In this meme template both the lowest and highest IQ should say the same thing
Edit: just realized, it could be sort of saved changing either gentoo for an arch based distro or arch for a gentoo based distro. This would partially save the symmetry of the template.
The way memes work, yes it is wrong. Memes have a core structure or theme that variations are made around. Changing that core only really works if making a new meme or if making intentional commentary on the original meme itself. In this case by having nothing more than their preferred ranking of distros the creator has actually made themselves the target that the original meme would be making fun of.
Honestly what is wrong with 'just works'. If the policies behind the project and the security and privacy is all in place using this option is nothing wrong.
For linux to grow it needs to be more 'just works'. Let the complex stuff and simple stuff be there. It's not one or the other.
When I was younger, tinkering around was a hobby in itself. But today I actually used my machine and I want it to work without hassle. I don't want to think about swap partition sizes, modeset kernel parameters and that kind of stuff. I want a reliable tool.
That's why so many devs use MacBooks. They're essentially Unix machines with a proper GUI and mostly work absolutely flawlessly.
I've been using MacBooks for over ten years now and had exactly one crash: when the drive was failing so hard, it couldn't even spin up anymore.
This is exactly me. For a server it’s Linux but for everyday use/work a MacBook Pro is great. It just works. It’s great as you can fire up the command line to manage Linux servers easily. That’s how I admin my Lemmy Ansible install.
For gaming I use Windows. It’s all about the best tool for the job.
You might want to configure it from scratch, with exactly the tools and utilities you want (e.g. networking utility, desktop environment). Or you might just find this process fun and interesting. Some people take issue with how Canonical is run, and decisions they make.
I think it's funny that so many Linux users talk about how locked down Windows is, when 90% of them live in an effective walled garden defined by their package manager, or other inborn restriction of their distro. I doubt that even 10% are compiling from source with any regularity.
Why do you need to wait for someone to repackage FF for you before you install it? Just go get it if you run Arch BTW, but you know the overwhelming majority of ArchBros really only know how to install it through Pacman.
What‘s wrong with installing software from a package manager when the package I need is on there and has a decently up to date version?
If its not on there I can still build from source.
When I‘m in a situation where I just need a specific lib or cli tool or whatever and don‘t have time to potentially debug a niche compile error, installing from a package manager is more convenient and saves time.
Regardless of whose fault it is, it's unacceptable that half the people with a discrete GPU have nigh incompatible hardware. It's more akin to using snow tires breaking your car than a jet engine.
Not just that, but ever since F32 every single fricking update managed to either break something completely or made some part of the OS too unstable for daily use. Bluetooth issues, crashing display server, system hanging on suspend, broken bootloader on some Secure Boot sysems (handover from EUFI to bootloader no longer happening) therefore rendering the system completely unable to boot.. Just some issues I ran into when using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a year.
Fedora is great when it works, but always keep in mind that having a bleeding edge system comes at the cost of stability.
That was my experience ten years ago : mobile Geforce 660 with "Optimus", two flavours of drivers, of which none worked reliably. I remember fiddling with Nouveau & Bumblebee for hours.
I should try another, more stable distro on my desktop, but I rely a lot on some Windows-only programs.
I keep reading this, but I haven't had any issues at all over the past year with Fedora KDE and proprietary Nvidia drivers installed via flatpak. Is it more of a problem when installed via dnf?
Just works is definitely something Linux should strive for, but at least in my experience and in experience of my friends, "just works" has always been a poor experience.
What I'm talking about is how you install a just works distro like mint or garuda, and then some package refuses to work or maybe hardware such as a sound card or multi monitor setup, so you gotta go troubleshooting, which isn't very "just works". What's worse is that some of the issues aren't talked about/documented, so you pretty much have to rely on making a post and wait for potentially hours for a response to get help. It's also very hard to troubleshoot the system by yourself if you don't have experience, as you don't really know what's running under the hood as in what came prepackaged by the distro.
Complaining that something works or that people prefer things that work is a very backasswards critique and deepens the presumed stereotype that home Linux users are just nerds who only like to tinker (which is just partially true).
To be fair I've been using mint, and whilst THE FUCKING MULTIMONITOR DOESN'T FUCKING WORK (Uhh I wanna punch a drywall)! otherwise it has been suprisingly smooth. Especially since it is my main computer, and I use it to burn discs for older game systems (incl. x360!!!), unity development, and a bunch of other stuff. So I have to say, it is VERY close to it just works.
It works but it kinda forgets the monitor layout, especially if you remove the computer from the dock while the os is sleeping.
It is a pain in the ass to set it up again, especially since it thinks it is a great idea to use the inbuilt monitor, even though the lid is shut.
Also when you undock when suspended sometimes it forgets to check after waking up, and some programs, especially fullscreen video playback has a tendency to continue on a "ghost display"
Overall it is livable but annoying especially because 33% of times it just works.
Also this is xfce. Cinamon and Mate may be much better.
Ok, I'm not up to speed on these things. I use several monitors on my desktop computer only. I suppose this would work better than with a laptop, in the event I chose xfce as my DE ? I don't usually hotswap monitors, they're always plugged in.
Can confirm. I'm using Kubuntu because the Debian installer didn't detect my hardware correctly and I couldn't be bothered to figure out why. Aside from snaps, I don't care.
All the parrots doing Ubuntu bashing over the last few years are really hurting adoption in my opinion. It still is the best Linux OS for new users for many reasons, even if there are many other ones that might be better suited for other uses or preferences.
Riddle me this—I’ve used Windows, MacOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu to host a Plex server over the last 12ish years, and Ubuntu has been the most stable, hands down. Currently I’ve got a bunch of VM’s on ProxMox, but Plex still hums away on an Ubuntu Server LTS VM without a hitch.
I have plenty of reasons to chose other distros for specific needs, but when I want something to just work and be easy on me, Ubuntu is the right choice, and it is definitely a solid place for anyone to start getting into the Linux way of life.
No riddle really. The last time I checked, Ubuntu was the most used server Linux OS. Just like RHEL, it's tested for and used in the enterprise, but unlike RHEL, everyone gets the same copy, including you and me. It follows that it should be solid. A big part of that comes from Debian of course, but there's additional testing and patching in Ubuntu. It's no wonder it just works.
Simple is unfortunately the negation for complicated and complex, which are slightly different things. Ubuntu is not complicated, but complex. Gentoo is complicated, but not as complex (at least it can be).
A distro is the distribution you want to use for an OS when it comes to linux such as fedora, Ubuntu, mint, arch etc. the symbols are the icons for the individual OS’s
A bell curve featuring numerous wojaks and Linux distribution system icons by IQ score.
From left to right they are:
At the left 0.1% end of the bell curve with no IQ score labels is a boomlet wojak accompanied by Ubuntu icon and the text: WHERE START BUTTON?
Between 0.1% and 14% on the left side of the bell curve, encompassing the IQ scores 55 and 70 is an NPC wojak accompanied by the Arch icon and the text: I USE ARCH BTW
Between 14% on the left side of the bell curve and approximately 34% on the right side of the bell curve, encompassing the IQ scores 85, 100, and 115 is a crying Zoomer wojak accompanied by the Fedora icon and the text: JUST WORKS
Between 34% and 0.1% on the right side of the bell curve, encompassing the IQ scores 130 and 145 is a big brain wojak accompanied by the Gentoo icon and the text: K.I.S.S
At the right 0.1% end of the bell curve is a light brown hood wojak accompanied by the Debian icon and the text: NO TIME FOR DISTROWARS
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Quick attack users of the most popular distro before normal people start using Linux! We can't allow a good, stable and perfectly usable distro to get popular, we need to bully everyone back to windows or terrible things might happen like the year of they Linux desktop!!
This was me, except I went straight from Ubuntu to Debian. At some point I wondered why I was doing all this manual maintenance. I realized that Ubuntu relies on Debian and so I switched. Haven’t looked back.
My last Ubuntu install would break my shit all the time. Debian is so much more reliable it's incredible. Haven't had to mess with anything in almost two years on my debian install whereas Ubuntu required constant maintenance.
It's a shame Ubuntu's so popular because Canonical seems to be absolutely awful at testing their package updates compared to any other common desktop distro. I've had far fewer issues with Debian, Fedora and SUSE
Interesting. I‘ve installed ubuntu server on my homeserver and added a couple of services like two years ago. I‘m constantly improving stuff and so far, nothing went wrong. I also had a couple ubuntu servers at work, no issues like ever.
I also installed ubuntu desktop recently and it’s a little buggy (my fault as I didn’t use the lts version I suppose).
It's a lot harder to get Nvidia drivers working on Debian than any other distro I've tried including Arch. Every issue besides that one I've ever had in Debian, I was able to fix.
I'm about to get a chance to try it on a different pc (M5A am3 with a Titan X), but on a x79 motherboard and a 1080ti, that doesn't work. After installing that, I do get the Nvidia x server but when I open the program, it's an empty window and something is obviously broken. I installed Arch on the same pc and it was even easier to get Nvidia drivers working than on Ubuntu.
