that it is similar to the idempotency that Terraform brings but on a OS, packages and code level.
Basically you define (in a file) everything you want on the OS from packages to settings to custom repos and it installs everything so even if something goes sideways and say your server gets hacked, you just start over not from scratch or hopefully a clean fallback image but with everything you need installed out of the gate on a fresh install.
Can also be super useful for ensuring your whole team is using the same setup. No more reading a manual for this one obscure firewall that some random guy setup. Your firewall (or whatever else) was installed and configured out of the box, plus it is the same org wide.
With flakes, you can also lock the project or your system to an exact commit of the nixpkgs repo, meaning you get the same versions until you update the lock file. It's like a npm or cargo lock file, but for the whole system.
The nix packages define how to build and configure it, so the build part is like Gentoo. It has a powerful cache setup, so you rarely need to really build anything. Need a custom kernel though? Define your patches in your config and it works exactly the same until you update it.
Learn a dynamic lazy functional programming language first and then start building a flake without much help or documentation because that's what you should be doing and the default installation doesn't use that mechanism. The docs you find will assume you understand category theory already.
About few years later you are a god and there is no way you're going to use anything else ever again.
He didn’t explain it well. The whole system lives on a ymal file and is easy to read. Documentation as code. If you have a working system then you’re set, it’ll never break. Adding software uses it’s own dependencies and will never break other software. It also has roll back features like snapshot/btrfs, during bootup you can go back to a previous version of your system. With the ymal file it makes it easy to clone the setup from others or for other systems of yours in the future, just have to generate a hardware file in most cases.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to communicate! But, there is a spot for this OS: you've been a programmer for decades now, you still love Linux and you've customized every piece of your desktop and programming environment. Now, NixOS gives you the possibility to write one config to configure everything: from your system daemons to the desktop wallpaper, from the editor theme to the kernel boot parameters. And when you store a lock file, the same configuration that worked correctly in one machine, will work exactly the same in another computer.
So, you have a workstation, maybe another workstation in the office and a laptop? You change something in your setup, and this setup gets replicated exactly the same in every other machine when you push your changes to the version control. This is very nice, especially if you have a highly customized emacs, vim or helix as your editor, and like to try out new tools outside of coretools for the CLI lyfe.
Another thing, where you don't even need NixOS (just the nix package manager installed in your Linux, Mac or Windows machine), is how you can configure your project dependencies with it. Now, you run a business that develops software with maybe Rust and TypeScript, or Go and Javascript. You need a special version of OpenSSL or a certain version of Rust. The project then has the nix flake in it, and nix-direnv. The devs enter the directory and nix installs every single tool needed for the project correctly for everybody. The same version, the same config, everything streamlined for the whole team. If the env works correctly for one dev, it works for everybody.
I hope this answers why you'd like to put some effort to learn it. It's hard in the beginning, but there's a huge payback for certain use cases.
I replied in another comment about some of it’s features. I love it, its really hard to break even compared to my previous Arch install using auto snapshots on btrfs.
Bro, I spent so many hours a few years ago getting a hannah montana stick up to date so I could prank a co-worker... I was second shift and watched the first shifters roll in. I know this is a joke but man I learned a lot that night.
Gentoo is the final boss of Linux installs. (Linux From Scratch is the raid boss)
I installed it last year. After watching it compile for half an hour, I decided that a source-based distro was something I have no interest in daily-driving.
I think someday I’ll do a gauntlet of Linux installs back to back. Start easy: Ubuntu - Debian - Arch - Nixos - Gentoo - LFS. Not sure if I put Nixos right though. Tbf I’ve already done Debian so maybe I’ll start with Arch.
All of my homies use Debian for servers, can’t do much wrong with the stability of it, although newer packages are sometimes difficult to get around but not an issue directly.
Teaser pic for the rare fellow Crunchbang enthusiast. Here's a screenshot of my desktop on my $100 USD Asus Vivobook. Crunchbang runs flawlessly on this minimally specced laptop that is basically like a modern day netbook. I'm having a great time with it. I mostly use it to ssh into headless servers from the terminal so I usually just have a web browser and terminal or two open.
I'm actually not sure. I remember doing an apt install conky but it's possible that it was already installed and that switched it to manually installed. I also installed tint2 panel, just like the good old days. My panel is extremely minimal. There is no clock, battery info, desktop switcher, or anything except my minimized windows. My battery info, date, time, weather, moon phase, and lots of the usual conky sensor data are available in my conky.
Yes! Crunchbang lives! I was a Statler user back in 2011 and Crunchbang++ is just like the Crunchbang I knew and loved with all the goodness of Debian 12. If you like minimal setups I highly recommend it!
Out of interest, what's your preferred choice nowadays? I've always preferred to stick with Debian-derived distros so I don't need to learn a different package manager (silly, I know).
I guess I like the comfort/predictably of Ubuntu - I know what to expect, and how to fix it if things go wrong. But maybe I shouldn't be limiting myself.
I am on a Debian based distro as we speak! I'm using Crunchbang++. For me a perfect operating system is very simple and mostly just stays out of the way. Crunchbang is perfect for that. My setup is very minimal and probably wouldn't be ideal for most users. For most users I recommend Linux Mint, but if you are using Ubuntu and it's working for you there's nothing wrong with that! One of the great things about linux is the huge variety of options of distros to choose from. There's different flavors to suit everyone's needs. What makes this especially great is that under the hood, linux is linux, so for the most part you can use what works for you and not miss out on capability.
Eh I love GNOME 3, especially after like 3.22 or so. It’s not very customizable, and that’s kinda the point. With KDE I spent far too long fussing with settings instead of getting shit done.
I like mint, never really have to think about it. My ageing workstation is on 24/7 (arrgh) and Plex works just fine. Firefox is fine, google docs or libre office are fine. Things just work.
The one problem I do have is it goes mad and needs a reboot if the monitors go to sleep while one of them is orientated to portrait. So I just switched off sleep and turn them off manually.
My Mom has been running Mint for over a decade now and I rarely have to remote in and help her with anything. If it passes the works for my Mom test, I think it should work for most people.
I'd say unless you're an advanced user looking for something specific, it's between Ununtu and Red Hat, and even then I'd argue that Red Hat is more for business and Ubuntu is great for home / casual use, but they're both excellent!
Manjaro is not arch though it likes to pretend it is and includes the aur. Because of this sometimes aur packages will break manjaro since they expect packages which arch uses that aren't on manjaro yet. Pamac, their software center, has broken the aur via essentially ddosing it multiple times. Also, despite the fact I have no idea what I'm doing ive never had my ssl certificate expire, Manjaro has several times. I'm sure there's more but that's the things I know about.
I don't actually care if you use it, I just think the devs are not quite with it all the time so I won't use it. But I use arch anyway so that wouldn't make sense anyway.
How cheap can i build a linux pc if i dont want to game on it? Just browsing, maybe play some videos from youtube every now and then. Mostly browsing and using excel etc for work, no gaming at all.
Cesar/Leo if you are out there thank you for enduring my stubbornness in learning Linux on Slackware. I bet you were patient every time I had issues and you didn't force me to switch distros. Thank you.
It's a way to go at least for rolling release. However, tw is looking less and less interesting than it used to 5 years ago now that all these shiny new immutable distros are coming out.
No, I am using fedora silverblue which is point release. But there are rolling release immutable distros like opensuse aeon/kalpa im pretty sure. Basically the system files are read only and packages are "layered" onto the system image through transactional upgrades. Most of the packages you want to install should be in containers like flatpak (for gui) and distrobox (for terminal). This keeps the base system clean and small and doesn't get "bloated" like other mutable OS's.
That's pretty much me. I've introduced a few of my friends to Linux. I recommend Ubuntu because it generally has the most documentation, support, largest userbase, etc but they are of course free to pick whatever distro they want. I use Ubuntu LTS myself, it works well enough. In terms of software, I like static linked builds and AppImages since they work on pretty much any distro.
First distro was Mandrake, yeaaars ago. Second was Gentoo. Third was back to Windows. Wish I'd gotten more into it. Definitely don't have the time for it now though.
I believe you, given how many people love it. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I love its KDE for some reason (and the boot animation beats other distros easily).
I always end back up on leap when all the other distros piss me off, and I always wonder why I even bothered with anything else. It just works for me.
