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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.).

Atemu ,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

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?

I’m a bit biased of course but you sound like you’d enjoy NixOS.

NixOS is immutable but quite a bit more tinkerable than Silverblue. Not quite Arch or Void levels of tinkering but this topic is not as black and white as it may seem.

secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS

Not yet in upstream NixOS but: github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote

systemd (because of MullvadVPN),

Unrelated to evangelising you into NixOS but I’m curious: Why does a VPN proxy software have any hard dependency on a process manager?

chevy9294 OP ,

Why does a VPN proxy software have any hard dependency on a process manager?

Probably because of killswitch. App installs a service that manages internet and vpn access, the app is just a GUI for communicating with that service.

flashgnash ,

Can confirm NixOS is the shit. Can’t imagine myself using anything else

raubarno ,

I’d recommend rather boring Debian. Archlinux as well if you want to dive deeper.

EDIT: For Debian, you want Debian Testing.

GuyNoIRQ ,
@GuyNoIRQ@infosec.pub avatar

Debian is only as boring as you want it to be.

bulwark ,

I installed Debian so I could install Proxmox. Now I have like 10 VMs with every flavor of Linux I could want. Still partial to Arch tho.

MonkderZweite ,

Debian i get the feeling “we do everything for you, don’t question it”, not exactly deep.

humanplayer2 ,
@humanplayer2@lemmy.ml avatar

Vanilla OS 2 Orchid sounds very interesting, I think. It’s in alpha now. Have a read about their package manager - it’s kinda meta, allowing you to use other package managers in parallel.

gunpachi ,

There are a few options. Like many have mentioned, Nix OS is a wonderful distro with it’s own quirks.

If you are looking for something normal, consider Opensuse Tumbleweed and arch linux (or arch based distros like EndavourOS).

hottari ,

The secure boot implementations in Debian and Fedora trust kernel/modules with keys signed by Microsoft. Everything that you listed you want to do, you can do on Arch and with AUR you probably won’t need to compile 99.9% of programs.

knobbysideup ,

I prefer doing useful things with my workstation vs playing with the OS itself, so mint cinnamon is my recommendation. Servers are ansible-managed alma. Professionally I’m a Linux systems architect and devops engineer.

pete_the_cat ,

Linux From Scratch 😉

Klaymore , (edited )
@Klaymore@sh.itjust.works avatar

You want immutable distros but Silverblue wasn’t flexible enough? Why not try NixOS? It’s really nice.

I’ve been using it for two years and I love being able to make changes to my config and having those changes apply to all my computers. It’s also basically unbreakable, if my computer explodes I can just reinstall NixOS with my config files and it will instantly be set up exactly how I want it.

MrPhibb ,
@MrPhibb@reddthat.com avatar

Arch is a good choice, Endeavour was my flavor of choice, but these days I use Linux Mint: Debian Edition, which works mostly fine for me (got one minor piece of software I can’t get for it).

PanaX ,

Seconded LMDE. Super stable, polished, and intuitive.

onelikeandidie ,

Void Linux was my daily driver for around a year and it was fast, really fast, and had a lot of tinkerability. I highly recommend it.

owatnext ,
@owatnext@lemmy.world avatar

Void is lovely, I use it on my computer as my sole OS, but OP requested systemd so that’s a no for Void.

onelikeandidie ,

Oops, you’re right, I read as the opposite!

db2 ,

Since you’re experienced with Linux already try a BSD for something new.

pete_the_cat ,

BSD sadly lacks a fair amount of support for things that Linux does. I gave FreeBSD a try a few years back and it annoyed me, especially coming from Arch. All the packages were so outdated and compiling updated versions from Ports took forever. Also the BSDs are just different enough from Linux to be annoying.

I’m a Linux System Engineer and at my former job we had a few thousand Linux hosts but a handful of Solaris 5 hosts. Shelling into one of those, expecting it to be Linux and then raging when something didn’t work but then realizing it was Solaris and not Linux was always fun.

ferox ,
@ferox@lemmy.ml avatar

Fedora 38

cbarrick ,

I use Arch (btw) because of the ArchWiki, and I’m totally comfortable configuring my system how I like it.

But I do appreciate Debian a lot. You can customize things to almost the same extent, but packages come preconfigured with great defaults and designed to better work together, unlike Arch which uses the upstream defaults almost universally.

al177 ,

Don’t sleep on OpenSuSE. It supports everything you’re looking for and has options for periodic and rolling release.

GlenTheFrog ,
@GlenTheFrog@lemmy.ml avatar

OpenSuse is great except for one (imho) zypper. When I do updates zyper has this huge section which is labeled “will not be upgraded”. For me it’s really distracting and makes reading which packages will be upgraded harder to parse visually at a glance

This is what I mean: superuser.com/…/am-i-using-zypper-correctly#36104…

zelifcam ,
@zelifcam@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

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    Shrexios ,

    @zelifcam @chevy9294 I’ve become a fan. I’m not a coder or anything, and I have been able to navigate its package management easily enough. The manual could be made a bit simpler/clearer, but the system itself is not hard to manage.

    I’ve been meaning to figure out if I can set up the system and then generate a new configuration file based on what I installed using nix-env

    starkzarn ,

    That sort of configuration after the fact would be a fantastic addition, if not already in place.

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