I've been a Linux user since installing Slackware from floppy discs. These days I run Mint on my desktop/laptop and Ubuntu on servers. Does this make me weak?
I started similarly with Yggdrasil, but quickly moved to Slackware, downloading floppy images on a 2400bps modem.
These days I use Xubuntu on my desktops/laptops and Debian on my servers.
While back in the day I (to quote Weird Al) "beta tested every operating system, gave props to some, and others, I dissed 'em", I just haven't got time to deal with all that any more.
I was actually a Xubuntu user for a long time, but tried Mint with Cinnamon, and found lots of things much easier and more polished, while maintaining the lightweight feel that XFCE provided.
Nix is great. But I don't think I'd want to use it for a desktop OS base.
(Disk space/cycle life potential, binary cache misses, broken packages, and complete incompatibility with everything else. User error, TBH, but also stuff that's not really a problem with other systems. Well worth it as a package manager, though.)
I've been using it on various desktops, as a PM but mostly the full OS for 6 years or so. I would hate to switch back.
Disk space is an issue... I've seen the OS take as much as 100 GB. But in a world of 2TB SSDs for $100, is that a big deal?
I don't see why NixOS would be any worse for the lifetime of a disk than other distros.
I've only hit binary cache missed for packages I created, or where I changed build options. IOW: a binary cache miss means Debian wasn't gonna have it anyway. And on the flip side: you can change package build options! Neat!
Broken packages are, if anything, less of a problem with Debian. Debian has lots of packages that are...not broken, but incomplete, requiring lots of manual config or whatever. NixOS is way better at that stuff.
User error? Yeah, fair. I'm a programmer by trade, but I can definitely see how it'd be a bit much if I weren't.
But oh man...you should've seen how trivial it was to switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire (including Jack support etc), leaving no trace that Pulse was ever installed... Or switching from X to Wayland, on a system that I've been doing rolling updates on since 2017, all with a clear conscience... It's beautiful.
Disk space is an issue… I’ve seen the OS take as much as 100 GB. But in a world of 2TB SSDs for $100, is that a big deal?
Yes? Storage used for the OS is space not used for projects, entertainment, docs, redundancy, snapshots, avoiding fragmentation (EXT4), etc. Money spent on SSDs is money not spent on going out, food, meeting people, basic needs, other hardware, etc.
I don’t see why NixOS would be any worse for the lifetime of a disk than other distros.
Untested, but I'd assume high space use combined with high update frequency, plus occasional builds-from-source and multiple simultaneous package versions, means more disk writes.
Biased, maybe, because manual GC means you see disk use tick up more than in other package managers, and also because I personally repeatedly rebuilt a custom gigabyte-sized Derivation dozens/hundreds of times. But I think it's a reasonable point of caution.
I’ve only hit binary cache missed for packages I created, or where I changed build options.
Broken packages are, if anything, less of a problem [than] with Debian. Debian has lots of packages that are…not broken, but incomplete, requiring lots of manual config or whatever.
Maybe this is a NixPkgs vs NixOS thing. Also, using Nix mostly to supplement packages I hadn't already installed through my distro probably meant I hit more fringe areas. But I've even encountered cache misses and failed builds for some pretty big Python libraries on certain commits.
Debian-based out-of-the-box functionality for stuff is indeed also Not Great, IIRC— Stable, but yeah, sometimes maybe a bit "incomplete". Actually, Arch-based has worked well IME.
And on the flip side: you can change package build options! Neat!
But oh man…you should’ve seen how trivial it was to switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire (including Jack support etc), leaving no trace that Pulse was ever installed… Or switching from X to Wayland, on a system that I’ve been doing rolling updates on since 2017, all with a clear conscience… It’s beautiful.
Yeah. I personally don't care about that stuff unless it directly impacts something I'm working on.
And that's why I say Nix is a great tool for package management, but not something I'd personally want to use as an OS base. When you're already elbow-deep in the plumbing anyway, Nix makes it way easier to swap components out. But when you just want to install and use an application, editing Nix configs feels like more work, and it's so much easier to just pacman/yum/apt-getinstall firefox or whatever and get on with your day.
Plus, some specific red flags surrounding stability and interoperability:
ALSA is apparently hardcoded to just straight-up not work with a Nix root. Not sure how NixOS handles it, but in my specific use case, I had to symlinkJoin{paths=[alsa-lib alsa-plugins]} so they could find each other. Pretty sure it took a lot of strace -f -e trace=file and nix-locate for me to figure this one out, just to get sound working.
Qt generally takes a ton of extra steps to be able to run on Nix. And have you actually ever opened the wrapper the Nix hooks generate to see what it's actually doing? For one of my applications just now, you get a 43kb Bash script with apparently 581 assignments to just a handful of QT and XDG-related environment variables.
OpenGL doesn't look safe either. Nix handles the drivers its own way, so to get OpenGL for Nix packages to work on other systems, you have to jump through some hoops. I assume the same amount of work in the opposite direction would be needed to use EG proprietary or statically compiled graphics applications on NixOS too.
I'm sure most of these problems are "solved", in the sense that NixOS implements workarounds that are the default when you install the affected derivations, and there are wrappers written for most other cases. But all of that adds maintenance, fragility, and complexity. It remarkably works well enough for userspace, but stuff like this still feels a bit house-of-cards-y for the basic OS and desktop. It's not Nix's fault, but so much of the work that goes into Nix seems to be just to force software that was never designed for it to run on it. Ultimately, the Linux FHS has momentum and adoption. Nix's technical design might be compelling, but so are interoperability, stability, and simplicity.
The NixOS enthusiasts are doing a lot of technically interesting work, but I personally find the results of that work most useful outside the NixOS ecosystem. And I do think Nix as a package manager is really great. Ever since I've installed it, I've basically incorporated it as a major component or tool in every sizable software project I've since started. But I just personally wouldn't want to base an entire OS on it.
I'm saying that's a way I might personally consider going if I were to set up a new computer. Rock solid base that you can still get normal packages and binaries to run on without much hassle if needed, plus Nix with more up-to-date packages that you can customize however you find most useful.
Personally I have a mix of rolling/regular repos, AUR, Nix, Flatpak, and static binaries. They all have their uses, TBH.
Distro swapping is a rite of passage. The grass is always greener. Until you settle and stopped caring about the OS at all. Which is why I went back to Windows (7 at the time) mainly for gaming compatibility.
Proton got me hnnng tho I'll definitely be giving either Endeavor or OpenSuse a go when I build my next computer. Rolling distro sounds like a "set it and forget it" thing and I like that.
Installing a new distro feels so good to me, makes me happy. I love messing with the settings and stuff, trying a new desktop environment messing with the native apps. Man I love it.
I'm using OpenSuse's Gecko with rolling release. It's beautiful.
Garuda linux. I'm running the dragonized gaming distro and have fallen in love with it. A buddy turned me on to it a few months back and it's perfect. Runs all my steam games through proton like a champ.
I got everything working great in Fedora with Proton, even my nvidia drivers. Then, a buddy had an idea that we all get and play MWII, which can not run in proton, now I'm back to windows
I did xfce for a long time and really enjoyed it. Then I did some hopping to try out tiling, and found paperwm. For me, its just a much better experiance for the way I work
For some reason my TV could only do 30hz with XFCE but 60hz with GNOME. I never figured out why. If anyone has the answers, feel free to share. I just gave up and used GNOME lol.
I think I'm stupid as I don't get this at all. I've never used a distro that doesn't work. They all work. Some are more advanced, some are more stable, some are more polished, some even look and behave like Windows, but fundamentally they are work.
I haven't seen anyone hate Fedora until this meme.
Now, Red Hat, which has strong ties to Fedora, is doing a lot of stupid bullshit. I actually moved to Debian due to that, not really because I think its superior (at the end of the day, all distros can do the same stuff) but because I'm getting tired with corporations
I enjoy Fedora and have used it for years but it can occasionally be harder to find packages and tutorials compared to other distros. That and DNF being quite slow.
You should stay on Ubuntu if it work for you. This is just a meme. There is no need to feel bad and force yourself to switch just because other people think your distro is bad :)
When I decided to set up my own server my only Linux experience was experimenting with regular Ubuntu. So Ubuntu server was the closest thing to it, and I figured I would have to re-learn fewer commands. It’s also been my impression that because a lot of inexperienced folks like me start with Ubuntu, that’s where the most beginner-friendly instructions are likely to be. I didn’t really know what Debian was.
Some corporations are switching from Redhat-based (CentOS/Alma/Rocky) to Ubuntu because it offers a professional level of support in the event that support is needed.
Personally, I prefer Debian for servers and Arch for desktop.
Sure, but given red hats shenanigans we can't just go on with status quo. The servers I have to replace are goijg to something else than a RH downstream.
Usual sentiment of "the best distro is the one that works for you". I can just say that I found Ubuntu to do a confusing "splitting the difference". It requires more knowledge than using, say, windows, but also tries to hand hold. I put in a lot of time with Raspbian, and now Debian on a desktop, and I like it better because there's less "in-between".