It is one of the best KDE distros, the yast config took is brilliant, the installer is great, it has fast servers in Europe (fedora installs and updates are way slower for me) and on top of all that it has a cool and instantly recognisable logo.
The only real nagative in my experience of opensuse is the long install times.
I am a pretty simple user though, I only really use Firefox and Emacs.
Yeah it’s so good for KDE. I must have Stockholm Syndrome from config files because I was indignant that people had a GUI with ever setting while I had to search up every damn thing.
Coming from Arch deviates and Fedora, i feel like they have really nice tools to repair anything going wrong.
Maybe it was a big problem 5 years ago, but it looks like they worked hard on it and now they are ahead of anyone else in terms of getting on the right path again after breaking something.
Having Yast as a system administration GUI is also nice, as i don't have to google my way through countless configuration files all over the system figuring out what goes wrong.
I used tumbleweed for about an year with no problems. The installer was a bit different and not much user friendly but it had a lot of options that i wanted.
I don't know how it was 5 years ago, but these days I think it's doing pretty good. I'd consider it over fedora if I need a rolling release distro.
Y’all should call your friends out on this sort of stuff but jabbing at each other is a useless practice that only serves to ruin trust, add frustrations and is just a generally douchey behavior to encourage. Nobody likes being harassed for their choices, esp. when they’re subjective
I would never criticise someone’s distro. As long as it was arch built without any scripts.
This pleb didn't even write his own kernel.
If you don't use Linux From Scratch, why do you even bother?
I actually want to try a LFS install, mostly to gain a deeper understanding of how Linux works. To anyone who's done an LFS install: good idea or waste of time?
Learning things is always a great idea if you have time and interest.
I'd rather be waterboarded
Deal!
Just did that for the first time today and the second, third and ,fourth time aswell
Distros are like Kinks. I have my own and you have yours, I won't judge.
Best Linux analogy I’ve read in a long time.
Except for Manjaro with their expired certs and DDoSing AUR. Or niche remixes that don't patch stuff and don't have a warning saying that our stuff is old, don't use it if you care about that.
Ahh yes, Good Guy Greg. Just like the good old days, I'm loving the nostalgia of these vintage memes.
bro in a world of scumbag steves it feels good to see a ggg
I was about to post the same. Good guy Greg was cool.
Yeah, Lemmy right now reminds me a bit of that era of the internet. It's strangley nostalgic.
they are just waiting for you to discover Arch ;)
Arch is the cross-fit of the Linux world.
This is the best analogy I've seen for Arch.
Please explain
How do you know if someone does CrossFit?
Haha, now I feel dumb needing the joke explained to me
Or vegans etc etc
I know enough about Linux to be able to install most distros and use them, but I don't know enough about them to criticizes others for their choice.
I will, however, warn them about Manjaro, fuck it.
I've seen many comments about Manjaro, what's the deal with it? I used it shortly a few years ago but I didn't liked it
My wife and I haven't had any issues with it, they're just easy to paint as the bad distro because it's supposed to uncomplicate Arch for your average user, but has had some certs fall through the cracks and they had kind of an asshole response to address it (thank God Gnome and Linux devs are never contentious folks), and apparently people don't read the warnings about enabling AUR in the package manager. Don't get me wrong, it's not the perfect distro, but it doesn't deserve nearly as much hate as it gets. It's not Canonical, pushing Amazon and telemetry by default 😆 besides, it's got some cool features out of the box like one of the better default dualboot grubs I've seen by default, the ability to have multiple kernels installed simultaneously from multiple streams, and while it's common anymore, was one of the early adopters of providing Nvidia drivers on install. Lots of people have strong opinions on what distro is best, and Manjaro manages to be an easy one to point fingers at.
There are legitimate criticisms of Manjaro, and these days there are better options like Archinstall or EndeavorOS, but yeah it's mostly just become a popular distro to shit on.
Canonical deserves way more hate than the Manjaro devs tbh.
Oh for real, I won't deny there's legit plenty to call them out on, and as well we should, but I was always baffled that they just how much they get, especially compared to Canonical.
here
Manjaro piggybacks off of Arch and some Arch users want to be obnoxious about it.
There's nothing wrong with the distro, itself.
