- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/42673820
Looking for suggestions besides Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Debian, Arch Linux, or Kali.
Would be on a modest Dell Latitude with i5, 14" 1080p display with intel graphics, and maybe 16gb ram. I have previous experience with XFCE, Ratpoison, Openbox, KDE Plasma. Recently started trying out LXQT.
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Here are options, which I’ll choose by dice roll. Laptop arrives eta today.
- Project Name Window Manager
- Devuan —
- Fedora default Gnome
- Gentoo Libreboot firmware
- Void Sway or Niri + noctalia-shell
- MXlinux Sway
- CachyOS Niri + Limine
- Bazzite
- NixOS Cinnamon + Guix + Flakes
- QubesOS Whonix
- Zorin Gnome
- LMDE
- OpenSuse Slowroll
- EndeavorOS Plasma
- Slackware
- Alma
- Aurora
Nixos
Cool, I’ve tried Nix twice for a week at a time. Still have my configs. Struggling with lots of missing packages and the docs being frustrating, but love how it works once configured.
I want to set time aside to set it up but I’d rather go with a fresh drive
Exactly the sort of situation I am benefiting from, thanks to receiving a spare machine.
Guix
openSUSE. Either Tumbleweed (rolling) or Leap (stable). A few reasons for this:
- Their snapshot system is awesome (they develop snapper) and configured by default when you install it. It takes a snapshot of your system before and after updates and at other times as well. Uses minimal space because they use BTRFS and also have maintenance jobs by default. This is the main factor that made me settle on it. To me, it was the best of both worlds between the stability but restrictive nature of atomic/immutable distros and the freedom but potential for breaking your system of the traditional distros.
- They’re reputed to have one of the best KDE integrations of any distro. I’m not sure what this means in practice because I’m still a newbie, but I’ve seen this mentioned by others a few times. Other major DEs are also options at install time.
- They’re one of the traditional big distros. SUSE has been around since the early days of Linux. SUSE is also a commercial corporation, similar to Red Hat.
- The rolling distro, Tumbleweed has a reputation for being one of the most stable rolling ones because they apparently have an extensive automated testing system for updates.
- Their system configuration tool (YaST) is also supposed to be awesome and one of the best around, minimizing the need to resort to the command line, but I also haven’t used this too much.
- Their community is supposed to be really helpful as well. I haven’t experienced this myself, but have heard it.
Edit: it’s probably best to avoid their “SlowRoll” distro for now. It’s rolling but with less frequent updates than Tumbleweed, which many may thinks is a sweet spot. However, it’s still in beta and I’ve heard of people having issues with it occasionally.
Slowroll was recommended previously.
Yes, I’ve seen it recommended in the past, but just wanted to mention the caveats. Might as well go for Tumbleweed, which appears to be their main distro. In fact, if I recall correctly they had announced a couple of years ago that they were going to sunset Leap but then walked that back when the community protested.
I recently went back to fedora workstation (gnome) after using Arch (Manjaro) with kde and hyprland for the last 3 years.
Got tired of things breaking with hyprland and Manjaro every other month. Had a few issues with AUR packages too (I know I’m supposed to carefully read release notes to figure out what breaks, but how many people actually do that?)
With fedora at least, I won’t have to worry about packages breaking and not working together. Gnome isn’t my favorite but I’m sticking to it for a while to give it a fair chance.
Yeah, definitely super interested as someone who has tried neither Fedora, nor Gnome (since version 2).
I’ve just switched to Pop_OS and so far I’m really impressed. Very fast, and Cosmic desktop has a totally different design and aesthetic to any other DE
Added to list
Fedora.
I prefer the KDE spin over GNOME, but I hate GNOME.
Whatever DE you prefer, pick that one.
Curious about Gnome after avoiding it since version 3 dropped
i noticed you havent tried fedora atomic cosmic. if youre just looking to run the gamut of DEs its probably the best cosmic distro right now. bonus points its fairly easy to rebase between each fedora atomic distro so you can DE hop without too much pain
Sounds fun. I did try Cosmic some time ago on a live disk and it had almost no features at that time, but was very snappy.
theyve come a long way, i keep an eye on them all the time. i think its possible that one day they will eclipse kde in functionality but theyre still in the adding features stage. its getting close though, maybe another year baked and i’ll swap entirely. its very snappy on cheap laptops, fully recommend it for that use case
I’m on Zorin, and i love it.
Cool, how long have you used it?
on and off for a few years. It’s decent as fuck. It’s very windows like, more so than KDE or cinnamon imho.
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Thanks, I have this combo on the list (Niri was requested on it as well).
If you’re looking for something that won’t give you any headaches then I wholeheartedly recommend Bazzite. IMO it’s the best distro for the casual user.
I’ve also been interested in NixOS lately for the ability to easily transfer and back up the config, but I have yet to make that jump. It seems like a really great way to set up an OS though.
Until you want to tinker with stuff that doesn’t have an appimage or flatpak, also on amd I’m convinced blender runs slower than it did on cachyos, davinci resolve doesn’t work no matter what work around I try it freezes my computer when loading a project. Cycles can’t recognize my gpu on bazzite either (blenders renderer), if it does (through tar not flatpak) it doesn’t work.
I had no issues on cachyos, I just swapped to see if my displayport would work here, should’ve realized it’s a hardware issue earlier, did when I dualbooted windows and then googled my laptop and found out the usb c to display always had issues and likely never worked. (alienware m17 r5 all amd) Every person asking under warranty got it replaced with an nvidia variant.
