During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
The old Pardus, YALI was, and still is, the most awesome installer i’ve ever meet. Also Kaptan was amazing
Manjaro is the only distro I’ve tried whose live image worked flawlessly, out of the box, and did everything I could think of, first try.
Granted this was 5 years ago when I set down to find an alternative to Ubuntu. Maybe today there are more distros that can do that.
At the time I tried all the usual suspects that are supposed to provide a user-friendly, gamer-friendly desktop experience and they all came short — except one.
That sold me. And it was surprising because I didn’t really expect to find such a distro, I was just thinking I will make a list of what doesn’t work out of the box on each, and pick the one with the least stuff. I didn’t expect a distro to have no list.
Antergos (rip). It just worked. None of the weird problems I’ve had with Ubuntu/Debian
Ironically arch, the only issues I have when using it are usually just sound issues, which simply occur before a pipewire update, during one, or right after one. A reboot or two fixes things for me :p I get to enjoy a lightweight system without efforts I’m not willing to put:) (the features I guess are that it breaks a lot less than I expected, and that arch + i3 legit use around 450mb on idle for me ☠️)
Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.
Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.
Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.
Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.
I heard all the stability concerns when I first started using it. That was in 2008. It’s been my main distro ever since. Apart from 2 or 3 major changes over the years (eg, the infamous /usr/lib migration) it’s been rock solid and very up to date
Yeah I feel like even if arch is a little easier to break than other distributions, it’s also way way easier to fix which basically cancels it out.
I second this - for some reasons, my (almost) first distro was arch (first was a fedora for 3-4 days). Arch is great if you know what you are doing, you can have a lean mean compute machine
Puppy linux seems like its still one of the more unique Linuxes around. Its my go-to when I need to do a recovery for family/friends and seems to almost work with any system. If it can, it will load its entire system into the RAM and go to town. If it cant. then it will act like a live disk…but you can “save” the OS multiple different places. Its a fun little OS.
I ran Puppy as a daily driver for about a year before I finally got a new hard drive for that computer. It’s surprisingly robust for such a tiny footprint.
If you like Puppy, also have a look at Easyos. Created by Puppy’s orginal creator.
Ha. Was about to say the same. Running EasyOS on one ofy extra partitions for testing, and I end up using it as semi-daily driver often due to how light it is. Great on a USB key, too.
It is also somewhat unique, on top of other Puppy distros.
Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.
Yeah, I tried a variety of Debian based distros to start my Linux journey and but eventually just settled on Debian stable and haven’t looked back.
Alpine It just gives me the system and go “do whatever” It’s snappy, decluttered, doesn’t get in the way It doesn’t have a bazillion systemd components, it’s as barebones as it can be
@AkatsukiLevi @Sunny Alpine’s installer is simplest indeed, and it just works. very similar to OpenBSD
And due to just being a bunch of scripts, if shit goes wrong you just know why it went wrong
OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I’d used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. Also
zypperhas fun arguments, likezypper upTumbleweed surprised me with how it receives constant, up-to-the-minute updates yet somehow doesn’t ever seem to break.
It also surprised me with how much I like KDE. I had used it way back in the day when it was a bit complicated looking and ugly. These days Plasma makes the whole experience nice.
My weapon of choice
Endeavour OS
I’ve tried all the usual distros many times over the years but never an arch based distro until last year. I gave arch a go first and it was great but then tried endeavouros and it came with the fixes I needed and was more instantly good from the first boot. The AUR and arch wiki stuff just makes the whole experience most (sry to use this term) Windows like in terms of fixes and support.
EndeavourOS is the first Linux distro I tried a little over a year ago.
I have never felt the need to even try anything else. If it ain’t broke…
The entire Ublue project is freaking amazing. But Bazzite finished off my distrohopping. I work by day and game by night. Bazzite has eliminated all maintenance tasks for me. It just works. It makes things so damn easy. Also, the Ublue CI/CD builds is crazy cool. It allows them to focus on the important stuff, while all the chores are done automatically. Truly amazing stuff. I also heard lots of praise about the dev oriented spin: Bluefin.
