I don’t even notice Debian, which is exactly how an operating system should work.
And yet…
I love this
Here’s the thing. When I talk to friends interested in Linux, it’s always Debian or Fedora that I suggest. I think they draw a good line for what the average user wants and needs and they’re stable. In fact, I used Fedora for a long time, and all my homelab stuff runs Debian. It wasn’t until computers themselves became a hobby that I switched to Arch. And I think that’s likely the cutoff. If you’re a computer user, stable distros are great. If you’re more a hobbiest… Well, the Arch wiki can own your free time.
NixOS has entered the chat
Normal distro -> arch -> gentoo -> nixOS -> QubesOS -> Debian pipeline.
The only problem with Debian is that I want packages from this century.
Thats what you think you want but by the time you’re at the end of the pipeline you just want a computer that works.
In my experience that means packages from this century. Eventually you do need a new software for something. Trying to get software from 10 years ago to agree with software released in the last 6 months leads to breaking things or finding myself doing Linux From Scratch on top of debian or ubuntu.
It turns out if everything is new everything really does just work. That’s why I use Artix (child of Arch). It’s less pain. You just have to ignore the myth that these systems are “hard.” Graphics cards and Steam work out of the gait. There is a reason why StreamOS is built on Arch.
No more compile hell in the rare case you need to compile because the AUR does the same thing, but in a single command line resolving all dependencies. It’s like compiling without the experience of compiling.
Just make sure you always
pacman -Syubeforepacman -S {package}. No exceptions. Or in rare cases you may have to chroot from a live disk andpacman -S linuxto fix your initramfs. If you do that one thing nothing ever breaks.So far, that’s exactly why I’ve stopped at Nix.
Everything is declared exactly how I want it. If something would break, it just bails on the update. If I want to set up a new machine, I just clone my config and build it.
I’m not sure what could be more “just works” than that.
When I went 24.11 it exploded in some fantastic manner. None of my boot menu rollbacks worked. I spent a long ass time trying to recover the upgrade. I eventually realized it would be a lot faster to wipe, reinstall, re-import my old home and configuration.nix and I was back up.
25.05 didn’t even flinch, just worked.
Now I’m patiently waiting for postmarket to sort out LTE modems on phones before I buy an old pixel and install nixos on it :)
Debian is where the jaded users end up when they lack the will to flash another usb stick.
“I’m good, fuck it.”
“Man I wish I could do more with my new computer” – Fedora
“Yeah I just want to breathe some new life into this old laptop and have it last me until the end of time” – Debian
Almost every interaction with a boomer involving their computer/phone
The zoomers and gen-alpha aren’t doing much better. Just ask the average teen what a filesystem is and how to find a file without it being organized in some sort of media gallery app.
As a millennial, I often feel like I’m surrounded by tech illiterates on both the upper AND lower sides of my age bracket.
It’s dumb as hell to most here, but ordinary users their own ideas on what a desktop should look like that often doesn’t agree with the intelligentsia. Just let them have it.
The computer in the picture is infected with adware
The literal ArchWiki says you may not want to use Arch if you are happy with your current OS.
based
This is good, i hope somebody printed this and hand it over to Arch Linux cult
I’ve been running cachyOS for the last few months…
i’ve heard a bunch of people talking about cachyos
i use endeavour os, and when i get my pc back (i moved and haven’t been able to build it yet) i’m planning on installing base arch
so, what are the upsides to cachyos?
As a gaming-oriented distro, CachyOS is ready to use right out of the box. It’s similar to Endeavor, but goes a few steps further with its opinions. I’d still be using it if it weren’t for AUR’s serious malware problems.
hmmm interesting. i might use it, but now i need to know more about the AUR’s malware problems. i haven’t heard of them and am now kinda scared
The funny thing for me is I swapped to fedora after my last attempt to use arch failed spectacularly.
I’ve found I’m at a point where I just want my device to work and work well
Just means your over 25
/me a 42 year old that uses Arch
I take that personally.
/me adjusts my knee high socks.
42 and wearing long socks like that? You need help bud’
Once you hit 40 your knees need all the help they can get.
Use NixOS
Install Guix
Guix’s FOSS stance is cool, but Nix is much more mature
Guix’s FOSS stance is… cool… I guess… but can be very impractical. The main channel only ships linux-libre which will give you problems on most modern hardware. I immediately had to add
nonguixto get my laptop working.No, the reason I went with Guix is because their tools and APIs seem/feel a bit more polished than Nix. I also feel better about learning Guile Scheme because it’s a more general-purpose language than Nixlang and I just personally found it more intuitive.
But yeah Nix is definitely more mature, has more packages, and has more documentation scattered about. Also, Guix uses GNU Shepherd instead of systemd… which… I don’t know how I feel about that yet…
How do you do Flakes with Guix? When I tried to use it, the closest I could get was a script using time-machine to output a lockfile, and it was still missing many other important features such as inputting other Flakes and their dependencies. Also NixOS/Home Manager have tons of configuration options that integrate with each other (i.e. Shell integrations, stylix) that Guix doesn’t have so with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful. Also on aarch64 Guix is way bugger and like half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time, their lack of quality control was also one of the things that pushed me to Nix.