The maintainers have done some inconsequential noob-ish things with the site's website, and the in-house package manager (pamac) had a bug that took down the AUR once and Arch users that couldn't host their own website if they wanted to like to point fingers and troll.
What's wrong with manjaro?
Mostly the admins. They've forgotten to renew their SSL certs multiple times, causing various issues, and they introduced a bug that briefly DDOSed the entire AUR.
The distro itself seems fine. Although, I don't see why you wouldn't just use Arch with Archinstall or EndeavorOS if you really want that GUI installer. Both are much better managed imo.
Both arch and endeavor OS don't have the gui pacman interface they are terminal based distro. Manhor makes it easy to use without even opening up the terminal to do anything. Most people and new user are not too comfortable with using the terminal. So the gui helps to make things simple.
Both arch and endeavor OS don't have the gui pacman interface they are terminal based distro. Manhor makes it easy to use without even opening up the terminal to do anything. Most people and new user are not too comfortable with using the terminal. So the gui helps to make things simple.
I use Arch btw.
How do you know when someone is a
veganArch user?Iusearchlinux.fyi
There's HUNDREDS of us! HUNDREDS!
Just read the news feed, folks
I thought Lemmy was another excuse to never do research on my own. Please explain so I don't have to leave Lemmy
It's usually recommended to read the Arch news before doing an update because if there are any known issues they will be reported there. However, I've been using Arch now for a few years and I've never encountered any issues during updates (I know that others have not been so lucky. There was an update that caused grub to break for many that I recall, but I wasn't affected by it.)
Ah lol totally missed what you meant. Yeah I used Arch since 2010, so I went through the big ones like switching to systemd, moving to
/usr/bin, etc.Never had any issues that couldn't be easily repaired from an archiso, and you learn from them every time!
Also there are tools to warn you when updating after a news article has been posted, but I enjoy living on the edge.
Oh, I wasn't the person you were originally responding to. Just someone that came by later and had an answer to what I thought the question was you were asking.
Everytime I mention Linux in the outside world, people's brains freeze and then I get questions. I need a better social circle.
I swear that when I was a student, my department had a good mix of distros.
Kids these days? WSL or Mac.
To be fair, installing MacOS on a PC is harder than most Linux distros.
To be fair, installing MacOS on a PC is harder than most Linux distros.
MacOS on an FX-8350 (pre-OpenCore), with nvidia graphics was legitimately one of the most difficult and unpleasant projects I have ever undertaken in all my years of stupid projects, worse than the time I managed to fuck up fstab so badly I turned 6 drives into 6,000+ drives.
Is Slackware even still around?
I'm in the WSL camp at home, and Red Hat at work
Slackware 15 came out like late last year/early this year. I want to try it tbh (religious reasons), only really used Fedora so far.
Yes, it's being mantained pretty actively
Amogos is the best just saying🙄
sus
AmongOS is dead 😭😭😭
i'm about to take my first peek into linux on mint. i'm not completely put off learning some new things but being able to do that in a desktop that is familar makes everything a lot easier to pick up on. who knows, if it all goes smoothly maybe next week i'll be running arch (i won't)
Mint is honestly the best one to go for really especially since everything just works there almost.
just works "almost" is pretty funny but i know what you mean. i wasn't having much trouble with it testing it with a virtual machine. the nice thing is a lot of the applications i use on windows are already free software that im realizing are a lot of the go to's for people running linux, so really a lot should "just work"
I've been using Linux on and off for ~15 years and I run Mint on my main desktop PC just because it's so intuitive and stable. I want my gaming PC to "just work" and not need any tweaking, so Mint is perfect.
Yeah, was my first that didn't crash during install, really enjoyed it
If you want a EAVEN more windows like distro I will recomend nobara. The official version is a windows 7 styled gnome and it is based on fedora.
i havent really looked into that, been mostly researching debian based distros specifically ubuntu and it's bunch since a lot of recommendations go to it. nobara looks interesting for the big gaming spin it has though i'm still iffy on being at home with linux for games, but from the outside looking in things like proton seem to be doing a lot of good in that space recently.
I started with Mint and then moved on. Honestly I think Debian based ones are not nearly as good as Redhat or Arch based. You can get easy to use versions such as Fedora or Manjaro without being a headache at all, and their systems are superior to PPAs (which in itself is far superior to windows updating). Obviously my opinion is not the end all, but I highly recommend branching out a bit and trying things with the different base systems. I thought Debian was the bees knees, then tried the others and really haven't looked back.