I'd kind of stumble through windows, sort of getting what was going on but mostly having faith and a hands off approach to what was going on underneath the hood. I didn't really understand or learn much other than keyword recognition and a passing concept of broad principles. Rasbian and then Debian forced and encouraged me to get under the hood more, so when I was troubleshooting I was at least learning why things weren't working. When I had display issues, it wasn't "I clicked the wrong box" it was "because of my SSD my kernel has a race condition with the video driver and x". Not that I would, but I get now how you can slim down an OS for a specific hardware platform if you really wanted. Having done a ton of microcontroller stuff where I was getting different chips and whatnot talking to each other succesfully, this was a HUGE missing piece. "Real computers" aren't a black box mystery to me anymore, even if I'd suck at proper computer engineering.
Ubuntu kind of over optimized so I didn't learn, but was being asked to do more under the hood anyway. I kept looking at it as adjusting settings the way I did with windows, even though it was asking more of me in terms of understanding to troubleshoot.
But again, that's me and my experience, and more so it's based off of how I personally learn. I'm still not overly familiar with Ubuntu, but I get now that there's no reason you can't do what I described above, it just never "clicked" for me.
The way you describe Ubuntu as asking you to do more under the hood, and you seeing it as adjusting settings, really rings true to me. Often I find myself frustrated at having to jump through so many hoops to do simple stuff. I like learning to use Linux but sometimes I just don’t have the time for it
Yea that makes sense. I've been curious about Arch given how many resources there are for learning it. Weirdly enough I know two people who have tried it, one said it was the easiest setup they've ever done and the other said it bricked their laptop.
Most distros really aren’t too different fundamentally, so if you’re happy where you are there isn’t much reason to switch. It can be fun to swap just to see what’s different (and learn what differences are really just skin deep), but you don’t have to. Some distros have more big ideas behind them which can be interesting (like nixos) but mostly they all feel pretty similar.
Because you're arbitrarily restricting yourself to old versions of tools and software. The idea is you don't want unexpected conflicts to bring down your system. But, what that means is when you do go to upgrade on something like a server, you would test the whole thing on the new version, and then migrate. That's not how people use desktops. You just feel like one day upgrading from 20.04 to 20.10, and then get a massive burst of differences. It's really hard to pin down what specifically goes wrong when something does.
So unless you have a staging environment for your desktop where you test the new version before migrating, then what is the purpose of running old versions of stuff?
I am a Debian unstable user who used to use Gentoo, the reason I stopped using Gentoo is revdep-rebuild. Do not want to do another revdep-rebuild ever again.
I had a girlfriend who used Debian back around 2005.
Never have I been around an OS that didn't work as often as Debian. It wouldn't crash, but need to be updated or something every hour. It was a full time job keeping it running for her.
Every hour was obviously hyperbole. It would break often. Normally due to some issue that would pop up, most often drivers.
She did run on unstable and had a fetch for updates automated every evening. Her goal wasn't a stable OS, but to be at the forefront of testing. She knew no programming, so it meant that she would report bugs and have a box with a giant fan that didn't run anything most of the time. She made bad choices.
I'm sure stable Debian is stable. I'm sure it's gotten better in the past 15 years, but the fact my experience with Debian was an unstable mess that was more of a job than a useable system makes me suspicious of the distro.
If you run testing or unstable there will be updates available very very often. But, you choose when to update, you don't need to update anytime an update is available.
You should know what you're doing and expect this if you're running it. Otherwise, you should use stable. With stable, you'll typically just have security updates until you choose to update to the next stable, which typically is released every other year.
4th is Gentoo.
5th is Debian's logo inverted, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be Debian or a derivative that I don't know off hand because there are so many.
Pretty accurate. Heard someone describe Debian as "boring Arch" the other days and it's pretty accurate. Whilst the base system is still fairly useable it's still pretty bare bones and it seems like most Debian users will tweak it slightly to their liking and just stick with it. Been me for the past few years
Serious question: For those wanting to run Linux, and not having experience in the command line, which distro would you recommend? Gotta be as user-friendly as possible.
I don't either. I hate Snap. Flatpak is kind of Okay but I still prefer native install when available.
I was mainly making a comment on how on Ubuntu they sometimes force you to install the snap version with apt, yes it is really slimy and wrong and it's why I don't use Ubuntu anymore and instead just use Pop.
Precisely. And for me, the snap package doesn't work well. It doesn't follow cursor themes and there are issues involved with closing tabs. Installing via the Mozilla ppa fixes this, but it shouldn't have to be that way. New users, especially ones with a fear of the console, should stay away from Ubuntu for reasons like these.
I'd still recommend Debian bases for people like Mint or Pop, since they have the best software compatibility over all (so many devs just package their apps as Deb and rarely RPM so it's a pain to install them on other Distros). Best of all those ones come without Snap at all.
As with anything Linux, the answer is, it depends, and each person will give you a different answer. Mine is that is you want something close to Windows? Go for Linux Mint.
Solus was specifically designed to be for normal people and for you to have to use the terminal as infrequently as possible. However, the software selection is more limited than in other distros.
I have a bit of a hard time recommending solus because they have been back and forth on development for the past couple of years. It is a project with great potential, but it needs to be actively maintained.
Ubuntu Cinnamon is what'd I recommend more if you're starting out and want to play video games. Lutris dropped support for Linux Mint because both parties were a bit too stubborn on making the appropriate changes that would work for everyone (iirc, LM packaged drivers differently and Lutris wanted it a bit more standard to work efficiently. And immovable object had met an unstoppable force)
I've never had a easier time going from bootable to functional than using Nobara, even Mint gave me more hassle creating a functional bootable than Nobara.
It's based on Fedora Linux so if you were gonna go that route I'd say give Nobara a try.
I would seriously recommend you use gentoo for a bit. It is not user friendly, you use the command line constantly, the install process is mostly manual. But nothing teaches you the fundamentals like using it.
Now, personally I did this on a second PC as a home server hobby. Dunno if I'd recommend it for a novice wanting a desktop experience.
"Use not insert user friendly distro so you can get better even though you're probably one of the 99% of humanity that doesn't need their computer for more than dicking around on a web browser and couldn't give less of a fuck about OS's and computers."
I haven't tried using arch since I was 12, and even after all these years the experience makes me feel like such a poser, I didn't even manage to compile the kernel, and gave up before I had anything resembling an OS.
This was over 20 years ago, so I don't know and/or remember, point is I had no idea what I was doing, possibly just trying to build a window manager or something then? All I remember is only having a CLI and feeling like I couldn't get anything to work.
These days the arch live image comes with an install script, archinstall, that does a pretty good job at making sure arch is installed and set up enough to get you in, including installing a nice DE of your choice. No compiling needed :)
Debian user here... Just works and has been working since '95 here. After Slackware 1.3 and Redhat (non EL) 4.2 I was fed up with reinstalls for major upgrades, so I switched to Debian. It just works, most of the times. (for the first time in decades I had to revert a kernel to the previous version, that what you get running testing ;) )
Am I a guru, I doubt it but I don't care, I'm lazy enough to stick with what I know, but not to lazy to dive into new things. (but not until I absolutely have to)
To be frank, i distro hop'ed for like 3 months, tried a lot of things, i've got an amd 3900 and rx 590.. 'till now it's the only one everything worked fine, i also got 2 screens with different dpi and resolutions, latest gnome with custom nobara patches is the only one that properly worked with fractional scaling with wayland. It's my main OS for personal use and work, and i'm not gonna change it anytime soon. Flatpaks, snaps everything works as expected! Before that i used PopOS or 1,5y, also nice OS but i had to fix everything by hand. I'm kinda tired of doing it each time i have to upgrade to milestone version or something similar. 😑
I used Debian on my other computer and it made me happy. But not having access to the AUR was too annoying so I never switched away from EOS on my main computer. Not everything can be verified on the repo, flatpaks and their weird compartimentalized sandbox are confusing to me, and sometimes I don't wanna build shit from source.
Ubuntu deviates from accepted standards too often (Mir, Upstart, Snap) thanks to Canonicals ham fisted attempts to redefine Linux.
Arch has a tendency to break due to the maintainers commitment to staying true to upstream. Too often you end up on the Arch wiki looking up how to solve small issues that should have been in the original PKGBUILD
Gentoo, not everyone wants to compile everything from source
Debian's commitment to FOSS results in frequent incompatibilities (both SW and HW) out of the box.
Fedora is the perfect middle ground. It implements the latest technology standards as soon as they are stable (eg, Wayland, Btrfs by default), stays fairly close and true to upstream while maintaining package stability, and overall just works with a large variety of lackages
Fedora is for people who use Linux as a tool rather than a hobby.
Should I use Fedora for a home server? I like stuff not breaking randomly after updates which makes Gentoo and Arch kind of a meh choice. Debian is so committed to foss that it's harder to get drivers working/a lot less stuff works out of the box. On a new enough laptop with all it's weird chipset drivers, it's harder to get Debian working than Arch in my experience. I've never successfully got Nvidia drivers working on Debian for example.
Normally home servers run bog standard older hardware so using Debian isn't a problem but I want to install an Nvidia card for ai stuff.
