NixOS tends to encourage “proper” solutions instead of hacky temporary solutions, so while doing stuff on NixOS takes more time, maintaining what you’ve done is much easier, and it’s much easier to reason about, so I learned much more on NixOS than I learned on Arch (hell, I wrote two Nix DSLs for nftables and Lua because my perfectionism told me I need to do that instead of manipulating config as strings in Nix). I have an initrd hook that configures GPU passthrough by picking a GRUB option, I have a system configuration for an Arm router SoC (BPI-R3), which is a painful piece of hardware to work with, much like other SoCs, I have the router config itself (which I wrote a Nix framework for) - and if I ever forget how that all works, I can read the config to remember it, instead of trying to figure out what Linux commands I ran “back then”. But if your goal is just learning about Linux, look elsewhere - that was just a bonus for me; Nix is an abstraction, and you can only start learning Linux after you understand that abstraction.
This really depends on your definition of “stability”.
The technical definition is “software packages don’t change very often”. This is what makes Debian a “stable” distro, and Arch an “unstable” one.
The more colloquial definition of “stability” is “doesn’t break very often”, which is what people usually mean when they ask for “stable” distributions. The main problem with recommending a distro like this, is that it’s going to depend on you as a user, and also on your hardware.
I, personally, have used Arch for about 5 years now, and it’s only ever broken because I’ve done something stupid. I stopped doing stupid things, and Arch hasn’t broken since. However, I’ve also spoken to a few people who have had Arch break on them, but 9 times out of 10, they point to the Nvidia driver as the culprit, so it seems you’ll have a better time if you have an AMD GPU, for example.
KDE sets a really high bar with all the packages and extensibility. Almost everything (not including the lesser known and used packages) is feature-packed and just works. I really don’t know any other software that constantly amazes me like KDE.
I’m fine in general with most of them but I’m settled on KDE. I agree the software is great, I love apps like Okular and there are these little goodies hidden everywhere, like typing “fish://user@server” in the file manager url/path area and I get a folder open of the remote file system, I can even add it to “Locations”.
Apart from actual system administration or kernel developing, there’s no real “learn Linux” .
Video/Photo/Vector editing on Linux is not “learning Linux”, it’s learning to use a tool which runs on Linux. You can learn to use Blender, Gimp or Inkscape on Windows. You don’t edit videos/photos/vectors with the Linux kernel. You can even “learn the linux terminal” installing bash on Windows.
You can also install Visual Code or IDLE on Windows and on Linux. Learning to code on Visual Code or IDLE is not really “learning Linux”.
Also going on distro hopping looking for the “perfect distro” many times means the hopper simply doesn’t stick to one long enough to learn how to customize the environment to their liking (which usually means the window manager).
Most of the things you can do on the GUI, even the administration ones are just layers and layers of tools to make things “easier” - and they’ll be different on each distro and release. Command line administration will change much less, or at least less frequently.
Things I consider “learning Linux” are for example:
installing Linux (specially a headless server)
understanding how to use the package managers - again, on the command line
understand how systemd works
(hard core) dive into the kernel workings
understand how grub works
learn the general filesystem structure
learn how to analyze logs
learn user administration and how the permissions (and extended permissions) work
learn how to integrate Linux to a Windows environment (join a workgroup or domain, share storage, authenticate users)
learn how to check resources usage and how to troubleshoot it
undertand the nuances and of partitioning and when they are needed, as well as the different filesystems
etc (and /etc)
And yes, many of those are not strictly “Linux”, but are specific to a Linux system, unlike photo editing.
Mostly good advice. I disagree on the headless server part though. Most people who are interesting in learning "Linux” have a much less reductive idea of what that means than you do, I think. Specifically, I think becoming a comfortable, fluent speaker of a typical Unix/Linux environment and userland is probably the most important thing. I think the best way to start doing that is to just live in Linux, and you’re not going to do that on a headless server. Learning the GUI that your distribution uses to add users isn’t important, but having a GUI where you can run standard browsers and photo editors and such is important, because otherwise, you’ll spend all your time in Windows and never have the chance to develop fluency in all the stuff that is actually important.