Getting the damn thing to install was a total nightmare for me .
The instructions on their site had nothing step by step, -still no idea how to work checksums- so I had to figure out how to get an ISO onto a flash drive (turns out it needs additional software), how to get it onto the hdd without bios access (thanks Windows 10), then fight through tpm errors.
Hell, even having to torrent the file in the first place was a pain since the machine I was installing on didn't want to download the ISO.
Took me all morning, but could've been worse in my mental fog, I guess
Using Mint right now, started off with Kubuntu but decided to stick with the Gnome desktop environment for a bit, at least until KDE works out some of its kinks lol. I will say, KDE worked better with my drawing tablet than Gnome so...
Arch is easy enough to install. If you ever get tired of overhead, ala all the apps on the OS which you never use, just start from scratch. It's not hard to install the base, desktop envo + a browser and start from there. The cleanest desktop you can imagine and probably the resulting OS too
arch is interesting to me and i'm not too worried about the install, the rolling releases and stability of the system are what i think would snag me in using it. though the minute regular updates are probably more an issue for people who delve into the system more to get the absolute most out of it. it'll be more stable, works out of the box-type distros for me while i get a grasp of things like the file system and using the terminal. but i do think the setups people post of their riced out installs look pretty cool ngl
The rolling release being unstable is wrong. You don't get the "dev" version of update with bugs and instability, you get a proper update, just in small increments usually. A lot of people who actually run arch will tell you the same, sometimes it's even more stable than the major release type systems.
It is a common misconception that rolling release distros are inherently less stable than other distros. My experience has been exactly the opposite. I've used, for extended periods, Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch. Both Manjaro and Arch were far more stable than my experience with Ubuntu. With ubuntu, every time I had to do a full system upgrade it was a crapshoot about whether or not I would be spending the next day or two fixing my system. But with Manjaro and Arch, it's never a full system upgrade, as long as you are doing updates regularly, they tend to remain small and manageable.
I've never had an update brick my system on Arch and have never felt the need to restart from scratch because an update went to shit. But that was an experience I was getting used to on Ubuntu.
Disclaimer, this is just my experience, and your own mileage may vary.
I used mint for a long time, the only reason I switched is that my Nvidia card was preventing mint to boot/install on my new laptop. I didn't want to spent hours on it tried a few distros until one worked (Manjaro). I like Manjaro now, but might have to try mint again (laptop is a few years old so it will probably work now).
Arch linux is the gateway drug that leads to NixOS
How is Nixos? Are there clear advantages over a traditional Linux distro?
Nix hype has been high the last several months for some reason despite it being around for awhile. I think DevOps guys are just now discovering it or something.
Disclosure: I haven't used it. I've just watched a few videos and have been following the hype. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
My understanding is that it is similar to the idempotency that Terraform brings but on a OS, packages and code level.
Basically you define (in a file) everything you want on the OS from packages to settings to custom repos and it installs everything so even if something goes sideways and say your server gets hacked, you just start over not from scratch or hopefully a clean fallback image but with everything you need installed out of the gate on a fresh install.
Can also be super useful for ensuring your whole team is using the same setup. No more reading a manual for this one obscure firewall that some random guy setup. Your firewall (or whatever else) was installed and configured out of the box, plus it is the same org wide.
With flakes, you can also lock the project or your system to an exact commit of the nixpkgs repo, meaning you get the same versions until you update the lock file. It's like a npm or cargo lock file, but for the whole system.
The nix packages define how to build and configure it, so the build part is like Gentoo. It has a powerful cache setup, so you rarely need to really build anything. Need a custom kernel though? Define your patches in your config and it works exactly the same until you update it.
Learn a dynamic lazy functional programming language first and then start building a flake without much help or documentation because that's what you should be doing and the default installation doesn't use that mechanism. The docs you find will assume you understand category theory already.
About few years later you are a god and there is no way you're going to use anything else ever again.
Source: been a user for the past four years.
I understood maybe three things in your reply so NixOS probably not for me.