If Debian works on your hardware and you just want something that works and doesn't give you issues then yes its a good choice. It will just work happily in the background for years.
Fedora Server is a great choice if its something you want to continuously tinker with. Each release averages a little over 1 year of support so you'll want to do a dist upgrade after each new version comes out.
I'm currently considering switching to it on a couple of production servers I manage because they rely on PostGIS. EL9 and Debian rely on the official postgres repositories rather than shipping their own .deb/rpms and the official postgres repository's GIS packages are so unreliable I think it would be more stable on Arch. With Fedora server however I can just install postgres and postgis from the official community repo.
If you Emerge, Gentoo would at very least tell you before you install something that it'll break as a result of dependency issues with a list of said dependencies, and offer to update those dependencies for you.
I got screwed one time really hard with emerge. I didn't update for a long time and it was messed up enough that I couldn't install anything due to python issues and I also couldn't update due to python issues and there were circular dependencies. Experienced people on the Gentoo discord tried and failed to help me get that fixed without an os reinstall but all efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
This was on a slow as molasses Athlon XP so reinstalling Gentoo was completely out of the question. Since Gentoo was basically the only thing that would run on that cpu, I got a different motherboard from ebay instead.
Fedora is for people who use Linux as a tool rather than a hobby.
Last I heard, this mere tool now no longer supports various video codecs lol. Something something "patents", which get in the way of using something as a tool.
Fedora with AUR would be ideal for me. I've had too many random issues running Ubuntu and ubuntu-based OSs and while I like the simplicity of Debian, its too... little? for what I'm looking for. Arch and arch-based works great, but most are KDE and I would need to make a lot of changes out of the box before I can start using it (the default pdf viewer for KDE is nicer that Evince (the pdf viewer packaged with most gnome DEs) but I can't print off some pages in e-books whereas Evince allows that)
What do you mean "most are KDE"? Arch doesn't even include a DE when you install it. If you don't install one during install, then you're greeted by a terminal when you reboot. I've been using Gnome on Arch for 2 years without issue.
Now you made me look up Artix. Which is 81 in the top 100 in Distrowatch.
Oh, it's a fork of Manjaro/Arch. I liked Manjaro on my ARM Laptop. Most software I use is easier to install from .deb or .rpm though so I tend to stick to Debian-based.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20210308#artix
Artix is a fork of Arch that uses different initialization systems such as Open-RC instead of SystemD.
Artix exists because people believe that SystemD is bloated, which it arguably is. And that SystemD doesn't respect the Unix philosophy.
The memory usage is as Systemd has lots of daemons and services running the background. The CPU usage uplift is mainly during boot, as Systemd is sorting itself out.
I see ! Is this a concrete issue, as in does your system stall easily ? or is it more ideological ? Sometimes it's difficult to make sense of that as a layman
...says the guy that makes a meme shitting on users of every other distro.
While at the same time not even using the meme format correctly.
I‘m 14 and this is deep, linux edition. :)
I see this always get commented, but I don't get it, what's the right way to use it?
In this meme template both the lowest and highest IQ should say the same thing
Edit: just realized, it could be sort of saved changing either gentoo for an arch based distro or arch for a gentoo based distro. This would partially save the symmetry of the template.
Ahh, makes sense, but is it really wrong? To me it's just a different kind of joke
Lmaoo, moar recursion!
Omegalul
goodun
I mean… Ubuntu is kinda-sorta just Debian with extra steps.
Right, I think there's another bell curve meme to be made here
The way memes work, yes it is wrong. Memes have a core structure or theme that variations are made around. Changing that core only really works if making a new meme or if making intentional commentary on the original meme itself. In this case by having nothing more than their preferred ranking of distros the creator has actually made themselves the target that the original meme would be making fun of.
Honestly what is wrong with 'just works'. If the policies behind the project and the security and privacy is all in place using this option is nothing wrong.
For linux to grow it needs to be more 'just works'. Let the complex stuff and simple stuff be there. It's not one or the other.
Exactly.
When I was younger, tinkering around was a hobby in itself. But today I actually used my machine and I want it to work without hassle. I don't want to think about swap partition sizes, modeset kernel parameters and that kind of stuff. I want a reliable tool.
That's why so many devs use MacBooks. They're essentially Unix machines with a proper GUI and mostly work absolutely flawlessly.
I've been using MacBooks for over ten years now and had exactly one crash: when the drive was failing so hard, it couldn't even spin up anymore.
This is exactly me. For a server it’s Linux but for everyday use/work a MacBook Pro is great. It just works. It’s great as you can fire up the command line to manage Linux servers easily. That’s how I admin my Lemmy Ansible install.
For gaming I use Windows. It’s all about the best tool for the job.
Why should I use Arch btw if Ubuntu does everything I need? It's not some locked down os like Windows and I can tweak it however I want
You might want to configure it from scratch, with exactly the tools and utilities you want (e.g. networking utility, desktop environment). Or you might just find this process fun and interesting. Some people take issue with how Canonical is run, and decisions they make.
I think it's funny that so many Linux users talk about how locked down Windows is, when 90% of them live in an effective walled garden defined by their package manager, or other inborn restriction of their distro. I doubt that even 10% are compiling from source with any regularity.
Why do you need to wait for someone to repackage FF for you before you install it? Just go get it if you run Arch BTW, but you know the overwhelming majority of ArchBros really only know how to install it through Pacman.
What‘s wrong with installing software from a package manager when the package I need is on there and has a decently up to date version? If its not on there I can still build from source.
When I‘m in a situation where I just need a specific lib or cli tool or whatever and don‘t have time to potentially debug a niche compile error, installing from a package manager is more convenient and saves time.
Except snap, which can burn in hell.
Fedora definitely doesn't "just works". Try installing the proprietary NVIDIA drivers then updating your kernel.
Ford definitely doesn't "just works". Try installing a jet engine on the roof then fueling it with unleaded.
I don't want to blame you, but I think sometimes Nvidia really enjoys messing with Linux users.
Regardless of whose fault it is, it's unacceptable that half the people with a discrete GPU have nigh incompatible hardware. It's more akin to using snow tires breaking your car than a jet engine.
Yeah, fair point.
Not just that, but ever since F32 every single fricking update managed to either break something completely or made some part of the OS too unstable for daily use. Bluetooth issues, crashing display server, system hanging on suspend, broken bootloader on some Secure Boot sysems (handover from EUFI to bootloader no longer happening) therefore rendering the system completely unable to boot.. Just some issues I ran into when using Fedora as my daily driver for well over a year.
Fedora is great when it works, but always keep in mind that having a bleeding edge system comes at the cost of stability.
That was my experience ten years ago : mobile Geforce 660 with "Optimus", two flavours of drivers, of which none worked reliably. I remember fiddling with Nouveau & Bumblebee for hours. I should try another, more stable distro on my desktop, but I rely a lot on some Windows-only programs.
I keep reading this, but I haven't had any issues at all over the past year with Fedora KDE and proprietary Nvidia drivers installed via flatpak. Is it more of a problem when installed via dnf?
It is ok to use what you like, this is just a joke
Just works is definitely something Linux should strive for, but at least in my experience and in experience of my friends, "just works" has always been a poor experience.
What I'm talking about is how you install a just works distro like mint or garuda, and then some package refuses to work or maybe hardware such as a sound card or multi monitor setup, so you gotta go troubleshooting, which isn't very "just works". What's worse is that some of the issues aren't talked about/documented, so you pretty much have to rely on making a post and wait for potentially hours for a response to get help. It's also very hard to troubleshoot the system by yourself if you don't have experience, as you don't really know what's running under the hood as in what came prepackaged by the distro.
Complaining that something works or that people prefer things that work is a very backasswards critique and deepens the presumed stereotype that home Linux users are just nerds who only like to tinker (which is just partially true).
To be fair I've been using mint, and whilst THE FUCKING MULTIMONITOR DOESN'T FUCKING WORK (Uhh I wanna punch a drywall)! otherwise it has been suprisingly smooth. Especially since it is my main computer, and I use it to burn discs for older game systems (incl. x360!!!), unity development, and a bunch of other stuff. So I have to say, it is VERY close to it just works.
Ah, that's a dealbreaker. What causes it to fail with several monitors ?
It works but it kinda forgets the monitor layout, especially if you remove the computer from the dock while the os is sleeping.
It is a pain in the ass to set it up again, especially since it thinks it is a great idea to use the inbuilt monitor, even though the lid is shut.
Also when you undock when suspended sometimes it forgets to check after waking up, and some programs, especially fullscreen video playback has a tendency to continue on a "ghost display"
Overall it is livable but annoying especially because 33% of times it just works.
Also this is xfce. Cinamon and Mate may be much better.
Ah, xfce is the lightweight DE, right ?
And what is this dock exactly ? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Well yeah, "lightweight". The only one that uses slightly less resources than windows 10.
A docking station for a laptop? Pretty common device. A specialised port replicator.
Ok, I'm not up to speed on these things. I use several monitors on my desktop computer only. I suppose this would work better than with a laptop, in the event I chose xfce as my DE ? I don't usually hotswap monitors, they're always plugged in.
Thanks for clarifying
On my desktop XFCE works as expected with the dual monitors...
Isn't the point of this meme for the low IQ and high IQ people to have the same preference? Any way, I'm on Linux Mint usually -_-
Well, ubuntu is based on debian, so it is the same preference.
quickly escapes the comment section
Can confirm. I'm using Kubuntu because the Debian installer didn't detect my hardware correctly and I couldn't be bothered to figure out why. Aside from snaps, I don't care.
I think by default the debain installer doesn't have any proprietary code.
that's not true anymore
ah noice
From freedom, came elegance
Well I can tell you why Linux does not have a higher adoption rate: toxic shit like this.
Na the biggest and main reason why Linux doesn't have a higher adoption rate (on desktop) is that it's not preinstalled on the devices you buy.
There are obviously other factors but they are miniscule in comparison
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux.
Oh no, I can no longer tell if you are serious or making fun of the people who are serious.
Haha 😀 This is Linux memes community afterall ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ
You're such a shit. 😀
Fueds between distros will always exist, like fueds between car manufacturers. It's just banter, except some people take it wayyyy too far.
but which distro YOU use?
All the parrots doing Ubuntu bashing over the last few years are really hurting adoption in my opinion. It still is the best Linux OS for new users for many reasons, even if there are many other ones that might be better suited for other uses or preferences.
Riddle me this—I’ve used Windows, MacOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu to host a Plex server over the last 12ish years, and Ubuntu has been the most stable, hands down. Currently I’ve got a bunch of VM’s on ProxMox, but Plex still hums away on an Ubuntu Server LTS VM without a hitch.
I have plenty of reasons to chose other distros for specific needs, but when I want something to just work and be easy on me, Ubuntu is the right choice, and it is definitely a solid place for anyone to start getting into the Linux way of life.
No riddle really. The last time I checked, Ubuntu was the most used server Linux OS. Just like RHEL, it's tested for and used in the enterprise, but unlike RHEL, everyone gets the same copy, including you and me. It follows that it should be solid. A big part of that comes from Debian of course, but there's additional testing and patching in Ubuntu. It's no wonder it just works.
This is parroted all the time, all the while linux is doing just fine.
Why is adoption rate such an important metric?
It's a meme
Actually it's because Linux users are all mentally ill.
How is Gentoo keeping it simple?
I think the insinuation of the gigantic brain is that it's not
Simple is unfortunately the negation for complicated and complex, which are slightly different things. Ubuntu is not complicated, but complex. Gentoo is complicated, but not as complex (at least it can be).
lol aren't complicated and complex synonyms (as adjective)?
No, there's a pretty important difference.
As a Mint user: What do those symbols even mean? (or: "Distro? What's a distro?")
A distro is the distribution you want to use for an OS when it comes to linux such as fedora, Ubuntu, mint, arch etc. the symbols are the icons for the individual OS’s
Wooooooosh
Image Transcription:
A bell curve featuring numerous wojaks and Linux distribution system icons by IQ score. From left to right they are: At the left 0.1% end of the bell curve with no IQ score labels is a boomlet wojak accompanied by Ubuntu icon and the text: WHERE START BUTTON? Between 0.1% and 14% on the left side of the bell curve, encompassing the IQ scores 55 and 70 is an NPC wojak accompanied by the Arch icon and the text: I USE ARCH BTW Between 14% on the left side of the bell curve and approximately 34% on the right side of the bell curve, encompassing the IQ scores 85, 100, and 115 is a crying Zoomer wojak accompanied by the Fedora icon and the text: JUST WORKS Between 34% and 0.1% on the right side of the bell curve, encompassing the IQ scores 130 and 145 is a big brain wojak accompanied by the Gentoo icon and the text: K.I.S.S At the right 0.1% end of the bell curve is a light brown hood wojak accompanied by the Debian icon and the text: NO TIME FOR DISTROWARS
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜]
Quick attack users of the most popular distro before normal people start using Linux! We can't allow a good, stable and perfectly usable distro to get popular, we need to bully everyone back to windows or terrible things might happen like the year of they Linux desktop!!
Quick Attack? Like the pokeymun move?
It's not very effective.
XD
I use Linux Mint because I like Mint Ice Cream
I use Parrot in honour of my parrot Loba
I use Ubuntu Mate because I've always wanted one
I use Peppermint because it's my favourite flavor of gum
I use Rocky Linux because he's my favourite American Hero
I use fedora because I know it will come back in style
This is so stupid. They're all fine.
This was me, except I went straight from Ubuntu to Debian. At some point I wondered why I was doing all this manual maintenance. I realized that Ubuntu relies on Debian and so I switched. Haven’t looked back.
My last Ubuntu install would break my shit all the time. Debian is so much more reliable it's incredible. Haven't had to mess with anything in almost two years on my debian install whereas Ubuntu required constant maintenance.
It's a shame Ubuntu's so popular because Canonical seems to be absolutely awful at testing their package updates compared to any other common desktop distro. I've had far fewer issues with Debian, Fedora and SUSE
Interesting. I‘ve installed ubuntu server on my homeserver and added a couple of services like two years ago. I‘m constantly improving stuff and so far, nothing went wrong. I also had a couple ubuntu servers at work, no issues like ever.
I also installed ubuntu desktop recently and it’s a little buggy (my fault as I didn’t use the lts version I suppose).
Debian is for people who have shit to get done and don't care about a neon colored wallpaper, mostly don't have a wallpaper at all.
I kinda like my Debian to be as least a little pretty.
Default wallpaper FTW
Real Chads don't use a DE.
It's a lot harder to get Nvidia drivers working on Debian than any other distro I've tried including Arch. Every issue besides that one I've ever had in Debian, I was able to fix.
How so? If you have non-free enabled, shouldn't
apt install nvidia-driverwork?I'm about to get a chance to try it on a different pc (M5A am3 with a Titan X), but on a x79 motherboard and a 1080ti, that doesn't work. After installing that, I do get the Nvidia x server but when I open the program, it's an empty window and something is obviously broken. I installed Arch on the same pc and it was even easier to get Nvidia drivers working than on Ubuntu.
I've been a Linux user since installing Slackware from floppy discs. These days I run Mint on my desktop/laptop and Ubuntu on servers. Does this make me weak?
Installing Slackware from floppies makes you a badass
If it works for you, you have find what you want :)
It makes you a king because you use what's best for you.
I started similarly with Yggdrasil, but quickly moved to Slackware, downloading floppy images on a 2400bps modem.
These days I use Xubuntu on my desktops/laptops and Debian on my servers.
While back in the day I (to quote Weird Al) "beta tested every operating system, gave props to some, and others, I dissed 'em", I just haven't got time to deal with all that any more.
I was actually a Xubuntu user for a long time, but tried Mint with Cinnamon, and found lots of things much easier and more polished, while maintaining the lightweight feel that XFCE provided.
NixOS: from where I am, you're indistinguishable
Nix is great. But I don't think I'd want to use it for a desktop OS base.
(Disk space/cycle life potential, binary cache misses, broken packages, and complete incompatibility with everything else. User error, TBH, but also stuff that's not really a problem with other systems. Well worth it as a package manager, though.)
I've been using it on various desktops, as a PM but mostly the full OS for 6 years or so. I would hate to switch back.
Disk space is an issue... I've seen the OS take as much as 100 GB. But in a world of 2TB SSDs for $100, is that a big deal?
I don't see why NixOS would be any worse for the lifetime of a disk than other distros.
I've only hit binary cache missed for packages I created, or where I changed build options. IOW: a binary cache miss means Debian wasn't gonna have it anyway. And on the flip side: you can change package build options! Neat!
Broken packages are, if anything, less of a problem with Debian. Debian has lots of packages that are...not broken, but incomplete, requiring lots of manual config or whatever. NixOS is way better at that stuff.
User error? Yeah, fair. I'm a programmer by trade, but I can definitely see how it'd be a bit much if I weren't.
But oh man...you should've seen how trivial it was to switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire (including Jack support etc), leaving no trace that Pulse was ever installed... Or switching from X to Wayland, on a system that I've been doing rolling updates on since 2017, all with a clear conscience... It's beautiful.
Yes? Storage used for the OS is space not used for projects, entertainment, docs, redundancy, snapshots, avoiding fragmentation (EXT4), etc. Money spent on SSDs is money not spent on going out, food, meeting people, basic needs, other hardware, etc.
Untested, but I'd assume high space use combined with high update frequency, plus occasional builds-from-source and multiple simultaneous package versions, means more disk writes.
Biased, maybe, because manual GC means you see disk use tick up more than in other package managers, and also because I personally repeatedly rebuilt a custom gigabyte-sized Derivation dozens/hundreds of times. But I think it's a reasonable point of caution.
Maybe this is a NixPkgs vs NixOS thing. Also, using Nix mostly to supplement packages I hadn't already installed through my distro probably meant I hit more fringe areas. But I've even encountered cache misses and failed builds for some pretty big Python libraries on certain commits.
Debian-based out-of-the-box functionality for stuff is indeed also Not Great, IIRC— Stable, but yeah, sometimes maybe a bit "incomplete". Actually, Arch-based has worked well IME.
Yeah. I personally don't care about that stuff unless it directly impacts something I'm working on.
And that's why I say Nix is a great tool for package management, but not something I'd personally want to use as an OS base. When you're already elbow-deep in the plumbing anyway, Nix makes it way easier to swap components out. But when you just want to install and use an application, editing Nix configs feels like more work, and it's so much easier to just
pacman/yum/apt-getinstall firefoxor whatever and get on with your day.Plus, some specific red flags surrounding stability and interoperability:
ALSA is apparently hardcoded to just straight-up not work with a Nix root. Not sure how NixOS handles it, but in my specific use case, I had to
symlinkJoin{paths=[alsa-lib alsa-plugins]}so they could find each other. Pretty sure it took a lot ofstrace -f -e trace=fileandnix-locatefor me to figure this one out, just to get sound working.QtWebEngine/Chromium has to be run through some kind ofsed -e "whatever.so"to "Patch library paths in Chromium sources" in order to even run, because it's also hardcoded to just not work with a Nix root. IIRC, this one I figured out by just straight-upgrepping on the compiled binaries after seeing the errors instraceor whereever. Seems a bit ridiculous, using a RegEx to patch a web browser when installing it so it can even run.Binaries aren't safe either, because they probably need
patchelfto be able to run on Nix.Flakes are apparently hosted as user repositories on a Microsoft-owned website, and can just randomly disappear sometimes.
Qtgenerally takes a ton of extra steps to be able to run on Nix. And have you actually ever opened the wrapper the Nix hooks generate to see what it's actually doing? For one of my applications just now, you get a43kbBash script with apparently 581 assignments to just a handful of QT and XDG-related environment variables.OpenGL doesn't look safe either. Nix handles the drivers its own way, so to get OpenGL for Nix packages to work on other systems, you have to jump through some hoops. I assume the same amount of work in the opposite direction would be needed to use EG proprietary or statically compiled graphics applications on NixOS too.
Running precompiled binaries on Nix looks… Involved, as well. Sure, there's tools to automate it. But that only hides the complexity, and adding an opaque dependency sorta defeats the entire purpose of configurability and composability IMO.
I'm sure most of these problems are "solved", in the sense that NixOS implements workarounds that are the default when you install the affected derivations, and there are wrappers written for most other cases. But all of that adds maintenance, fragility, and complexity. It remarkably works well enough for userspace, but stuff like this still feels a bit house-of-cards-y for the basic OS and desktop. It's not Nix's fault, but so much of the work that goes into Nix seems to be just to force software that was never designed for it to run on it. Ultimately, the Linux FHS has momentum and adoption. Nix's technical design might be compelling, but so are interoperability, stability, and simplicity.
The NixOS enthusiasts are doing a lot of technically interesting work, but I personally find the results of that work most useful outside the NixOS ecosystem. And I do think Nix as a package manager is really great. Ever since I've installed it, I've basically incorporated it as a major component or tool in every sizable software project I've since started. But I just personally wouldn't want to base an entire OS on it.
Are you saying that having a Debian base system but exclusively installing with nix is the way to go?
I'm saying that's a way I might personally consider going if I were to set up a new computer. Rock solid base that you can still get normal packages and binaries to run on without much hassle if needed, plus Nix with more up-to-date packages that you can customize however you find most useful.
Personally I have a mix of rolling/regular repos, AUR, Nix, Flatpak, and static binaries. They all have their uses, TBH.
Haiku: from where I am, you're all Linux
Distro swapping is a rite of passage. The grass is always greener. Until you settle and stopped caring about the OS at all. Which is why I went back to Windows (7 at the time) mainly for gaming compatibility.
Proton got me hnnng tho I'll definitely be giving either Endeavor or OpenSuse a go when I build my next computer. Rolling distro sounds like a "set it and forget it" thing and I like that.
Installing a new distro feels so good to me, makes me happy. I love messing with the settings and stuff, trying a new desktop environment messing with the native apps. Man I love it.
I'm using OpenSuse's Gecko with rolling release. It's beautiful.
That "new distro smell" 😊
New distro smell hahah exactly, that's perfect.
Yeah but BTW on Arch the grass is always evergreener.
Been trying out EndeavourOS in a VM for a bit. Might be my next home if I don't fall back to good Ol Reliable Debian.
I'd say EndeavorOS is the way to go. So far I haven't had nearly as many issues as I had with Manjaro
I started with Arch and loved it but just recently switched to openSUSE and it might be even better.
Garuda linux. I'm running the dragonized gaming distro and have fallen in love with it. A buddy turned me on to it a few months back and it's perfect. Runs all my steam games through proton like a champ.
I got everything working great in Fedora with Proton, even my nvidia drivers. Then, a buddy had an idea that we all get and play MWII, which can not run in proton, now I'm back to windows
This is where keeping a pocket Windows dual boot is handy. Probably kept just big enough for two games tops.
Check Nobara. Fedora based, tweaked specifically for gaming.
Bah, all the same, Linux 6.4, Xfce 4.18, be it Debian or Arch, there is no difference except the package management...
Kompile It yourSSelf
XFCE Debian is my perfect OS. Just does what I need and that's all. Why look anywhere else?
I did xfce for a long time and really enjoyed it. Then I did some hopping to try out tiling, and found paperwm. For me, its just a much better experiance for the way I work
For some reason my TV could only do 30hz with XFCE but 60hz with GNOME. I never figured out why. If anyone has the answers, feel free to share. I just gave up and used GNOME lol.
x11 vs Wayland?
XFCE was my DE of choice for a long time, it's very practical.
I love Arch and Hyprland, but when I need to spin up some linux machine ASAP that can be used by normies I will install Linux Mint.
I think I'm stupid as I don't get this at all. I've never used a distro that doesn't work. They all work. Some are more advanced, some are more stable, some are more polished, some even look and behave like Windows, but fundamentally they are work.
no time for distro wars if you're too busy hunting down drivers and unbreaking everything :]
(debian still best distro tho)
Depending on the situation, you could maybe partially adopt. My team at work uses the package manager on macos
I don't know why people hate Fedora so much and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.
Redhat is shitting the bed nuclear style right now. I expect Fedora is the next one on the chopping block.
Ohh they love their beta Texters. Fedora will never be in a state to be a business driving product especially on servers though.
I haven't seen anyone hate Fedora until this meme.
Now, Red Hat, which has strong ties to Fedora, is doing a lot of stupid bullshit. I actually moved to Debian due to that, not really because I think its superior (at the end of the day, all distros can do the same stuff) but because I'm getting tired with corporations
I really hope they don’t screw up Fedora, the last thing I want is to change distro again and go back to Arch.
I enjoy Fedora and have used it for years but it can occasionally be harder to find packages and tutorials compared to other distros. That and DNF being quite slow.
That's all I can really think of.
As an Ubuntu user I feel called out. But the callout is also fair… I am conflicted. Is it a mitigating factor that it’s a headless server?
You should stay on Ubuntu if it work for you. This is just a meme. There is no need to feel bad and force yourself to switch just because other people think your distro is bad :)
Wait am I missing something? What did canonical do this time?
Not judging, just curious: If it's a headless server, what does Ubuntu do better than Debian?
Edit: Better community support/documentation?
I find that installing things from repos you typically get something far more up to date with Ubuntu than Debian.
When I decided to set up my own server my only Linux experience was experimenting with regular Ubuntu. So Ubuntu server was the closest thing to it, and I figured I would have to re-learn fewer commands. It’s also been my impression that because a lot of inexperienced folks like me start with Ubuntu, that’s where the most beginner-friendly instructions are likely to be. I didn’t really know what Debian was.
Fair enough.
FWIW, Debian is 98% the same anyway since Ubuntu is downstream from Debian. I'd choose Ubuntu over Debian for desktops but opposite for servers.
Some corporations are switching from Redhat-based (CentOS/Alma/Rocky) to Ubuntu because it offers a professional level of support in the event that support is needed.
Personally, I prefer Debian for servers and Arch for desktop.
Yeah, still haven't decided which distro to replace our CentOS-alikes with. Bothers me.
Doesn't AlmaLinux offer professional support?
Sure, but given red hats shenanigans we can't just go on with status quo. The servers I have to replace are goijg to something else than a RH downstream.
Usual sentiment of "the best distro is the one that works for you". I can just say that I found Ubuntu to do a confusing "splitting the difference". It requires more knowledge than using, say, windows, but also tries to hand hold. I put in a lot of time with Raspbian, and now Debian on a desktop, and I like it better because there's less "in-between".
I'd kind of stumble through windows, sort of getting what was going on but mostly having faith and a hands off approach to what was going on underneath the hood. I didn't really understand or learn much other than keyword recognition and a passing concept of broad principles. Rasbian and then Debian forced and encouraged me to get under the hood more, so when I was troubleshooting I was at least learning why things weren't working. When I had display issues, it wasn't "I clicked the wrong box" it was "because of my SSD my kernel has a race condition with the video driver and x". Not that I would, but I get now how you can slim down an OS for a specific hardware platform if you really wanted. Having done a ton of microcontroller stuff where I was getting different chips and whatnot talking to each other succesfully, this was a HUGE missing piece. "Real computers" aren't a black box mystery to me anymore, even if I'd suck at proper computer engineering.
