Most modern distros are either new distro trying to have more modern sensibilities, distros based off of Debian, Arch, or Fedora, or occasionally original things that are okay with being superficially similar to one of those while doing things differently at lower levels. OpenSUSE is one of the few remaining distros from the olden days that has been independent and doing their own thing for decades without spawning a bunch of forks or dying off. If you want to try something even older and crazier Slackware is sure an experience.
Slackware’s package manager doesn’t even do dependency resolution. I respect the fact that it’s managed to keep existing this long and that so much of what it did inspired other distros, but I honestly have no idea why anyone would use it in 2023. Imo dependency resolution is the main reason to even have a package manager, without that I might as well install everything by cloning random git repos. If you want packages compiled from source, why not just use Gentoo (or Source Mage? Idk much about it, but I read through their website and it seems neat).
That being said, if anyone uses Slackware, I’d love to know why. It’s survived this long, surely it must be doing something right.
It’s completely surprise free. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and find it’s dumped Systemd and Wayland on your front porch like some unsokicited car wreck.
I use Slackware because, in my opinion, it is simple, easy to understand, doesn’t get in your way, and strikes a good balance between being up to date, stable, and bug free. I also have it set up how I like it and don’t feel like installing something else. Honestly, the lack of dependency resolution has really not been a problem. By default, Slackware comes with a lot of libraries, and sbopkg (which builds SlackBuilds from slackbuilds.org) can do dependency resolution, as can some third party package managers. And with appimages and flatpacks, this is less and less of a problem.
That said, I use Manjaro on my Pinebook and am perfectly happy with it, and I’ve used Debian in the past too.
<rant> I use RHEL at work and it’s not bad, but I don’t really care for it. It feels overly complicated in terms of configuration and daemons running, and I don’t know systemd that well. Although I think this is mostly the fault of our satellite server, “dnf update” breaks on me at least once a month. Also, some packages are just plain archaic, and didn’t even update from RHEL 7 to 8. And I can’t seem to wrap my head around source rpms or how to make rpms. Slackware and Manjaro use straightforward build scripts. </rant>
Overall, pretty good considering it’s low price. It is a bit quirky, kind of like running Linux on a laptop 15+ years ago. Hardware support is somewhat lacking because it’s all pretty new. That said, the default Manjaro that ships with it works pretty well out of the box. It struggles a bit with video conferencing, in my case, roll20. It can play Minetest and Supertuxkart on minimum settings.
The Slackware community has produced about 8 package manager front-ends that handle dependency resolution, so it’s not an issue at all and hasn’t been for over a decade. The big thing with Slackware is an emphasis on simplicity of design over ease of use and an expectation that the user will make all the decisions regarding how their system is maintained. I love it, use it on my main machine (Void on my laptop, Ubuntu on my server). It’s taught me a lot about operating systems in general and Linux in particular, and it lets me do whatever I like. I use sbotools and flatpak for my 3rd party software, the former being a ports-like interface to slackbuilds.org (like the AUR for Slackware, but far smaller and with a lot more quality control). Works great, no surprises, boots fast, rock solid and dependable.
I use it because 22 years ago it was more appealing than redhat or Mandrake. It forced me to learn more about Linux because I had to resolve almost everything myself than any other distro. I was using before it had a package manager and honestly after the dependency hell of rpms in 2000s it just seemed more problematic to use one that resolved dependencies than not. Usually I used to and sometimes still use it for a nice base to compile everything on. I dunno. It's my Linux equivalent to my first car that I loved.
It’s a wonderful distro that will teach you a lot about how Linux works. It’s weird, and beautiful and you might brick your system or an essential component (why the heck would I need groff?), but you’ll come out the other side knowing more and appreciating how things work and how easy they’ve become.
Check your games’ compatibilty first on protondb if they’re not specifically made for Linux, so you know what to expect.
If your mind is set for Arch, go for it, it has an installer these days, but consider some other distributions of Linux that are easier for a novice user. Reserve some time to install a few, if you don’t like the first one or it’s not working out then you can just move on to the next.
Stick to the big ones, because you’ll be able to get the most support for then and find the most information about them.
Linux generally works with software repositories that will contain most of the software you’ll ever need. You rarely need to search for software on websites to install manually.
