I’ve messed around with Linux before, mostly in VMs, but I’m looking to switch over from Windows permanently on my laptop because I think Linux is cool.
Most people in this community talk about pros and cons of this distro or this other distro, but I’d like to hear your opinions based on entirely subjective factors.
I think Arch is neat, I think Ubuntu isn’t as neat, why? Who knows. Tell me about how you chose a specific distro because you thought the name was cool or because it ships with some completely unknown utility no one uses.
NixOS has a cool logo.
There, I said it.
I installed it three nights ago.
It has a lot of neat
It has a lot of wtf
You start out, I want x, then you realize you want y, then you find out to get y, you need z. Then you put follow some instructions and defining unfree in one spot no longer works. Then you find out there are no safe facilities to deploy secrets and you’ll have to make that anyway.
I don’t hate it at all, but I’m slowly realizing it’s not what I thought it was.
Still cool though.
Yeah, it’s very much one of those “steep learning curve” distros, and requires a lot of background reading and perhaps a bit of functional programming knowledge.
For secrets storage, I’ve been using agenix, but you can probably get away with just putting the secrets as plain text files in
/var/secretsor similar.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I like it too. And Debian has its own screenshots website, https://screenshots.debian.net/ how neat is that ?
silly code comments
Wanna share some of those? :)
I unfortunately haven’t found that many I can remember. But a comment on Busybox cat that linked to a talk titled “cat -v considered harmful” did send me down a rabbit hole once.
OpenSUSE just feels all cool and enterprisey and I feel like I’m doing important things when I use my computer
If you want to create a Hannah Montana branded version of ublue kinoite plasma 6, that would be as neat as it gets.
Also there is Cosmic, I am just gonna say
Rust
I currently use pop-os which is an Ubuntu derivative. I use it because it works well, is easy, and it’s smoother than Ubuntu. My second choice would be Kubuntu if I wanted to commit to KDE. My reasons are that I’m doing important business on all my computers and I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot things that don’t work. So I stick to the LTS releases nowadays.
A downside of my approach is that it’s less customizable, not as up to date and slightly constraining.
Over the years I have used a lot of different distributions. I’ve had many success and even more failures.
So many people have strong feelings about their favorite distros. The big differences are about ease of installation and configuration, stability, open source vs. proprietary code, community support and ability to customize. Other than that, they are all basically Linux.
Arch is not for the faint of heart but it is awesome if you can get it installed. And they have a great support community. There are a lot of Arch variants that are easier to install.
I’m on Pop too, mainly looking forward to Cosmic because… It’s got a cool name. The actual features are gravy to me
I use Arch because it makes installing almost any software package trivially easy via the AUR and if you run into issues, the wiki is there to help.
Okay, you asked, we deliver ;-) I tried OS/2 and BSD, but did stick with Linux (Using Debian and Arch currently).
"No. That’s it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say “OS/2? Hah. I’ve got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.” – Linus Torvalds
Probably wouldn’t’ve thought that when it came out, but I kinda really like OS/2 as a name. Had a very Serial Experiments Lain ring to it.
…Certainly a lot cooler than OSX.
I wouldn’t suggest arch unless you know it’s issues. I love the distro, but I understand many might not.
It’s the quickest rolling release for most things. When you update, things sometimes break, and break bad. Like the grub issue we all had where you restarted to get a “grub rescue” screen with no way to boot. Like the linux 5.17(I think?) Kernel that had some intel laptops backlights go flash from max to zero, possibly destroying the machine.
You’ll also have some software or drivers with major bugs like the nvidia driver a while ago that stuck brightness at 100% (or 50, in my case) requiring a downgrade of both the kernal, and nvidia driver.
Arch is the first place where new software gets to meet a large userbase and their hardware. The first place it might interact with other new software.
Sometimes you need to manually intervene and change stuff, and this means keeping up with current arch events via their mailing list, lemmy, or reddit (reddit sadly is the safer bet)
If you’re ok with this I’d highly reccomend arch if not only for the AUR. If not, PopOS and Fedora are also pretty sick and, there’s also tumbleweed.
opensuse always had a special place in my heart. it was the first “linux” i successfully installed 17 (welp) years ago. with kde desktop, wich became my goto desktop. both are based in germany, which makes it easy for me to support local open source organisations.
my notebook is running tumbleweed for over 2 years now and i had no problem at all.
for the switch, tho, i’d stick to an ubuntu based distro. there are ubuntu tutorials for litterly everything. i guess mint might be a solid choice. the debian edition is also cool. for the moment, you don’t need a rolling release. you’ll install another distro before eol either because you wrecked your current one, or you want to “try something else”.
if possible, have a sepperate disc (at least partition) for your home folder.
and always keep in mind:
no backup, no merci. =]Fedora just documents itself incredibly well, plus all the pushes they’re doing with immutable distributions and somehow making it seem simple is a wonderful thing.
I think what you mean with “neat” is the desktop environment (DE), which hugely defines how a distro looks like.
Most major distros (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) have have the most major ones.Here’s my post about distro choices if you’re interested, since it’s mostly more about DE choice: https://feddit.de/post/9087676
Just gotta crank the desktop effects up to 11 on kwin
For me it’s just Linux itself that’s cool. I mean, I get the different distros have different opinions and things that make them neat, and that in and of itself is what’s so cool. FWIW I use Ubuntu (server) and desktop.
I installed Arch because I liked the idea of building everything from the ground up, choosing all of my utilities, and gentoo would take too long on my laptop. Still haven’t finished my DE 2 computers and 3 years later
I usually don’t order my distros on the rocks, so they’re all neat.