Ubuntu kind of over optimized so I didn't learn, but was being asked to do more under the hood anyway. I kept looking at it as adjusting settings the way I did with windows, even though it was asking more of me in terms of understanding to troubleshoot.
But again, that's me and my experience, and more so it's based off of how I personally learn. I'm still not overly familiar with Ubuntu, but I get now that there's no reason you can't do what I described above, it just never "clicked" for me.
The way you describe Ubuntu as asking you to do more under the hood, and you seeing it as adjusting settings, really rings true to me. Often I find myself frustrated at having to jump through so many hoops to do simple stuff. I like learning to use Linux but sometimes I just don’t have the time for it
I use debian on my server. It's been great for that.
I've never known anyone who used alpine outside of docker
Arch is Debian sid with a better package manager
Checkmate liberals.
Damn you. I'm even wearing my glasses rn
You want to get defederated?
As an Ubuntu weanie why should I swap?
If it works for you, you shouldn’t
I mean, you’re right.
But….
….. let’s be honest. There’s no reason not to try some variety.
(Yes I have usb keys of All the good ones…)
If it’s not broken… though if you don’t try something new every now and then, what’s the point
no need to break anything to try a new distro. Just boot up a live USB, maybe a small partition to give it a whirl.
I use VMs, but usb drives work just as good
You don't need too, Ubuntu is perfectly fine if it works for you.
it can get resource hungry but nothing even close to windows.
But as others said: Try another distro if you like to try new things - otherwise just use what works for you.
Yea that makes sense. I've been curious about Arch given how many resources there are for learning it. Weirdly enough I know two people who have tried it, one said it was the easiest setup they've ever done and the other said it bricked their laptop.
If you want to try arch I recommend EndeavourOS. It’s as close as you can get to vanilla arch without doing all the compiling yourself.
unless you want to go the hard way at least once just for the learning experience
Go with a vm first, or use a spare laptop just. Don't go nuking your primary machine.
I do like making life too difficult only to regret it later and end up doing what everyone suggested anyway
are you me?
what I don't regret is what I learned along the way
Ya sometimes you only get the interesting details by jumping in the deep end
bricking a laptop with linux is incredibly unlikely.
Making the system unbootable so you need to boot from USB to fix it otoh... not so much.
Don't. It's good.
I've been more of a Kubuntu guy in the past tho.
If you are curious and haven't tried all there is to offer you might not realize that you like another flavor.
Most distros really aren’t too different fundamentally, so if you’re happy where you are there isn’t much reason to switch. It can be fun to swap just to see what’s different (and learn what differences are really just skin deep), but you don’t have to. Some distros have more big ideas behind them which can be interesting (like nixos) but mostly they all feel pretty similar.
It is okay, just us what you like. There is no need to change your distro just because others are
Ya for sure. Buuut I'm not afraid to hear some passionate opinions about things if anyone has them haha
Non rolling release distros for your desktop makes no sense.
Why?
Because you're arbitrarily restricting yourself to old versions of tools and software. The idea is you don't want unexpected conflicts to bring down your system. But, what that means is when you do go to upgrade on something like a server, you would test the whole thing on the new version, and then migrate. That's not how people use desktops. You just feel like one day upgrading from 20.04 to 20.10, and then get a massive burst of differences. It's really hard to pin down what specifically goes wrong when something does.
So unless you have a staging environment for your desktop where you test the new version before migrating, then what is the purpose of running old versions of stuff?
Good points. Thank you.
I like Ubuntu.
As a mint user, I can confirm that I still don't know where the start button is.
I am a Debian unstable user who used to use Gentoo, the reason I stopped using Gentoo is revdep-rebuild. Do not want to do another revdep-rebuild ever again.
That's mostly replaced by
emerge @preserved-rebuildnow.Slackware was my first distro more 25 years ago! Good times.
Me too! Well, technically Yellow Dog Linux, but that lasted all of two weeks.
Real men use Slackware. Obviously.
I'm currently just after the fedora stage so far. Guess I better go try Gentoo.
But it does just work 😁
Red Hat making memes now?
I had a girlfriend who used Debian back around 2005.
Never have I been around an OS that didn't work as often as Debian. It wouldn't crash, but need to be updated or something every hour. It was a full time job keeping it running for her.
man, i wish i would ever have a girlfriend that even knows what Linux is.
man, i wish i would ever have a girlfriend
wdym, updates every hour? we're you using Stable?
Even Arch doesn't have updates every hour
Every hour was obviously hyperbole. It would break often. Normally due to some issue that would pop up, most often drivers.
She did run on unstable and had a fetch for updates automated every evening. Her goal wasn't a stable OS, but to be at the forefront of testing. She knew no programming, so it meant that she would report bugs and have a box with a giant fan that didn't run anything most of the time. She made bad choices.
I'm sure stable Debian is stable. I'm sure it's gotten better in the past 15 years, but the fact my experience with Debian was an unstable mess that was more of a job than a useable system makes me suspicious of the distro.
You shouldn't use Debian unstable as a rolling distro. It's gonna break.
You use a real rolling distro aimed to end users.
If you run testing or unstable there will be updates available very very often. But, you choose when to update, you don't need to update anytime an update is available.
You should know what you're doing and expect this if you're running it. Otherwise, you should use stable. With stable, you'll typically just have security updates until you choose to update to the next stable, which typically is released every other year.
What about opensuse
"Precision German Engineering"
Can we talk about Solaris for a minute?
+1 for Debian here, but I'm on KDE.
I am on KDE too :D
I still love Debian to bits and pieces but I can't convince me to use it as a daily driver again. And I used it as such for nearly a decade.
My main issue is the software being dated. Yes, there are backports, and with flatpak support we can circumvent that even better but... no.
Lol. Arch for desktop, Debian for servers is where it's at, IMO.
Debian is great for gaming too
Remind me what the two on the right are.
From left to right: Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian
4th is Gentoo. 5th is Debian's logo inverted, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be Debian or a derivative that I don't know off hand because there are so many.
I thought it was the debian logo , mandella effects tho :O
The rightmost is Debian, not sure about the other one though.
Gentoo and Debian, https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_Collage_Linux_Distro.png
Nixos: chewing on arch documentation in the corner
I use Debian XFCE, and it is perfect for me.
Pretty accurate. Heard someone describe Debian as "boring Arch" the other days and it's pretty accurate. Whilst the base system is still fairly useable it's still pretty bare bones and it seems like most Debian users will tweak it slightly to their liking and just stick with it. Been me for the past few years
I'm on Ubuntu. A week ago I had to look up how to use a python script. I wouldn't even hide porn that much.
I spend more and more time after each new fedora install to get it perfect. There are so many small tweaks i gotta do that I might just learn NixOS
Debian: "I'm a Docker container"
Linux from scratch users : 🫣🤪🥵🤯😭😭😭☠️👹
Manjaro should fit between Ubuntu and Arch
Debian me to
Pop!_OS because a tiling window manager is nice but I can turn it off too
Serious question: For those wanting to run Linux, and not having experience in the command line, which distro would you recommend? Gotta be as user-friendly as possible.
Ubuntu.
apt install firefox
*installs as a snap instead*
Am I the only one who doesn't install snap/flatpak ?
I don't either. I hate Snap. Flatpak is kind of Okay but I still prefer native install when available.
I was mainly making a comment on how on Ubuntu they sometimes force you to install the snap version with apt, yes it is really slimy and wrong and it's why I don't use Ubuntu anymore and instead just use Pop.
Precisely. And for me, the snap package doesn't work well. It doesn't follow cursor themes and there are issues involved with closing tabs. Installing via the Mozilla ppa fixes this, but it shouldn't have to be that way. New users, especially ones with a fear of the console, should stay away from Ubuntu for reasons like these.
Also has trouble reading from External Drives and which can be problematic for apps like puddletag and VLC.
I'm just as pissed off about that as the next guy, but I stand by my recommendation despite it.
I'd still recommend Debian bases for people like Mint or Pop, since they have the best software compatibility over all (so many devs just package their apps as Deb and rarely RPM so it's a pain to install them on other Distros). Best of all those ones come without Snap at all.
As with anything Linux, the answer is, it depends, and each person will give you a different answer. Mine is that is you want something close to Windows? Go for Linux Mint.
Mint or Solus.
Solus was specifically designed to be for normal people and for you to have to use the terminal as infrequently as possible. However, the software selection is more limited than in other distros.
I have a bit of a hard time recommending solus because they have been back and forth on development for the past couple of years. It is a project with great potential, but it needs to be actively maintained.
Fedora or Pop
Linspire or Linux Mint
But you should get used to the console, just start using it, it's fun
Ubuntu Cinnamon is what'd I recommend more if you're starting out and want to play video games. Lutris dropped support for Linux Mint because both parties were a bit too stubborn on making the appropriate changes that would work for everyone (iirc, LM packaged drivers differently and Lutris wanted it a bit more standard to work efficiently. And immovable object had met an unstoppable force)
I would say mint or Pop. Ubuntu works but it's become a little annoying to work with.
Fedora/KDE
I've never had a easier time going from bootable to functional than using Nobara, even Mint gave me more hassle creating a functional bootable than Nobara.
It's based on Fedora Linux so if you were gonna go that route I'd say give Nobara a try.
Zorin.
Pop! All of the others pale in comparison.
I would seriously recommend you use gentoo for a bit. It is not user friendly, you use the command line constantly, the install process is mostly manual. But nothing teaches you the fundamentals like using it.
Now, personally I did this on a second PC as a home server hobby. Dunno if I'd recommend it for a novice wanting a desktop experience.
"Hey I need this to be user friendly and simple."
"Use not insert user friendly distro so you can get better even though you're probably one of the 99% of humanity that doesn't need their computer for more than dicking around on a web browser and couldn't give less of a fuck about OS's and computers."
This is why no one wants to use fucking Linux.
"You should learn more about your computer and use linux"
"GO AWAY, BAITIN'!"
That's why no one wants to use fucking Linux.
What about OpenSUSE?
I'd say Void linux and opensuse also qualify for the "No time for distrowars" section.
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I haven't tried using arch since I was 12, and even after all these years the experience makes me feel like such a poser, I didn't even manage to compile the kernel, and gave up before I had anything resembling an OS.
You.. don't generally need to compile the kernel to use Arch? Or is this some joke
This was over 20 years ago, so I don't know and/or remember, point is I had no idea what I was doing, possibly just trying to build a window manager or something then? All I remember is only having a CLI and feeling like I couldn't get anything to work.
These days the arch live image comes with an install script, archinstall, that does a pretty good job at making sure arch is installed and set up enough to get you in, including installing a nice DE of your choice. No compiling needed :)
Debian user here... Just works and has been working since '95 here. After Slackware 1.3 and Redhat (non EL) 4.2 I was fed up with reinstalls for major upgrades, so I switched to Debian. It just works, most of the times. (for the first time in decades I had to revert a kernel to the previous version, that what you get running testing ;) )
Am I a guru, I doubt it but I don't care, I'm lazy enough to stick with what I know, but not to lazy to dive into new things. (but not until I absolutely have to)
I use debian based distro. Level of over 9000
For me it was Ubuntu straight to CentOS, then settled on RedHat
You used CentOS as a desktop? That's Gentoo level of commitment.
redHat is dead to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUXYbt1eLTA
Anyone with Nobara?
I have tried Nobara before in a VM. It is quite nice but didn't offer a better performance than I thought it would be, maybe my pc is just too shit
To be frank, i distro hop'ed for like 3 months, tried a lot of things, i've got an amd 3900 and rx 590.. 'till now it's the only one everything worked fine, i also got 2 screens with different dpi and resolutions, latest gnome with custom nobara patches is the only one that properly worked with fractional scaling with wayland. It's my main OS for personal use and work, and i'm not gonna change it anytime soon. Flatpaks, snaps everything works as expected! Before that i used PopOS or 1,5y, also nice OS but i had to fix everything by hand. I'm kinda tired of doing it each time i have to upgrade to milestone version or something similar. 😑
As an Arch user i started building from source my software recently, guess i'll end on Gentoo some day
I find gentoo to give a very debian like experience in alot of ways, although I suppose it does use a lot of time which is what this is on about.
I only use gentoo on my laptop (where I never leave the tty) so it's not as big a deal, with the largest package being gcc.
Overall based meme.
I used Debian on my other computer and it made me happy. But not having access to the AUR was too annoying so I never switched away from EOS on my main computer. Not everything can be verified on the repo, flatpaks and their weird compartimentalized sandbox are confusing to me, and sometimes I don't wanna build shit from source.
but it's true 😭 fedora really does JUST WORK 😭😭💀
Mint: wait, what district are you using?
That doesn't make any sense right? Most of them just works at least as well as Fedora.
Ubuntu deviates from accepted standards too often (Mir, Upstart, Snap) thanks to Canonicals ham fisted attempts to redefine Linux.
Arch has a tendency to break due to the maintainers commitment to staying true to upstream. Too often you end up on the Arch wiki looking up how to solve small issues that should have been in the original PKGBUILD
Gentoo, not everyone wants to compile everything from source
Debian's commitment to FOSS results in frequent incompatibilities (both SW and HW) out of the box.
Fedora is the perfect middle ground. It implements the latest technology standards as soon as they are stable (eg, Wayland, Btrfs by default), stays fairly close and true to upstream while maintaining package stability, and overall just works with a large variety of lackages
Fedora is for people who use Linux as a tool rather than a hobby.
Should I use Fedora for a home server? I like stuff not breaking randomly after updates which makes Gentoo and Arch kind of a meh choice. Debian is so committed to foss that it's harder to get drivers working/a lot less stuff works out of the box. On a new enough laptop with all it's weird chipset drivers, it's harder to get Debian working than Arch in my experience. I've never successfully got Nvidia drivers working on Debian for example.
Normally home servers run bog standard older hardware so using Debian isn't a problem but I want to install an Nvidia card for ai stuff.
If Debian works on your hardware and you just want something that works and doesn't give you issues then yes its a good choice. It will just work happily in the background for years.
Fedora Server is a great choice if its something you want to continuously tinker with. Each release averages a little over 1 year of support so you'll want to do a dist upgrade after each new version comes out.
I'm currently considering switching to it on a couple of production servers I manage because they rely on PostGIS. EL9 and Debian rely on the official postgres repositories rather than shipping their own .deb/rpms and the official postgres repository's GIS packages are so unreliable I think it would be more stable on Arch. With Fedora server however I can just install postgres and postgis from the official community repo.
If you Emerge, Gentoo would at very least tell you before you install something that it'll break as a result of dependency issues with a list of said dependencies, and offer to update those dependencies for you.
Portage really is an incredible package manager.
I got screwed one time really hard with emerge. I didn't update for a long time and it was messed up enough that I couldn't install anything due to python issues and I also couldn't update due to python issues and there were circular dependencies. Experienced people on the Gentoo discord tried and failed to help me get that fixed without an os reinstall but all efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
This was on a slow as molasses Athlon XP so reinstalling Gentoo was completely out of the question. Since Gentoo was basically the only thing that would run on that cpu, I got a different motherboard from ebay instead.
I run Proxmox which is based on Debian, no issues for over a year now!
ye, I've tried Fedora before, it is nice distro
Last I heard, this mere tool now no longer supports various video codecs lol. Something something "patents", which get in the way of using something as a tool.
Fedora with AUR would be ideal for me. I've had too many random issues running Ubuntu and ubuntu-based OSs and while I like the simplicity of Debian, its too... little? for what I'm looking for. Arch and arch-based works great, but most are KDE and I would need to make a lot of changes out of the box before I can start using it (the default pdf viewer for KDE is nicer that Evince (the pdf viewer packaged with most gnome DEs) but I can't print off some pages in e-books whereas Evince allows that)
Fedora server be Ballin tho
What do you mean "most are KDE"? Arch doesn't even include a DE when you install it. If you don't install one during install, then you're greeted by a terminal when you reboot. I've been using Gnome on Arch for 2 years without issue.
My bad, arch-based distros.
Here I am with Manjaro.... I guess I'm with Ubuntu here; I'm ok with that
Manjaro is Arch, btw.
No, it's not. Manjaro users tend to think so, Arch users decidedly disagree.
That we can agree on.
Heh I went straight from Fedora to Debian. I'm 7 months late to this meme in true Debian fashion.
Artix for desktop, Alpine for servers.
Now you made me look up Artix. Which is 81 in the top 100 in Distrowatch. Oh, it's a fork of Manjaro/Arch. I liked Manjaro on my ARM Laptop. Most software I use is easier to install from .deb or .rpm though so I tend to stick to Debian-based. https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20210308#artix
Artix is a fork of Arch that uses different initialization systems such as Open-RC instead of SystemD. Artix exists because people believe that SystemD is bloated, which it arguably is. And that SystemD doesn't respect the Unix philosophy.
Yeah, I grew up with SystemV init in AT&T System V in the 80s and variants. The needed to learn systemd which I now understand.
What are the consequences of systemD being bloated ?
Increased memory usage, increased CPU usage, it might get in the way if you're trying to set something up too. General consequences of 'bloat'.
The only benefit you'll really notice with other systems is much faster boot time, the memory is only like 30MB maybe.
Do you mean the increased memory/CPU usage is for the entire session ?
The memory usage is as Systemd has lots of daemons and services running the background. The CPU usage uplift is mainly during boot, as Systemd is sorting itself out.
I see ! Is this a concrete issue, as in does your system stall easily ? or is it more ideological ? Sometimes it's difficult to make sense of that as a layman
Is this the best this sub can do? Just rehashed "I use x btw" memes ?
Please don't be a Reddit user here. this is just a joke :)