I started on Bazzite as my first real Linux desktop. After a while I rebased to Aurora (Bluefin but KDE instead of Gnome) and I really liked it. I ended up rebasing back to Bazzite for a while.
My only issue is around a very specific piece of software that has issues with Wayland. That’s why all the rebasing.
Being able to rebase so easily like that is so freaking cool.
Which software ?
Any software KVM like Synergy.
I work from home and Synergy has been a core part of my setup for many years.
It lets me use my personal PC and work laptop from one KB+M seamlessly.
I’ve tried so many different things. Input Leap, installed on Aurora by default, is supposed to work with Wayland, but doesn’t work out of the box.
I’m resigned to using Windows during the week so I can use Synergy and switching back to Linux over the weekend because I prefer it now.
Just a suggestion for you to try out https://github.com/feschber/lan-mouse
Update: I love you.
It took a couple tries to get my desktop and laptop connected, and I don’t know why, but it definitely works.
I’m going to really miss clipboard sharing, but I can make do for now.
I don’t think I mentioned it, but my work laptop is Windows 11, so I’m happy to report that this is working great even on Windows.
Are you aware of KDE connect? It can do clipboard sync, and more. Also available on Windows.
I will give that a shot. It definitely looks like it fits the bill.
If it works, I love you.
seconded for bazzite. I just came from cachyos (arch based) because it was missing a wayland component to make vr work. I had bazzite on my steam deck already so I figured I’d give it a shot on my pc. everything I wanna do works with minimal to no tinkering required, and I’m glad to know if I break something I can easily roll back in grub.
I’ve tried bluefin and it felt like when you turn on someone’s old computer they forgot to erase before giving to you, there was just so much useless junk installed. Are the other Ublue distributions a little more normal?
Ublue are based off of Kinoite. If you want something less “bloated”, try that. You can even rebase from Bluefin to that, I believe.
Keep in mind there are two versions of Bluefin/Aurora. Regular, and “-dx” which is more developer focused with more developer tools.
Yeah I know what they’re based on, I use silverblue on my laptop. I just personally really disliked bluefin when I tried it and I was wondering if that’s what all of the ublue images are like
Bazzite is pretty barebones, you add stuff using the first-run utility.
openSUSE Tumbleweed, it’s jusr a solid distro altogether
I’ve run OpenSuSE and then Tumbleweed for a while (as in years, now) on a variety of devices (including nVidia) with no real issues. It’s been by far the most solid of the distributions I’ve used since I started using Linux in the '90s.
Have to agree first time whenever I had to run steam it would cause a memory leak and slow the system down ,now I have reinstalled it two more times first reinstall steam games not working and can’t create extra swap ,second reinstall swap worked great ,but steam games still didn’t and then it was FUCKING 32 BIT PACKAGES took like 3 hours to figure that out ,but now it is my dailydriver
I know SUSE’s been around since forever, but how is package availability?
Void. Boots in 2 seconds to Xfce if not for udev. Maybe i’ll try mdev.
Any distro with KDE, when I was on Windows I thought Linux always looked like Gnome.
Gnome is a harmless though. It’s so benign it’s reliable.
KDE is glossy and featureful and sometimes my CPU fan doesn’t go down for whole hours because baloo is scanning my entire filesystem (including various conda installations) despite me repeatedly asking it not to.
Baloo only takes up a lot of CPU if you have it set to index file contents and hidden files. Shut those off, let it index completely, and it won’t happen ever again.
You might be able to keep “hidden files” on, but indexing file contents always bogged my laptop down.
I think it depends on how you use the OS, Gnome is great until you have a bunch of outdated extensions that break stuff. My impression is that KDE is better for the “advanced” use case and gnome is better for the “default”. I tried gnome recently and I found it very pleasant and easy to use but I prefer KDE since it has more customization.
I installed Pop in a VM (I use Debian usually) and was surprised how usable it was sans-graphical acceleration. Ubuntu is pretty much unusable these days in a VM - it can literally sometimes take 30 seconds for a button press to register where it works instantly in VM Pop or Fedora.