He didn’t explain it well. The whole system lives on a ymal file and is easy to read. Documentation as code. If you have a working system then you’re set, it’ll never break. Adding software uses it’s own dependencies and will never break other software. It also has roll back features like snapshot/btrfs, during bootup you can go back to a previous version of your system. With the ymal file it makes it easy to clone the setup from others or for other systems of yours in the future, just have to generate a hardware file in most cases.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to communicate! But, there is a spot for this OS: you've been a programmer for decades now, you still love Linux and you've customized every piece of your desktop and programming environment. Now, NixOS gives you the possibility to write one config to configure everything: from your system daemons to the desktop wallpaper, from the editor theme to the kernel boot parameters. And when you store a lock file, the same configuration that worked correctly in one machine, will work exactly the same in another computer.
So, you have a workstation, maybe another workstation in the office and a laptop? You change something in your setup, and this setup gets replicated exactly the same in every other machine when you push your changes to the version control. This is very nice, especially if you have a highly customized emacs, vim or helix as your editor, and like to try out new tools outside of coretools for the CLI lyfe.
Another thing, where you don't even need NixOS (just the nix package manager installed in your Linux, Mac or Windows machine), is how you can configure your project dependencies with it. Now, you run a business that develops software with maybe Rust and TypeScript, or Go and Javascript. You need a special version of OpenSSL or a certain version of Rust. The project then has the nix flake in it, and nix-direnv. The devs enter the directory and nix installs every single tool needed for the project correctly for everybody. The same version, the same config, everything streamlined for the whole team. If the env works correctly for one dev, it works for everybody.
I hope this answers why you'd like to put some effort to learn it. It's hard in the beginning, but there's a huge payback for certain use cases.
How ya liking it?
I replied in another comment about some of it’s features. I love it, its really hard to break even compared to my previous Arch install using auto snapshots on btrfs.
I use Hannah Montana Linux btw
Bro, I spent so many hours a few years ago getting a hannah montana stick up to date so I could prank a co-worker... I was second shift and watched the first shifters roll in. I know this is a joke but man I learned a lot that night.
Best of both worlds
First time installing Linux? What the fuck is this Ubuntu shit, that distro sucks. You really should try out Gentoo as your first distro.
Can't believe I fell for that as a kid. Wasn't even my first distro, but Gentoo for beginners is just hilarious
Gentoo is the final boss of Linux installs. (Linux From Scratch is the raid boss)
I installed it last year. After watching it compile for half an hour, I decided that a source-based distro was something I have no interest in daily-driving.
I think someday I’ll do a gauntlet of Linux installs back to back. Start easy: Ubuntu - Debian - Arch - Nixos - Gentoo - LFS. Not sure if I put Nixos right though. Tbf I’ve already done Debian so maybe I’ll start with Arch.
I don't criticize, I just give fair warnings. I want people to enjoy Linux like I do, not call me every other week because something is "broken"
It's mostly all Debian based, so it matters little.
Finally somewhere I can start a CentOS stream community!
RHEL is throwing shade lately...
I use ArseLinux btw
Ubuntu 🤮 if I wanted to be tracked by Amazon, I would have a registered address.
That's damn right, however, Debian is the only right choice.
I agree with you on principle but I'm typing this from Crunchbang++. On servers I go with Debian every time though.
All of my homies use Debian for servers, can’t do much wrong with the stability of it, although newer packages are sometimes difficult to get around but not an issue directly.
Teaser pic for the rare fellow Crunchbang enthusiast. Here's a screenshot of my desktop on my $100 USD Asus Vivobook. Crunchbang runs flawlessly on this minimally specced laptop that is basically like a modern day netbook. I'm having a great time with it. I mostly use it to ssh into headless servers from the terminal so I usually just have a web browser and terminal or two open.
I'm actually not sure. I remember doing an apt install conky but it's possible that it was already installed and that switched it to manually installed. I also installed tint2 panel, just like the good old days. My panel is extremely minimal. There is no clock, battery info, desktop switcher, or anything except my minimized windows. My battery info, date, time, weather, moon phase, and lots of the usual conky sensor data are available in my conky.
Yes! Crunchbang lives! I was a Statler user back in 2011 and Crunchbang++ is just like the Crunchbang I knew and loved with all the goodness of Debian 12. If you like minimal setups I highly recommend it!
