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Distro for experienced Linux user

Hi, I’m looking for a distro for my laptop. My first distro was Pop!_OS, then I switched to Fedora, then Arch for a year and 2 months ago I switched to Fedora Silverblue, because I wanted to try immutable distro that relies on containers and flatpaks to be usefull. Silverblue is great but not so much for me, its not flexible enough.

I’m thinking of switching to Arch but maybe it’s time for something else. Maybe NixOS or Void, Gentoo probably not, I don’t have time for compiling everything. What do you recommend?

It must support full disk encryption, secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS, systemd (because of MullvadVPN), everything else I think can work on any distro (Gnome, podman, kvm, etc.).

yum13241 ,

Arch supports all of those.

NixOS does too, but I don’t believe Void does.

superguy ,

Whichever one works best for you.

Now that’s an experienced user.

supert ,

Void, hands down, if you’re halfway experienced. Nix is cool but complicated and quite unlike amy other system.

Except void doesn’t have systemd, if you really need it, but it’s easy to write your own runit routine.

winterayars ,

Let me suggest: Fedora. It’s a solid distro that makes some good decisions, doesn’t require a huge amount of effort (unless an update bricks it but it’s been a long time since that happened), and can be further customized if needed.

nyl , (edited )

NixOS definitely. The disk encryption with keys you may need do that manually though.

Vilian ,

every distro is for experienced users, you can tranform arch in ubuntu and vice versa, but if you want sumething different try fedora silverblue, or other nonmutable distro, it’s fun learning how to use it(it’s what i’m doing with my laptop)

Contend6248 ,

I don’t know who downvotes this, but it’s true, you can get your hands dirty with any distro.

cyclohexane ,

Gentoo probably not, I don’t have time for compiling everything

Just wanted to say I use gentoo and was going to recommend it. Compile times really shouldn’t impact you that much as they’re running in background and can be configured to not impact other processes. And compiles are very fast for most applications, it’s only the few heavy ones that aren’t.

MigratingtoLemmy ,

Use wireguard for Mullvad

Likely void, gentoo, Slackware, or just do everything on Debian

noddy ,

I’d recommend go back to arch. I use arch myself and have decided to stop distro hopping. I always end up regretting and come back to arch. The arch install script is quite good now, spares me hours of hunting down what packages to install for a working desktop and configuring of bootloader, etc, that I had to do before for installing arch.

Last time I tried something else was fedora. I liked the seamless experience, but I was annoyed by the very slow updates (why does it take soo long to refresh the repos?), and I missed the awesome wiki and package availability on arch.

hornedfiend ,

I’m a long time arch with plasma user and recently tried arch with gnome and couldn’t get into it, so decided to try something new so I switched to Fedora Kinoite and yes, updates are incredibly slow. I mean it’s ridiculous really when compared to arch, but the distro seems solid ( curious how long I’ll last before inevitably going back to arch).

fraydabson ,

I love arch. I want to switch to NixOS for my home server but I think I’ll be sticking with arch for my main I see no further reason to switch.

sunred ,
@sunred@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I learned that using nix on arch for the home directory in addition to pacman and the aur is quite an unbeatable combo that I prefer to having everything managed by nix. The problem with nix and nixos I see for one is that it leaves some performance on the table for reproducibility and that many packages are or cannot be packaged for nix. Additionally arch already is quite reproducible albeit not as much as nixos. Writing your own meta package with a simple pkgbuild to manage the system base seemed like a good substitute for me.

PainInTheAES , (edited )

There’s an immutable Arch project out there called AstOS

astrsk ,
@astrsk@artemis.camp avatar

The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more experience you have with Linux, the less you rely on preconfigured distributions. Find a stable minimal install and build up your own set of base packages, DE, configs, etc.

Only you know your habits and needs and experience is how you narrow down the field.

For me personally, I have found my groove in a minimal Debian install with a first run setup script or two that is repeatable and automatable so I can start with a known quantity for any applicable need I have.

Fredol ,

just install tumbleweed and never distrohop ever again

giacomo ,

Switch to debian and go outside

dream_weasel ,

Plain old minimal arch to start is a great solution that’s not too painful to manage IMO. That is where I landed after not wanting to figure out how to make full compiles palatable.

kixik ,

Guix !

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