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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which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

Sbauer , (edited )

Eh, the way you phrased that I think it’s either fedora or opensuse. The up-to-date criteria basically knocks out everything with a fixed release cycle besides fedora which is pretty bleeding edge since they update certain things like kernel between releases.

Some criteria are non-sensical though imho. Ease of use? Speed? They are all the same, sure pacman works faster than zypper but it’s not like I’m waiting for either, they work in the background while I do stuff. As for ease of use … kde is kde, terminal is terminal. I think you would have to branch into the realm of the BSDs to get real differences there.

Debian is really solid, prefer it over any of its derivatives. You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part, ofc you’re going to have issues with a distro if you don’t know how to perform the most basic stuff. Stay far away from nix if kinoite gave you issues, with nix 90% of your pre-existing Linux knowledge will not only be useless but actively harmful.

Reading between the lines I think opensuse tumbleweed might work for you. Stable, powerful installer, very up to date and most of your pre-existing knowledge should transfer. Fedora is nice but you mentioned the magic word production, I don’t like fast cyclers in production, major version updates are a hassle at the best of times.

elucubra OP ,

You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part,

OFC, That’s what I implied in my post. That I don’t want to tinker more than necessary. I’ve been doing Linux things since the 90s, installing from diskettes, spending hours and hours on the CLI, compiling shit on a 40Mhz 486… Right now I want something that mainly just works, mainly being the key word here. I don’t mind doing the odd tweak here and there, I just don’t want the tweaking to be a main feature.

Telorand ,

I really like the idea of Nix, but the fact that the learning curve is so high and the skillset isn’t really transferable keeps me away. Also, you can make your own declarative build using BlueBuild, the template provided by Universal Blue, Vanilla OS, etc., so its unique use case isn’t so unique anymore.

RageLtd ,

Honestly I’m in love with CachyOS (Arch derivative). Not only have they done a bunch of optimization work, but it’s quite stable (for Arch) and has a graphical way to do just about everything- including the install process

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

I tried ChromeOS today, and while it looks awesome, has some really great UI elements and integrations, I would still say uBlue with KDE Plasma comes close to it.

I would prefer sane atomic updates though, like twice a month. Fedora is not that good in that regard, you want to update every day as you get fixes every day.

Also, OCI images are consuming tons of bandwidth currently, so ostree is still better.

RmDebArc_5 ,
@RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works avatar

For me that would be Fedora (preferably KDE). I currently am on Aurora (Kinoite fork), but that’s because I value stability very highly (except for immutable and Debian nothing is stable enough).

RageLtd ,

Not OP, but can you sell me on Aurora? Every time I’ve tried any of the Fedora Immutable distros they just feel slow and awkward. I have a few tools that need rpm-ostree installs and fighting with flatpak permissions is the bane of my existence

RmDebArc_5 ,
@RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works avatar

If you had problems with fedora atomic aurora likely isn’t for you. Its main changes are adding stuff like codecs and drivers to the image and making distrobox more accessible. What tools do you use? Aurora-dx comes with brew preinstalled so maybe they are available there. Also using distrobox completely skips flatpak permissions so maybe that would help you

RageLtd , (edited )

Well that certainly sounds like it’s worth investigating, at the very least. Thanks!

The big problem for me was SSH and IDE tools. Iirc they only worked with stuff installed on the base image (I use 1Password’s ssh agent)

erwan ,

There are a few improvements in Aurora over Silverblue that you might like.

It ships with homebrew which is perfect for CLI tools.

It ships with distrobox instead of toolbx which is much better. You can install any distro while toolbx is just a Fedora. For example I’m using Arch in toolbox because of the number of packages and the fact that they’re usually up to date (no need to wait for a major release).

So far I never had to use rpm-ostree, and for VSCode I use distrobox precisely because of the permissions.

RageLtd ,

I’m downloading Bluefin DX as we speak! Definitely gonna play with it a bit

j0rge ,

bluefin/aurora co-maintainer here, the 1password ssh agent is a miniboss we haven’t conquered yet, just a heads up.

superkret , (edited )

Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in some aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it’s a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can’t be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too “stable” for a desktop and I don’t use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.