Ain't nothin wrong with Ubuntu (is Ubuntu still around?)
It was once great, back in the glory days. Gnome 2 and Compiz, baby! It's still OK too, but not my preferred choice.
Out of interest, what's your preferred choice nowadays? I've always preferred to stick with Debian-derived distros so I don't need to learn a different package manager (silly, I know).
I guess I like the comfort/predictably of Ubuntu - I know what to expect, and how to fix it if things go wrong. But maybe I shouldn't be limiting myself.
I am on a Debian based distro as we speak! I'm using Crunchbang++. For me a perfect operating system is very simple and mostly just stays out of the way. Crunchbang is perfect for that. My setup is very minimal and probably wouldn't be ideal for most users. For most users I recommend Linux Mint, but if you are using Ubuntu and it's working for you there's nothing wrong with that! One of the great things about linux is the huge variety of options of distros to choose from. There's different flavors to suit everyone's needs. What makes this especially great is that under the hood, linux is linux, so for the most part you can use what works for you and not miss out on capability.
Give either elementaryos or just straight Debian a shot, you'll probably feel at home quickly enough on either
I prefer fedora KDE (not the original commenter but just recommending)
Eh I love GNOME 3, especially after like 3.22 or so. It’s not very customizable, and that’s kinda the point. With KDE I spent far too long fussing with settings instead of getting shit done.
There are some things wrong with Ubuntu and Canonical, but if it solves your problems, you're doing it right.
yeah but they seem hell-bent on forcing their stupid snap store down everyone's throats. Flatpaks work just fine, imo, snaps are unnecessary
Is Ubuntu still the go-to for home use?
Looking to use for things like web, office, Plex server, streaming, etc
I like mint, never really have to think about it. My ageing workstation is on 24/7 (arrgh) and Plex works just fine. Firefox is fine, google docs or libre office are fine. Things just work.
The one problem I do have is it goes mad and needs a reboot if the monitors go to sleep while one of them is orientated to portrait. So I just switched off sleep and turn them off manually.
My Mom has been running Mint for over a decade now and I rarely have to remote in and help her with anything. If it passes the works for my Mom test, I think it should work for most people.
I still use it in wsl and for my media server, there probably better out there but it's good enough
I'd say unless you're an advanced user looking for something specific, it's between Ununtu and Red Hat, and even then I'd argue that Red Hat is more for business and Ubuntu is great for home / casual use, but they're both excellent!
Still think Debian is better but Ubuntu seems to be the most.popular fs
VIM FOREVER
What is this thing about Manjaro in this Comments here?
Manjaro is not arch though it likes to pretend it is and includes the aur. Because of this sometimes aur packages will break manjaro since they expect packages which arch uses that aren't on manjaro yet. Pamac, their software center, has broken the aur via essentially ddosing it multiple times. Also, despite the fact I have no idea what I'm doing ive never had my ssl certificate expire, Manjaro has several times. I'm sure there's more but that's the things I know about.
I don't actually care if you use it, I just think the devs are not quite with it all the time so I won't use it. But I use arch anyway so that wouldn't make sense anyway.
How cheap can i build a linux pc if i dont want to game on it? Just browsing, maybe play some videos from youtube every now and then. Mostly browsing and using excel etc for work, no gaming at all.
A potato would probably be enough. But exel is a little complicated. Either you use it in a browser or switch to libre/onlyoffice
an old think pad might be a very good choice for about 150-200 dollars you can get a more then capable laptop for quite a lot of stuff
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/
This one might be a good starting point: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4295?src=raspberrypi
bsd from scratch btw
Which isn't a Linux. And here I am criticising someone's choice of Unix/Linux system...
im kidding lol. bsd is bloat. i rewrote templeos in rust for my daily driver
yeah? are they jealous that i dont even use an operating system, as everything i run is hardwired into the ciruitry of my custom built mainframe?
I won't judge you until you should know better.
Can install that on this can of garbage beer and this AMD chip?
And doesnt tell you to "just google it"
Ah "just google it" also excellent for making a hostile work environment too.
Cesar/Leo if you are out there thank you for enduring my stubbornness in learning Linux on Slackware. I bet you were patient every time I had issues and you didn't force me to switch distros. Thank you.