Okay, I’ll add bazzite and nix to the wiki suggestions. Thanks
I prefer Fedora over Bazzite as it gives you more control, but this also means it’s easier to break. Bazzite is an immutable distro, whereas Fedora uses the traditional mutable root filesystem. But despite the difference, Bazzite uses Fedora Atomic as it’s base OS.
Just as a fun little factoid, Linus Torvalds runs Fedora and while he was using KDE for a while, he switched to GNOME as he felt it required much less fiddling around with than KDE.
They are both on the list… Bazzite and Fedora w/ Gnome
I’d recommend KDE over GNOME, especially if you’re coming over from Windows. My take on Linus’s move is he’s tinkered with Linux 5+ days a week for ages, so GNOME makes more sense. But as a nerd who doesn’t work in tech, I love KDE as I can tinker until I’m content and changes are just made in settings. Either way, I’d say finding the Desktop Enviornment you like is more important than the distro!
I’ve been on Plasma for a while. Haven’t tried Gnome since version 2.
I agree. On a new machine I’ve been using I tried Ubuntu and then Zorin, but Bazzite just works better. Could be the Fedora base that’s helping a lot, idk. But switching that machine over when I’m not lazy.
It’s the first distro I’ve tried where everything just works right out of the box and nothing is overly bloated. All of the software I use was available from the Bazzar and my printer even worked right away. No fiddling with CUPS or trying to install from binary/tar/appimg/etc.
Agreed
Would you run it on the specs: i5, 8 - 16gb ram, intel integrated Graphics
Fedora.
Its not new, its not special with some big changes or special kernels, it has sane settings.
It has releases every 6 months, and updates about as much as arch
This was the first thing recommended: Fedora with default Gnome. I’ve never even tried Yum, so would be interesting.
me and my homies are using fedora KDE, which we can greatly recommend. we use it not just for personal gaming, creative tools, and software development but also (especially) on our work machines.
hannah montana linux
The only issue with this is it is Kubuntu, which is exactly what I already use. The theme and icon pack can be added onto any other distro, so that works.
If you didn’t comment this first I would have
I’ve been enjoying LMDE. Mint without Ubuntu.
same here
Any notable differences between Ubuntu and Debian base for you?
The big one is no Snaps. You can get them, but I prefer flatpaks which I use on LMDE.
Linux Mint uses the LTS version of Ubuntu so the “base” gets updates about every 2 years just like Debian. As such, both are going to be “about as new” as each other (emphasis on “about”).
Ubuntu LTS pushed a bad kernel update where the headers were not available for a while. This meant that anyone using additional drivers (like I was for my networking) would have the kernel fail to install and then the operating system kernel panic when you boot up the next time. That is surprisingly “not stable”…
Debian, which will update about the same amount, has not pushed a bad update like that as far as I recall. That being said, I have had less experience with Debian.
The Linux Mint team seems to publish packages to LMDE so that it will have similar features to Ubuntu (like codec support) so you won’t be missing that by using the Debian base. That being said, minor differences were present (such as guest mode missing compared with the Ubuntu base). Also, Ubuntu may have support for additional hardware in case you need that sort of stuff and will have HWE kernels that will support newer hardware than Debian.
Still, if LMDE works for you then it is more likely to keep working in a boring and predictable manner. If you are using the Ubuntu base, you may have a random update mess things up which will require you to do some troubleshooting. Ideally, you won’t notice much of a difference between the two though.
Added to list
NixOS and Guix System! I’m currently using Guix System + Nix (via home-manager, mostly) but you can also do it the other way around.
NixOS uses systemd, but Guix System does not. They are both awesome though. Absolutely my favourite distros. Incredibility flexible, and reproducibility and “declarativeness” are core concepts. The only negative is that they both have quite a steep learning curve, compared to other distros.
I wanna use Guix but I worry about hardware compatibility, when I tried to run it the installer said my hardware wasn’t 100% compatible and recommended me not to continue.
Yeah, “unfortunately” since Guix is a GNU project, they don’t package the upstream Linux kernel, just linux-libre, which removes a lot of binary blobs. Great if you want a fully free OS, not so great if you need drivers only available in the mainline kernel.
The practical solution to this is to use the channel nonguix, which packages mainline Linux for Guix. You can follow the instructions for nonguix to create a guix ISO with the regular Linux kernel, then make sure your installed system uses that same kernel.
It’s not hard to do, but if one doesn’t have the inclination I’d just recommended using NixOS. :-)
Right now and using NixOS and I’m pretty happy with it, it suffers from There’s More Than One Way To Do It and there are so many options that do the same and the documentation isn’t great.
When I finally made my base flake.nix, easy peasy! But the difficulty curve is pretty steep.
Cool, added Guix system to the list with Nix.
Someone else was saying to go for Flakes
If you’re new I suggest not using flakes. You can always switch to them when you learn how to maintain NixOS.
I’ve played with Nix twice over a week each time. I’m not afraid at all, but I suppose at this point I’ll decide which distro by dice roll.
Yeah, it’s been an ongoing debate whether the old Nix style or the newer Flakes are a better approach. I don’t really know that much about it, but thus far I definitely like using Flakes more
So Guix is the old stye?
No no, Nix has two ways of handling configurations, where Flakes are the new style, but still experimental. Guix just have one way of handling configurations.
