During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
NixOS. Not in a good way. I love the idea of configuring your entire system with a configuration file. However, on my laptop I couldn’t get the KDE live boot image to boot into the GUI. So, I tried the gnome live image, successfully, and used it to install KDE. I thought that I was in the clear but then sddm wasn’t working. I had to disable it to get nixos to boot into KDE.
I mean, I fixed it. But, with an intel APU from 2014, I haven’t had any problems with this laptop running Arch, Debian, Linux mint, or Fedora.
I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.
The lang is just rough for me for some reason. I use it as glorified pigs.txt atm instead of my single source of truth for my system.
I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.
Go is a simple and elegant imperative language (that does come with its downsides); Nix the DSL is a functional language which requires a different way of thinking. Systems usually are operated imperatively, so it’s normal that you’d find it easier.
It’s not an easy language at all and once night ask if another one wouldn’t do the job better, which is what Guix System kind of explores, but its design goals make a lot of sense.
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.
LFS: Not being so complicated actually. Arch: That a fully fletched OS install can be done in less than 10 minutes.
LFS isn’t a distro.
Then let’s call my install 30p87OS, that was made from scratch. Now it’s a distro.
Deal. :D Edit: Congratz BTW, that’s a huge feat to create own distribution from LFS. My hats off!
Isn’t maintaining LFS a pain for the long run?
It is. Especially when you need the night to compile FF and it constantly fails. But I learned a lot.
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
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.
Bending the question a little but my second “first impression” of Arch’s “simplicity” surprised me the most.
I was running Gentoo for a while before deciding to move back, and I was surprised that somehow I had
- saved space
- gotten faster at doing new things (…)
- didn’t lose any boot speed or anything like that
Granted, I had jumped on Gentoo because of misconceptions (speed, ricing, the idea that I needed USE flags), but going back, I saw things more clearly:
- the AUR being basically a shell script download + 300 MB of base-devel was simpler and more space-efficient than /var/db/repos (IIRC – since the portage and guru ebuilds were all held locally anyway after syncing, an on-demand AUR saved space).
- the simple automatic build file audits on Arch felt more clean to me. I like checking my build files; had to make a script for the guru ebuild equivalent (but maybe there’s a portage arg i missed somewhere – wouldn’t be the first time)
- Arch repos separating parts of packages in case you don’t need some part (like splitting some font into its languages, or splitting a package into x and x-doc and x-perl) was almost a simple USE flag-ish thing already
- /etc/makepkg.conf was Gentoo’s make.conf. And its build flags looked similar to the CFLAGS I manually set up anyway.
- My boot time (btrfs inside LUKS with encrypted /boot) was the same with systemd vs. openrc
- I realized I liked systemd (because of the completeness of my systemctl muscle memory, like with
systemctl statusandjournalctl, or managingsystemd-logindinstead of usingseatdand friends).
Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it’s when I realized why Arch was “simple.” Even me sorely missing
/etc/portage/patcheswas quelled byparu -S <pkg> --fm vim --savechanges.And Arch traveling at the speed of simplicity even quantifiably helped: Had to download
aur/teamsthe other day with nine-minute warning.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just wish more distros made their terminal prompt and updater look as good as Gentoo’s, it’s weirdly the one thing I miss most about messing around with it
Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it’s when I realized why Arch was “simple.”
That’s funny. I switched from Slackware to Gentoo in 2003 because it was simpler.
Yeah, it’s pretty funny how distros just passed each other by like that. Back then it was Debian that was regarded as the hyper-poweruser distro:
The reason I havn’t used Debian is because I can’t install it. “This guy is totally clueless” you might think. My only response is that I’m writing this on a Gentoo box that I have installed myself.
And then now there are plenty of people reading this thread who liked Windows 7. As time passed, their grade on the ease-of-use of A passed the don’t-get-in-my-way of B, and a load of Windows 10ers jumped ship to Linus & Friends, the last place their Windows 7 selves would have expected to go. Always a reminder that the end of history isn’t now.
NixOS is surprisingly easy to use
voidlinux: gave me much better battery life - I assume because it starts as a minimal system and one adds only the essentials to do the job - compared to the soup-to-nuts distros that pile everything in so that newbies are acccomodated. Of course, the voidlinux approach needs more linux skills - but it’s not that hard and the doco is great.
Also, I love the back to basics runit init system and runsv service runner (I’m old so I like that stuff) and the ultra fast xbps packaging system.
Been curious to try. How is your RAM usage on it? Like that it uses runit. Like my systems to be minimalistic and with little bloat.
Kubuntu.
The prevailing wisdom used to be that if somebody is tired of Windows and wants to switch you would send them to Ubuntu. Having used Ubuntu and Debian and Mint and Pop! OS and CentOS and Red Hat and Fedora and Kubuntu, Kubuntu with the new KDE plasma desktop seems to be the most Windows like while still retaining the Linux flavor OS that I have used so far.
Ubuntu by comparison is slow and convoluted and those are huge turn offs for neophyte Linux users who want to get away from Windows.
I think KDE is doing the heavy lifting of being like Windows. As a long time Windows user who would every now and then try Ubuntu and hate it, it was Gnome that really turned me off. KDE is so much nicer, IMO.
I’d argue it’s the other way around. Windows is doing the heavy lifting of being like KDE and when they try to do something themselves everybody hates it.
I agree. It’s not that I expect Linux to be like windows. It’s not and that’s a good thing. I’m just thinking for when I encounter people and they ask me, “Hey, I was thinking about trying a Linux. What should I do? Which one should I pick?”
I’m going to recommend Kubuntu.
Just switched over to EndeavourOS & it’s been great
Spiral Linux. It’s like Endeavor, but it sets up Debian with sane defaults for people who want a GUI installer experience.
I liked that it basically felt like any other distro, but it was surprisingly fast to boot and shutdown.
Void.
It all started by curiosity: “let’s try this no-where distros for the lulz”
Then it ended up to be the distro I am using everywhere.
It’s stable and quite on the “bleeding edge” in term of software versions…
And damn it’s fast son!
Fedora Atomic/Kinoite, just so relieved when one day I fucked the bootloader, and it didn’t boot anymore, and I only needed to rollback in grub to a perfectly working system
You were able to get to the bootloader with a fucked up bootloader?
Maybe i “fucked the bootloader config” should be better, and with fedora unified kernel support, you can rollback using the UEFI entry so even a fucked bootloader wouldn’t stop you
Steam OS 3 from Steam Deck. It’s based on Archlinux, but system is write protected by default. And the Gaming mode is surprisingly good. And that the Desktop mode is just Arch+KDE.
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.