Open Suse Tumbleweed is the way to go. Fight me.
I will not fight you as I also use Tubleweed. Fantastic distro.
It's a way to go at least for rolling release. However, tw is looking less and less interesting than it used to 5 years ago now that all these shiny new immutable distros are coming out.
What do you mean by immutable? Do you mean point release? Why would anyone use a point release distro for the desktop is beyond me.
No, he means Immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue. https://fedoraproject.org/silverblue/
Baisically the base distro is read-only (thus immutable) and all changes are made in top of that.
Makes it hard to bork a system and difficult for attacks to affect you.
No, I am using fedora silverblue which is point release. But there are rolling release immutable distros like opensuse aeon/kalpa im pretty sure. Basically the system files are read only and packages are "layered" onto the system image through transactional upgrades. Most of the packages you want to install should be in containers like flatpak (for gui) and distrobox (for terminal). This keeps the base system clean and small and doesn't get "bloated" like other mutable OS's.
I got started there too. Then I moved to Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Mint, with Ubuntu sprinkled throughout.
That's pretty much me. I've introduced a few of my friends to Linux. I recommend Ubuntu because it generally has the most documentation, support, largest userbase, etc but they are of course free to pick whatever distro they want. I use Ubuntu LTS myself, it works well enough. In terms of software, I like static linked builds and AppImages since they work on pretty much any distro.
And that dude didn't show up years later trying to sell me something on TV! Looking at you Bad Luck Brian.
Slackware or gtfo.
I don't know why these days. Doesn't seem to have much advantages...
I told them to use Ubuntu LTS and they did. Why would I criticize?
First distro was Mandrake, yeaaars ago. Second was Gentoo. Third was back to Windows. Wish I'd gotten more into it. Definitely don't have the time for it now though.
pfffff typical Ubuntu kind of guy 🙄
Am I the only one around here that uses MX Linux?
MX Linux is awesome! I do a bit of development on it here and there. The project owners are cool!
Except openSUSE. Fuck that, it breaks with the smallest thing and is just odd. But this was like 5y ago on Tumbleweed, so maybe it’s changed.
No way! Opensuse has always been perfect for me, I do usually use leap though.
I believe you, given how many people love it. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I love its KDE for some reason (and the boot animation beats other distros easily).
I always end back up on leap when all the other distros piss me off, and I always wonder why I even bothered with anything else. It just works for me.
It is one of the best KDE distros, the yast config took is brilliant, the installer is great, it has fast servers in Europe (fedora installs and updates are way slower for me) and on top of all that it has a cool and instantly recognisable logo.
The only real nagative in my experience of opensuse is the long install times.
I am a pretty simple user though, I only really use Firefox and Emacs.
Yeah it’s so good for KDE. I must have Stockholm Syndrome from config files because I was indignant that people had a GUI with ever setting while I had to search up every damn thing.
Coming from Arch deviates and Fedora, i feel like they have really nice tools to repair anything going wrong. Maybe it was a big problem 5 years ago, but it looks like they worked hard on it and now they are ahead of anyone else in terms of getting on the right path again after breaking something.
Having Yast as a system administration GUI is also nice, as i don't have to google my way through countless configuration files all over the system figuring out what goes wrong.
Yeah last time I used it I broke it in 20 minutes lol. But then I used btrfs to get it back. Fun times.
I used tumbleweed for about an year with no problems. The installer was a bit different and not much user friendly but it had a lot of options that i wanted.
I don't know how it was 5 years ago, but these days I think it's doing pretty good. I'd consider it over fedora if I need a rolling release distro.
Changed a lot really
More like unicorn
The arch wizard who introduced me to ubuntu
ZipSlack FTW
Yeah but fuck Ubuntu though.
+rep
Y’all should call your friends out on this sort of stuff but jabbing at each other is a useless practice that only serves to ruin trust, add frustrations and is just a generally douchey behavior to encourage. Nobody likes being harassed for their choices, esp. when they’re subjective
Do y'all Linux people have a lot of friends?
lol. I laugh to cover the pain.
Paste hide the pain Harold image.
Yep, they call me all the time to help them fix/setup their printers
Why would my choice in operating system have anything to do with how many friends I have lol. Weirdo comment