This is seriously a hot take
Debian since 1998. No reason to change.
that should be their mission statement.
Use Debian. No good reason to change.
Mint because the name is fun
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Ubuntu sucks
You choose the worst option
It’s not that bad but I feel like fedora’s probably a better option
I consider myself to be ‘techie’ for lack of a better word. I have custom janky solutions for everything. I have in the past written down a blue screen and troubleshooted it to give the IT team notes… Hell, I used to be the guy IT would call if they received a ticket from my office (anyone in my office) because I could give them more details and such… So, I like computers and shit, right?
And holy fuck I don’t get the Linux world. I used Mint back in '13ish and it was fine but in a different place back then. I use Pop_OS! on my laptop and I like it just fine. I use Ubuntu on my secondary computer and I like it just fine. I don’t get what I’m supposed to prefer about all these different distros/environments. I can’t wrap my head around it. Do y’all change OSes that often? Am I missing out on something? Am I wrong or are y’all the kids who are wrong?
I feel like a lot of it is from new-ish users excited to talk about it and in the process of forming often prematurely strong opinions on this versus that within Linux. After 15 years of daily driving Linux desktop environments i settled on the one that gave me the least fuss and havent given it a second thought since. I suspect there are many with a similar story, but it’s a boring conversation start if people are looking to debate it.
i settled on the one that gave me the least fuss
Debian?
TL;DR: I’m a true Linux noob, and now love and appreciate Linux thanks to openSUSE Tumbleweed. :)
In all seriousness, as a Linux noob, openSUSE Tumbleweed made me actually start to really enjoy using Linux as my main OS. I’ve fucked up plenty of times, and at that point I would’ve had to reinstall most other distros, but Snapper came in and saved the day. I’m sure there are plenty of other distros that do snapshots just as well, but this is coming from someone who last tried running Linux 5-6 years ago, and was still fucking my shit up somehow. I’ve never had the best of luck with Linux, which is why I always stayed on Windows.
Then came Microsoft’s ever increasing enshittification, and I saw openSUSE Tumbleweed on the distrowatch website, downloaded it, and here we are 8 months later, and openSUSE has remained my main OS. I only got a desktop for gaming, and it fit the bill almost perfectly. I had to learn some things, that’s for sure, but what got me to stay was the stability! I had never used a Linux distro up until that point that made BTRFS and system snapshots the default. This was crucial for someone like me who only dabbled in Linux because I love the idea behind it, I could just never get too far into using it before fucking my shit up!
There are plenty of options that are similar, or maybe even better than openSUSE, but they won my interest and respect for getting a noob like me to truly envelope themselves into Linux.
I’m still nowhere near anything that might resemble your common Linux user, but damn do I really love my computer again now. It’s like when I was kid again, and first started using computers, fascinated by what I could do.
This is crazy. You shouldn’t use Ubuntu for anything desktop related. There’s nothing vanilla about vanilla Ubuntu.
(Custom Gnome extensions, patches on top of Gnome, custom sandbox packages that don’t always work, custom apt that refuses to install the real packages in place of snaps, paywalled security patches, should I keep going?)
Except I have no trouble replacing snaps. I only replace them when there is a need. I always add gnome extensions to mine. I like a little extra and I get it easily with ubuntu. If you are a individual user you can get the ESM updates for free and I do.
When one of the other distros demonstrates anything that I cant get with ubuntu I will move on. Until then I’ll keep using it because it keeps working.
When one of the other distros demonstrates anything that I cant get with ubuntu I will move on. Until then I’ll keep using it because it keeps working.
You can’t get vanilla Gnome on Ubuntu. There are tons of other distros that will give you vanilla Gnome (they don’t put any of their own patches on top of Gnome).
But I think you were pretty clear that you don’t want vanilla Gnome, so if Ubuntu’s working for you, more power to you. I just wouldn’t recommend it to anyone new to Linux.
I don’t like vanilla gnome. Like I said the first thing I do with any debian installation I work on is install extensions.
Extensions are one thing. Even if a distro comes with some Gnome extensions, you can just disable them. Ubuntu puts custom patches on the Gnome packages they ship. Those can’t be disabled, and they could potentially interfere with extensions that don’t expect them to be there. That’s my problem with Ubuntu’s approach to Gnome.