Limiting yourself to only using command line stuff I suspect does more harm than good, unless you’re hyper-motivated to learn fast. For most people, the smoother path is probably more gradual. Start with Gnome or whatever and just use the computer. Over many years, you’ll learn a lot of piecemeal things just by becoming frustrated with some problem and learning how to solve it. I do think it’s good advice to do as much from a shell as you can from day one. Instead of using the GUI to copy files, learn to do it from a shell. Just don’t feel like you aren’t allowed to use Firefox to browse the web.
I agree; I mentioned headless server because that would be a more “pure” and general Linux administration - learning how to administer a SUSE Linux using the graphical yast tool won’t translate as well to general Linux admin as if you learn and understand how to fo it in the command line and config files.
And absolutely; one can use Firefox, LibreOffice and any other tool on Linux, but I don’t consider that as “learning” or “knowing” Linux. My wife uses exclusively Linux for 20+ years (because when she left her job where they still had Windows 95, that’s what the desktop at home ran; kubuntu). She does text editing, internet banking, shopping, browsing, printing, everything there (even updates sw through the gui package manager), but she doesn’t “know Linux”.
You can setup a Linux system for a computer illiterate, and they may happily learn how to use it for their social media and streaming consuming, and whatever endusers do in their computers, without ever knowing that’s “Linux”.
Strictly speaking, that already happens. How many Android users know they are running on a Linux kernel?
That’s why when OP said “learn Linux”, I prioritized the admin on command line; as you don’t need to really “learn Linux” to interact with it through automated/graphical admin tools (no shame on doing it, they’re sometimes quicker and more practical than command line).
What I mean is that learning how to use cPanel or Yast is useful, but you’re learning how to administer as system through a tool, which in theory could even be adapted to administer a non-Linux system.
Certainly it’s possible to be a Linux user without learning the things that we would say mean you “know Linux”, but I think the most effective way to learn them also requires being a “user”. Using Firefox on Ubuntu instead of Windows doesn’t teach you Linux, but If you don’t have X11/Wayland and a browser and you can’t do your online banking and social media and Youtube, then you won’t actually learn the “real” stuff, because you’ll spend all of your time in Windows and Linux will feel like homework. Instead, get a full Linux desktop experience that you can do all the things you want to do with, and as you’re doing those things, also seek out opportunities to learn the shell and userland utilities, etc.
The community is strong with lots of knowledgeable users with patience to help others out.
The release cycle gets the balance just right between having predictable updates and the latest software. Fedora’s testing process is very good, you rarely have problems.
Controversial one: strong financial backing from Red Hat means that Fedora is very unlikely to sell out or turn evil, at least not without a lot of notice.
This article is kinda misleading. Nearly 40% of Linux devices is the Steam Deck which is AMD only. Subtracting the Steam Deck AMD usage on Linux more or less matches that on Windows.
Yeah, there really isn’t any reason to go with one processor brand over the other. Since drivers and such aren’t a concern (like with GPUs) most people just pick whichever one has the most price-effective offering in the spec range they’re looking for.
I think you are half right. For the most part it’s price effectiveness in the spec range, but there are other considerations such as battery draw with laptops, or iGPU if you’re not running or looking for a video card. For the same price, looking into the performance or efficiency related to the type of programs you are using is still worthwhile.
Yeah, nah, that’s a dealbreaker for me. I’m back to LMDE when this happens.
I don’t mind having snaps available but I’d avoid using them whenever possible. They’re larger than necessary, slower than necessary, and I trust software checked by its original devs plus distro maintainers more than software checked by the devs alone.
I don’t think Manjaro made Asahi, that seems like poor phrasing. Manjaro has tried to get into the ARM scene for sure (and royally messed up), but Asahi is a completely independent project. Asahi is directly based on Arch ARM.
I wouldn’t say I hate Manjaro, but I had a bad first experience with it.
They put Material Shell in the default install. The project devs at the time described the project as alpha or beta quality and it was. It had some easy to find bad bugs.
Nobara for my gaming rig, same as OP + lots of out of the box gaming fixes.
Tumbleweed for the laptop, rolling release while (in my experience) being a bit less likely to break than arch.
Ubuntu/Debian/MicroOS/Alma for servers depending on whether I want stability + some fresher software, mountain-like stability, automatically updating container hosts or if I need redhat compatibility.
Mint if its someone elses old computer they want to “just work”, since I dislike being tech support more than necessary.
@authed@347_is_p69 Can agree plenty, I tried out Arch for one of my first Linux distros. I learned lots, it was a pain when stuff broke but at least it taught me how to fix things.
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