The one thing I do miss from Guix though is the containerized shells.
How do you do Flakes with Guix?
Good question. I haven’t gotten there yet… but I hear yeah, something with
channels.scmandtime-machine? I haven’t tried that workflow yet. Also, something about inferiors?NixOS/Home Manager … with Guix I had to use dotfiles directly which is less powerful
I actually found that I like using the
home-dotfiles-service-typebecause I already have everything in dot files. Although, I have a very simple setup, so I’m not sure more powerful features would be useful for me… maybe? idk.aarch64 Guix is way bugger
Ah, ok. I haven’t tried this.
half of the large packages wouldn’t compile a lot of the time
Hm, weird. Maybe this has gotten better? I haven’t had a problem with anything compiling yet. I did run into a bug with Obsidian not launching correctly and that took a few weeks to resolve, I think.
Guix is definitely lacking manpower for sure, but I’m vibing with the foundations so far. So I’m hoping things get better over time.
This was the closest I managed to get to a Flake with Guix. I’m bad at Guile so there might be other things I missed.
With Nix I made a Flake that automatically configures a text editor that can be imported into other Flakes for my own projects which is easy to do with Nix.
For system configurations, the flake-parts based configuration makes it easy to mix and match modules for different systems that edit parts of program configurations that I need (i.e. different modules add different aliases to Nushell). Idk how Guix handles this since I haven’t figured out Guile well.
I did run into a bug with Obsidian not launching correctly and that took a few weeks to resolve, I think.
I’ve experienced this with Nix before for a different program, although once I made an issue request it got responses immediately and I didn’t even do anything else. Meanwhile for Guix, I tried contributing a package that I spent several hours working on, and I asked multiple channels for support and didn’t get a response, then when I submitted it no response for a year before it was finally rejected, so my experience with the maintainers wasn’t great either and this made me hesitant to invest more time into the ecosystem.
Unpopular opinion: install community distros, not corporate ones. That way you can support the developers for their hardwork. Redhat doesn’t need our money, they already make enough of it. I use CachyOS, btw.
I just switched to CachyOS and I’m really enjoying it so far. My journey so far has been Mint > Bazzite > Kubuntu > back to Mint > CachyOS and for the first time I don’t have any real complaints. There’s a voice inside my head telling me to jump to just standard Arch though. Not really sure why. Have you tried standard Arch? If so, how does it compare to CachyOS? I probably won’t end up switching, I haven’t had any issues yet and I’m a computer problem magnet and certified idiot, so I’ll probably stick to what works, but something draws me to pure Arch.
I’ve run vanilla arch for quite a while. CachyOS is a ton better. Arch is barebones and you have to do everything yourself. If you have the time and patience to do it, then more power to ya. I’m a dad of two, one of which is on the spectrum. So, I wanted something like Arch that just works and doesn’t require too much maintenance, and cachy has been just that.
I’ve not had a single major issue with it in the 3 months it’s been running on my machine. Just your normal Linux annoyances. I love how the gaming package on cachy is literally one click of a button. Also, it’s a lot faster
Thanks for your input. I’m going to be a dad soon, so I should probably stick with cachy then.
Dude, fucking congratulations 🎉🎉. And yes, your PC should never take time away from your kids. I love taking care of mine, they’re so much fun. I love that my PC just works. And if Cachy gives me any trouble, it’s gone and will be replaced with something immutable like Bazzite. I legit want my machine to JUST work with minimal issues. I have had Bazzite on a laptop I have for close to 6 months now and it’s rock solid and a true just works distro.
Thanks man, yeah I’m pretty excited. I’ve always wanted kids, it’s crazy to think I’m finally going to have one soon.
For sure, family always comes first, especially kids.
Standard arch is just a downgrade from cachy if you just want a functional computer and not have to think about it.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed sends it’s love.
Hi, Tumbleweed 👋🏽
Which ones are corporate besides Redhat and what’s the relation to this post?
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I’ve had 0 problems out of Debian since bookworm.
That said, I daily drive Nix and use Ubuntu LTS for servers because I’m too lazy to keep up with it otherwise.
I thought Canonical got on board with spying ages ago. May I do not recall correctly.
Historically they have had a lot of funding problems. There’s been at least two or three times where they’ve partnered with somebody for marketing opportunies. And the egregious things were over a decade ago now. They decide to market with somebody, put an ad in there default desktop, or install a default application, or collect user data from dash, being open source it’s been noticed immediately and they end up rolling it back. Hell, it’s the reason half the forks exist.
Sure, people still get edgy about everything they do at this point but realistically they’ve not been all that bad. But I wouldn’t trust them with closed source for a second.
At current I think they’re only collecting some super basic user information and it is opt out. And to me from a server standpoint I don’t really care what they’re doing at the desktop level. I don’t even really care about snaps because I’m not installing anything on that box that would use snaps. It’s like firewall, kubernetes, and some monitoring tools. They’re not doing command line spying on my kubectl.
They’re a good choice for a headless server. They’ve got a nice long LTS with support for years. Their agile on security fixes. And they keep their repos pretty current.
My second choice would be Debian. They have an LTS service where people are only encouraged to pay. But imo their repos aren’t anywhere near as up to date.
It certainly seems like public opinion changed the tast ten years or so. As an ubuntu user, could you confirm or deny these claims I’ve seen? One is that firefox is a snap even if you try to install it with apt. Another is that they show ads to get paid ubuntu in the terminal output?
I can confirm them both. I’m considering moving to Debian because of this.
You can uninstall snap and use flatpak for those apps but it was a slap in the face when Firefox suddenly was replaced by a snap through apt
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True and true.
If you do a minimal install, it will still force apt to install snapd and snaps for certain packages, including Firefox. It can be worked around, but it’s very hard to keep snaps out of your system. This is why I dumped Ubuntu and never looked back. Fedora is my happy place, now.
If you really like Ubuntu, Linux mint Ubuntu version comes with the snap defaults removed.
I really liked Ubuntu back when the color scheme was more brown/orange, it seemed so friendly. The last ten years I’ve been on Debian though, but LMDE seems interesting.
LMDE is great, it’s what I recommend to all new Linux users. Lots of tiny things that remove friction, like not requiring Sudo for apt and showing stars when typing a password.
Joke’s on you, downvotes aren’t a thing on my instance, you’ll take my upvote and you’ll like it
Trying to help with the downvote situation. Glad you decided on a distro that works for you and you’re not succumbing to the pressure.
i was happy with Arch on my server.
then, i installed NixOS on it.
update: i’ve set it up to a usable state, it’s a minecraft server
Arch on my server
Sane people usually go bungee jumping or cave diving to get their irrational danger kicks.
Eh arch is perfectly stable for server use.
Can even get a debian experience by not updating ever.
I also use arch on my servers and it’s really stable. Until today that is. I updated one of my systems and it broke Nvidia docker runtime.
nvidia
I found your problem
Yes I know but I need Cuda :(
I find that questionable even for ml workloads but you do you. :)
Am I the only one that feels like saying “you do you” is more insulting then telling someone to just go fuck themselves and they are a raging idiot.
It just comes across as the most possible condescending possible response possible in the English language.
Installing Arch on a server is certainly a choice
Tried it all and ended up with Mint again. Forever the best distro.
Hell yes! Mint 4 life!
I am convinced that I will try Arch or similar some day in the future simply because of SteamOS switching over to being based off of it. But for now, I develop software for embedded Linux systems all day at work. When I get home it’s either family time inside or it’s playing “engineer turned farmer” in my back yard. Literally digging in the dirt and building stuff out of wood. Feels good man.
All I need is a Linux Mint KDE edition, with updates as frequent as Fedora
Dn it, am.on Mint, currently thinking about going Fedora with plasma
Do it…You know you want to.
After a couple of decades of wandering the Great Distro Desert in search of The One, it seems I have landed and Fedora Plasma as what I want in an OS. I’ve been running Fedora for the past few years now. I’m currently looking into Kinonite for that atomic goodness. It appears good so far.
Edit: You can choose the Cinnamon Spin if you enjoy that DE. I found Fedora Cinnamon to be snappier than the Mint version.
I’m on kubuntu. I can just Google questions with ubuntu attached to the query and it tells me a gui solution if it’s available. Bonus, there’s far less people telling me I’m doing it wrong, they just assume I’m a newbie.
If it works, don’t try to fix it
*Except their stand on software patents and video acceleration
Eh?
Fedora doesn’t ship video accelerated mesa drivers(which are open source) by default and is a bit of pain in the ass to setup. They do that because they are very much tied to IBM and have to respect software patents(maybe for legal reasons). This is for intel and AMD graphics and if you take fedora as plug and play, browsers will use cpu to decode vidoes and and heats up as if i’m gaming when i play a simple video.
I use fedora too but hates this specific thing. Most other distros ship with official mesa drivers.
Fedora includes incomplete video codecs that can’t use GPU acceleration. This forces the CPU to do the decoding. Fedora claims it’s because of imaginary “patent issues” due to its IBM backing. You can install the correct ones from RPM Fusion, but it’s an extra step and it’s not made clear that this is even a problem. You might notice only after you wonder why you have such high CPU temperatures while doing basic things like browsing the web.
I’m using fedora 42 kde on my new laptop since I couldn’t get mint working - fucking visit drivers.
Anywho, doom: the dark ages runs like wet ass and I’m wondering if it has something to do with video codecs or mesa )don’t know what mesa is and there’s a 5080 in there.
I reinstalled tempeh and all my videos work, but - any chance you could point me towards what to do with the video codecs just so I can confirm? If you can offer some guidance on how to install whatever mesa is I want to try that to see if it helps (even though afaik the game should be using the ncidia drivers anyway).
The laptop has a ryzen cpu btw.
Also cool if you can’t help. Figured I’d ask. I’m new to fedora.
Edit: it just suddenly works fine now for no particular reason.
First Linux experience beyond retro station. I love bazzite. Super fucking easy!