I understand that you don’t like vanilla Gnome, but I still wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu to anyone, especially noobs, as a desktop OS, because of the myriad issues with Canonical’s approach to modifying the source of the packages they ship.
It’s the same reason if anyone reports a bug to any of my software, and they say it happens on Ubuntu, I’ll disregard it unless they can replicate it on an OS that doesn’t patch their packages that way. Canonical is responsible for fixing the bugs their patches cause, and they’ve added tons of extra triage work to devs who have to determine whether Canonical fucked something up or there’s actually an issue with their code.
I totally get you don’t like it but once again you are not giving me any reason why what you prefer is somehow better.
Kubuntu LTS (
--minimal-install; nosnapfuckery from the start) has been wonderful.You could also just use Fedora KDE
Using pop OS for 5 years. Never tried any other, never seen the need to. I picked at mostly random and don’t really understand the differences.
I went Ubuntu > Mint > Ubuntu > Pop_os. The only difference I’ve noticed is Pop breaks less often.
That is the thing of it. I started with Slackware. Then Debian and moved to ubuntu. I’m still using ubuntu. I’ve loaded up some other distros but they bring nothing definitive to the table. I’ve installed pop os and it works. If it had existed when I moved away from slackware I might have picked it. If you are using it and its working for you why bother changing.
I used Mint for a good long while, but went to Fedora KDE for better Wayland support. KDE is quite different to Cinnamon, not sure I have the words to articulate how. It’s fussier. The main difference about Fedora is package management, DNF is slower than APT, a lot less software is packaged as RPMs, and a lot of “we don’t package it, you have to compile it” software offers no instructions for Fedora, and trying to translate the Debian/Ubuntu instructions practically always fails because the library they want you to install isn’t there. So Fedora is Linux with less software.
where’s nixos on the graph?
no one uses nixos for gaming. its mostly ricing and home servers.
Is there any reason not to? I was thinking of using nixos whenever I switch to linux on my desktop just for the sake of ‘doing it properly’. I’ve mostly used archinstall before (home server and laptop) but it seems fairly breakable because I have no idea exactly what’s doing what.
I have a nixos machine with Steam on it. It works great 🤷♂️
Asking ChatGPT to help them get games running since there’s no worthy wiki 🥲
GPT: “first, I’m gonna need you to drop a
hardware.opengl.enable = true;”Me: “GPT, you fucking slut! They changed the
opengloption tographicsin 23.11!”
Give me a reason to change. It needs to be something real not something perceived.
Fedora on the right tbh. Even when you chill and get wisdom Canonical and Snap are just a bit too far.
Fedoras where it’s at!
I think the whole works part is the most important part, Linux can be janky (and by that I mean obsolete information and deprecated or outdated packages are often recommended and there are a thousand different ways to do anything with only one of them actually working (don’t have an aneurysm)) on the best of days, If something just works you can change what you want later.
This is why I switched to Mint. It just works. It’s broken less than vanilla Ubuntu did. So thats what I use.
Yeah. Generally when I’m using a Linux PC to work on something, I don’t want to be fixing the PC itself too. And we make an embedded Linux product at work, so it’s not like I miss out on the fun, lol.
I use Mint everywhere. It works great. Being easier for newcomers to use and having an extra layer of polish does not restrict my use of the command line or scripting.
Mint users make it sound like the distro will literally suck your dick. It’s a cult at this point. Forums are filled with issues (which is normal obviously) but nope, “it just works”. When it doesn’t then that’s too bad because as easy as it is to find a vocal Mint user it’s much harder to find one who knows anything about Linux.
They should have named Fedora something like “red hat personal” or anything else that doesn’t sound like only smelly neckbeards use it and maybe that would be more popular but here we are.
I believe Fedora was named that before the association with neckbeards was a thing. It’s hard to believe, but back before the 2010s fedoras were mostly known as the cool hat Indiana Jones and old timey detectives wear rather than the stupid looking hat slobby idiots trying to look cool wear.
fedora is IBM and I kicked them to the curb for good when they killed centos.
Yeah I have found driver issues with mint (particularly with WiFi cards) where Ubuntu doesn’t have a problem
anything but Ubuntu tbh.
I use gentoo out of elitism and I want the Linux to be taken over by corps so I can move to a real is called freebsd