I’ve probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.

pmk ,

Tumbleweed is not a derivative of Leap.

superkret , (edited )

Tumbleweed includes the YaST package manager with all the repository priority settings that make sense in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to use it.
You can run zypper up which is a standard updating method in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to do that. More than half the zypper options make no sense in TW.
That’s the stuff I mean by “derivative”. They built on a Leap base and modified it into a rolling release.
If it was truly designed as a new, independent rolling release distro, they’d have taken those things out, packaged a different version of zypper or at least a different manpage.

pmk ,

I see what you mean now. I thought you meant as in upstream/downstream.

JubilantJaguar , (edited )

For years I used Debian. Because it worked, but also because Debian looked to me to be the purest and most solid FOSS distro. That is, it’s not run by a for-profit company, and it isn’t a derivative that will go away one day. It looked - still looks - like the “universal” Linux distro, which I believe is even its motto.

Firstly, is that assessment justified?

Next: the problem. A few years ago I read a disturbing report about the behind-the-scenes dysfunction at Debian. Specifically:

  • a serious dearth of maintainers
  • lots of very outdated packages with possible untreated security holes
  • silly political wrangling by Debian insiders - one representative allegation was that more time was being spent debating the positioning of a Black Lives Matter logo on the Debian site than on the technical challenges just mentioned

Possibly this was disinformation by someone with a scurrilous agenda. I want it not to be true because I believe Linux needs a flagship FOSS distro and Debian is the obvious candidate.

Can anyone set the record straight? Because when I had to do a new install I went with Ubuntu (LTS), and this was partly inspired by the above. I would really like all this to be wrong and to know that Debian is on the right path.

superkret , (edited )

I looked behind the scenes quite a bit in Debian and what you say mirrors what I saw. The project is very political and does suffer from a serious lack of man-(and woman-)power in many areas. If you do want to help, you’re almost immediately hampered by the community’s Byzantine structure.

If that puts you off, Arch is a more dynamic project that’s easier to get into as a maintainer. But it’s also organized with a more hierarchical and less democratic structure.

Additionally, you’ll find the issues Debian has all over the FOSS world (The Linux kernel is especially bad). And if you work in corporate IT like I do, you’ll soon notice that proprietary software organisations are no better. There’s software many people depend on maintained by a single overworked and struggling person everywhere you look. Yet it still works somehow. Cause wherever there is demand, a solution is found. And Debian at least has a long-established structure with the goal of finding that solution, even though it’s antiquated.

piexil ,

It seems they are prepping to do something about the sea of unmaintained packages

JubilantJaguar ,

This is great news! Debian is back in contention for me.

Recently Debian developer Helmut Grohne initiated the Debian development discussion around removing more packages from the unstable archive. He argued in favor of more aggressively removing unmaintained packages from the archive given the QA-related costs, additional work/complexities when dealing with major fundamental changes to Debian, and other non-trivial costs

JubilantJaguar ,

Useful insight, thanks. And somewhat reassuring.

I have no intention of using Arch (btw). I’m the kind of insufferable idealist who wants to use Debian for the high-minded principle of it. I consider Arch a toy distro for gamers. :)

cakeistheanswer ,
@cakeistheanswer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I use the Debian social contract as an example of the an unmitigated good in open source.

That doesn’t mean the org always live up to it, but that’s partially why there are battles for things like representation inside. I wouldn’t extend the benefit of the doubt to canonical, and I prefer rolling as opposed to security ported updates on my own hardware, but they made what you see possible on the internet in large part because people came together to make a free platform.

The orgs dogmas look like product of a bygone age to be, and changes to environment in software is probably as hostile to their approach as ever. I’m amazed they’re not more dysfunctional just from the outside looking, it’s a rock solid implementation.

bloodfart ,

There’s truth to what you’re hearing, all open source software is suffering.

Part of the allure of rolling releases for the places that have to maintain them is less maintaining! Debian does need maintainers.

Debian does ship old packages, that’s the point of “stable”, to be tested and known not to cause problems.

Free software is political. It’s literally not possible for there to have been more time spent discussing what to put on the website than looking for maintainers and updating packages, and part of stability isn’t active testing but instead time spent in active use.

Debian is on the same path it’s always been on, and reports of its imminent demise are exaggerated.

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