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I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

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.

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

D_Air1 ,
@D_Air1@lemmy.ml avatar

I agree. Arch really won me over with how they do things. Sometimes less is more.

  1. Not splitting packages as much means that I can compile pretty much any program without thinking about dependencies most of the time.
  2. Arch doesn’t autostart programs just because I downloaded them.
  3. While I’m not necessarily attached to having the latest and greatest of every package. There are often times where I do want the latest and greatest of some package and it was out of date on point release distributions. (Before someone comments flatpak. The most important collection of software I want up to date is the Desktop Environemnt and my Desktop Environment of choice is KDE Plasma.)
  4. Lastly, the pkgbuild format is dead simple and I have actually managed to roll my own packages compared to some other distros.
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.

A7thStone ,

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

Meltrax ,

Fedora. Silverblue if you want even more stability.

amanneedsamaid ,

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

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.

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.

erwan ,

Private Internet Access is just a VPN?

I’ve had no issues installing the flatpak for ProtonVPN and using it.

Telorand ,

Okay. There’s no flatpak for PIA’s client, so that doesn’t help me, and I don’t know how to create my own (not for lack of trying). Same deal with RPMs and Appimages.

Also, just FYI, the flatpak for ProtonVPN is unofficial, in case you weren’t aware. Make sure to double check the source files.

asap , (edited )
@asap@lemmy.world avatar

Private Internet Access

Can’t you simply get the OpenVPN or Wireguard details from in PIA, and then put them into Gnome/KDE’s built-in VPN app?

Like this: …privateinternetaccess.com/…/where-can-i-find-you…

Will be something similar for Wireguard.

atzanteol ,

Great question. Right up there with “what’s the best movie” or “which meal should I order”. Maybe you want to ask which editor is the best too?

Mr_Blott ,

The question starts with “What do you consider…”

You sound like the type to reply in threads where someone’s asking about a problem they’re having with Windows and say “I don’t have this problem because I use Linux (snort)”

mesamunefire ,

Popos for me. It’s my daily driver.

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.

fuzzy_feeling ,

i love my void…

sunoc ,
@sunoc@sh.itjust.works avatar

Aeon Desktops it is

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.

blackbrook ,

I haven’t tried slackware in some years, but doesn’t it require not minding that the version of everything be way dated? OP said “up to date”.

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