If you like to get the latest versions of software as it is released, consider OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch Linux. They are so called rolling releases. They are not tied down to versions, like Windows, but perpetually update their building blocks as time goes on. Your version is always the latest version.
If you like a more traditional approach with stable releases, consider distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora. Twice per year they bring out a new version (with software updates regularly still) but they tend to stick to large point releases of the software they are built on. You can expect things to work as they are until you install the next version of the distro. In this sense stability means that features generally don’t change. You still get security patches nevertheless. If you don’t like to update the entire system every 6 months you can choose to use their “long term support” versions instead. This will feel the most like new Windows versions, only you’ll get to see the rolling distros on newer cooler stuff, “beta-testing” all the things before your distro’s next LTS rolls them out. I’m starting to digress here.
I never bothered with distros that are built around specific niches, like “gaming distros”. If that maintainer stops you’ll need to switch distros anyway.
I can recommend rolling releases, always have the latest version of everything, as far as the maintainers of your distro can keep up (in which case it helps to go with a large well known distro with lots of maintainers).
Flatpak is fast, lightweight actual open-source and provides security via isolation. Snap is the usual BS Canonical tries to get people to use, has a ton of bloat.
Personally I’ve had zero issues with Flatpak under Debian for desktop usage. It integrates nicely with the GNOME Software “store” and allows you to get the latest and best of everything you might need without polluting your system. Flatpak solves the usual complaints about Debian only having “old” software - allows you to run the latest and greatest while keeping a clean and rock solid Debian system underneath.
I’ve been running Nobara, based on Fedora but with a bunch of tweaks specific to gaming. So far so good. I was using Mint but needed a newer kernel to support my (Ed: AMD) graphics card.
I have a fairly opinionated stance on this. Except in your sudo example where you’re specifically using sudo for a reason, I document all commands as non-root, and do not instruct them to raise privs. Whether or not they have, want or need privs, and how they raise them, is their system not mine.
It’s not exactly user friendly, but I don’t like to encourage people to blindly copy & paste commands that raise privs. That should be a conscious decision where they stop and ask themselves if & why it’s necessary.
Why? Because it works and is reliable. I’ve been using Opensuse now for ten years on a server and it updated through all the releases over the years without problems. The machine is getting retired now, though. But the replacement will get Leap again for sure.
Well I’m sticking with it for a while at least. Usually I don’t need to Google much to get a Distro going but for once in a long while a lot of things feel new. And that’s always been fun.
Maybe eventually I’ll get my servers switched from Debian if I get used to it
What SteamOS uses is largely irrelevant to the end user as Valve likely uses it as a base to build and test the versions of SteamOS that make it out. What ships out is likely not the same as running the latest Arch. Kinda like using AOSP because Samsung uses AOSP to build their Android OS.
But to be fair, openSUSE was my first linux distro after Windows and YaST had been helpful to me before I learned how to use console commands. And then I switched to another distro.
It’s not exactly a gaming mouse, but I recently got a Glorious Model O and it works just fine on Linux, wired or wireless. OpenRGB works with it too. The mouse itself is lightweight, comfortable, and accurate, which is all I need. I thought I would miss having a bunch of thumb buttons (this one has two) but I don’t.
The scroll wheel is fine, but honestly the one feature I do miss from my old Logitech was a button I could click that put the scroll wheel into free wheel mode where it would spin instead of ratcheting. If Glorious made a mouse with that I would probably buy it tomorrow
I also have a Glorious, in my case a Model I (because I have small hands on long fingers). Love the shape, its very comfortable, and how light weight it is. I like it more than my previous Logitech mouse. And the Glorious just works.
People have already made lots of good replies but here’s my summary:
tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It allows multitasking in command line only environments. For example if you have to do a sudo apt upgrade but don’t want to leave your ssh client logged in until it finishes, you can run it in a tmux session so it will happen in the background even if you’re not logged in.
To start a new session, type “tmux”
To view running sessions, type “tmux list-sessions”
To switch to a running session, type “tmux attach-session -c N” where N is the number of the session.
To exit a tmux terminal and go back to the main terminal, do ctrl+b and then press d.
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