There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Goldilocks distro?

What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.

I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

gramgan ,

NixOS. Declarative system management is just so unbelievably simple and reliable that I couldn’t ever see myself going back to a traditional Linux system.

mesamunefire ,

Popos for me. It’s my daily driver.

A7thStone ,

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

turbowafflz ,

For me it’s either OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch and I can never decide which. Tumbleweed having snapper and YaST everything out of the box is amazing but sometimes I miss the AUR, and Zypper is so much slower than Pacman. I also really like Fedora Silverblue on my laptop but I don’t think I could use it on my main system.

sunoc ,
@sunoc@sh.itjust.works avatar

Aeon Desktops it is

rebeltrouper ,

For me it was Gentoo. I am not sure what it is but for my work it just works better. Tests shows it runs faster for my work and comes with all the tools I need to compile things. I really like the package naming scheme and use flags. I also like the custom-ability of it as well. Tried arch and others but hated it. Also I think the documentation on Gentoo is insanely good.

JetpackJackson ,

My main distro is arch but I installed gentoo on a spare laptop and im really enjoying the granular control and the choices available, like if I want to use the binaries I can, or I can use a bunch of USE flags, it’s very nice. Emerge is slightly slower than pacman for me but I can live with that. I should learn to write some ebuilds though.

TheGrandNagus ,

Fedora. Installer is a bit rubbish (being replaced soon) but it’s not difficult.

In terms of speed, stability, and being up-to-date it’s been exceptional IMO.

Badabinski ,

For me, it's Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it's Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it's always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it's fast because it doesn't enable many things by default, and it's honestly been the most reliable distro I've ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

I personally feel like Arch's unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you'll likely have a rock solid system.

Again, this is all just my opinion. It's easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won't recommend it to you, but I'll happily say how much I've come to enjoy using it.

Kongar ,

For me I find endeavoros to be the goat. I realized that when I install arch and then the “essentials” for me - I basically recreated what endeavor does. Except endeavor does it with like three clicks on the installer. So now I just install endeavor. Gnome, nvidia drivers, pacdiff and meld, text editor, yay, you get the idea…. No bloat, no bs, quick install with exactly what I would do manually with arch.

I also know this take is controversial-but I like flatpaks as well. Sometimes you gotta mess with flatseal, and sometimes the AUR package is clearly superior. But they usually get the job done well.

It’s nearly impossible to break arch if you use the AUR as little as possible AND read the arch homepage for manual steps BEFORE doing an upgrade.

Thorned_Rose ,
@Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’m a long time Arch user (10 years) and I love EndeavourOS + Pamac (from Manjaro) as a simple install that I can easily maintain on family members computers or on our Laptop if I’m feeling lazy.

ugo ,

+1. Arch is super easy to install, just open the install guide on the wiki and do what it says.

It’s also really stable nowadays, I can’t actually remember the last time something broke.

As a counterpoint, on ubuntu I constantly had weird issues where the system would change something apparently on its own. Like the key repeat resetting every so often (I mean multiple times an hour), weirdness with graphic drivers, and so on.

That said, I also appreciate debian for server usage. Getting security updates only can be desirable for something that should be little more than an appliance. Doing a dist upgrade scares the shit out of me though, while on arch that’s not even close to a concern.

Hack3900 ,

Arch at home debian on the server is a great experience

Meltrax ,

Fedora. Silverblue if you want even more stability.

Only_Exception ,
@Only_Exception@mstdn.plus avatar

@elucubra linux mint was my goldilocks for a while. Had to get through some major driver issues before it was stable but I loved it. Very recently moved to fedora because I wanted the latest updates without being on a edge distro

ParadeDuGrotesque ,
@ParadeDuGrotesque@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Slackware.

It. Just. Works.

elucubra OP , (edited )

Slackware was my first distro, in the 90s, installed from diskettes, downloaded with a 9600 baud modem, FUN! (actually it was, wizard stuff at the time). I moved to Mandrake I think, then RH or another, and whenever I took a look at Slackware, it felt ancient when compared with these “glitzy”, for the time, distros. Maybe I should take a look again.

amanneedsamaid ,

Fedora. Specifically I’ve been using Silverblue recently, very stable system for me.

c0smokram3r ,
@c0smokram3r@midwest.social avatar

~ debian ~

fuzzy_feeling ,

i love my void…

erwan ,

For me atomic distributions are the way to go.

You get a rock solid base system that get updated automatically, and every single user has the same image so you can’t get into a bug that’s only reproduced on your system because of your combination of system packages. If for any reason you have a problem with an image update, you can always boot on the previous image from grub.

Then user apps come on top of that, and can’t break the base system.

I know you tried Kinoite and got stuck, but there is always a way to unblock yourself and install what you want. If it’s not in flatpak there is homebrew (for CLI), and if it’s in neither there is distrobox. You can also do a rpm-ostree for native packages if all the others fail.

You can also check universal blue, Aurora in particular if you want KDE. It’s based on Fedora Silverblue but with an improved out-of-the-box experience.

universal-blue.org

Telorand ,

I have yet to successfully install the Private Internet Access client on Bazzite. It does a lot of system modification at runtime, which doesn’t play nice with the immutable system.

There’s definitely limitations like that one, so I’d say there’s a solution for most, but not all cases. Hopefully, that will become a non-issue when bootc is fully ready.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •