I’ve messed around with Linux before, mostly in VMs, but I’m looking to switch over from Windows permanently on my laptop because I think Linux is cool.
Most people in this community talk about pros and cons of this distro or this other distro, but I’d like to hear your opinions based on entirely subjective factors.
I think Arch is neat, I think Ubuntu isn’t as neat, why? Who knows. Tell me about how you chose a specific distro because you thought the name was cool or because it ships with some completely unknown utility no one uses.
NixOS has a cool logo.
There, I said it.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I like it too. And Debian has its own screenshots website, https://screenshots.debian.net/ how neat is that ?
If you want to create a Hannah Montana branded version of ublue kinoite plasma 6, that would be as neat as it gets.
Also there is Cosmic, I am just gonna say
Rust
Okay, you asked, we deliver ;-) I tried OS/2 and BSD, but did stick with Linux (Using Debian and Arch currently).
"No. That’s it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say “OS/2? Hah. I’ve got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.” – Linus Torvalds
Probably wouldn’t’ve thought that when it came out, but I kinda really like OS/2 as a name. Had a very Serial Experiments Lain ring to it.
…Certainly a lot cooler than OSX.
I think what you mean with “neat” is the desktop environment (DE), which hugely defines how a distro looks like.
Most major distros (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) have have the most major ones.Here’s my post about distro choices if you’re interested, since it’s mostly more about DE choice: https://feddit.de/post/9087676
I use Arch because it makes installing almost any software package trivially easy via the AUR and if you run into issues, the wiki is there to help.
opensuse always had a special place in my heart. it was the first “linux” i successfully installed 17 (welp) years ago. with kde desktop, wich became my goto desktop. both are based in germany, which makes it easy for me to support local open source organisations.
my notebook is running tumbleweed for over 2 years now and i had no problem at all.
for the switch, tho, i’d stick to an ubuntu based distro. there are ubuntu tutorials for litterly everything. i guess mint might be a solid choice. the debian edition is also cool. for the moment, you don’t need a rolling release. you’ll install another distro before eol either because you wrecked your current one, or you want to “try something else”.
if possible, have a sepperate disc (at least partition) for your home folder.
and always keep in mind:
no backup, no merci. =]For me it’s just Linux itself that’s cool. I mean, I get the different distros have different opinions and things that make them neat, and that in and of itself is what’s so cool. FWIW I use Ubuntu (server) and desktop.
I currently use pop-os which is an Ubuntu derivative. I use it because it works well, is easy, and it’s smoother than Ubuntu. My second choice would be Kubuntu if I wanted to commit to KDE. My reasons are that I’m doing important business on all my computers and I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot things that don’t work. So I stick to the LTS releases nowadays.
A downside of my approach is that it’s less customizable, not as up to date and slightly constraining.
Over the years I have used a lot of different distributions. I’ve had many success and even more failures.
So many people have strong feelings about their favorite distros. The big differences are about ease of installation and configuration, stability, open source vs. proprietary code, community support and ability to customize. Other than that, they are all basically Linux.
Arch is not for the faint of heart but it is awesome if you can get it installed. And they have a great support community. There are a lot of Arch variants that are easier to install.
I’m on Pop too, mainly looking forward to Cosmic because… It’s got a cool name. The actual features are gravy to me
I used Fedora on my laptop for like 4 years. It came with gnome, and was very stable. I didn’t know a lot about Linux at the time, but it treated me well.
Eventually, I was learning graphics and the mesa drivers in fedora’s repos were lacking specific OGL support I wanted to try out. I tried installing mesa from source, but it didn’t go very smoothly.
This is when I learned about arch’s rolling release model. I ran antergos for a while, then manjaro, and now endeavor, and more recently I’ve heard arch has a fancy installer wizard so I might just do that next.
I would still recommend Fedora (or Mint) as someone’s first go at Linux. I don’t think you need to try arch until you know why you’re using it.
If you are on endeavour, I don’t think there’s much point jumping to plain Arch if you are all setup and comfortable. I say this as a pure Arch user 😛 Not much will change for you, you’ll just be pissing away a day to setup everything you’ve already setup on endeavour again.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be for no reason, I still have a desktop on Manjaro that I’ve been meaning to swap to endeavorOS. But I pretty much just use arch flavors rather than arch because they’re quicker to install lol.
Fedora just documents itself incredibly well, plus all the pushes they’re doing with immutable distributions and somehow making it seem simple is a wonderful thing.
I have a tendency to use “DIY” systems, basically systems that leave the administration up to me, and either have a minimal base or a customizable, powerful but convenient installer. Then comes the package manager’s strengths and weaknesses, and the package repository and its release cycles.
My favorite OSes of all are:
- NixOS
- FreeBSD
- Arch/Endeavour
- Debian
- To some extend Alpine
I never used Gentoo so I don’t classify it, but i believe I would like it a lot if I used it.
And yeah, I have a logo bias lmao. NixOS, FreeBSD and Debian have amazing logos. Something that is neat is when a distro has multiple kernel versions in the repository.
I usually don’t order my distros on the rocks, so they’re all neat.
Tell me about how you chose a specific distro because you thought the name was cool or because it ships with some completely unknown utility no one uses.
Alpine Linux: musl, minimal, fast
OpenBSD: correctness, simplicity, easy to use
I made the switch a few days ago. At the moment I’m running a dual boot setup as unfortunately I can’t completely drop Windows for work sessions. I settled on Linux Mint as I couldn’t get Nobara (a fedora fork or sth) to run stable.
I have no experience with Linux (except for owning a steam deck and using live CDs some years ago), so I was looking for sth simple and able to run games.
I’ve been doing more tweaking than I thought but that’s mainly due to my hardware, e.g. getting the stream deck and the rodecaster to run. I’ve learned a bunch of stuff while tinkering with all of this and I can recommend Linux Mint due to its ease of use and very large community where someone probably had your exact problem before and even documented it in some way.
Can’t say much about other distros but I don’t think I’ll switch to another any time soon.
