During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 - 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
openSUSE Tumbleweed, it’s jusr a solid distro altogether
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’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.
I know SUSE’s been around since forever, but how is package availability?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many have surprised me for different reasons.
The most recent that did is Alpine. I decided for some reason to install it for regular desktop use on an RPI400.
First surprise, the ISO was so small. Second surprise, everything installed so fast when I used the install scripts. Third surprise was the up-to-date repos. The final surprise was the community: it handled noob questions and complicated questions so we’ll, walked users through click by click and one command at a time. Awesome and totally an acceptable option for a desktop which is why I immediately installed it on my main laptop and used it for a number of months.
+1 for Alpine. I had my reservations due to their mistrust for glibc which rattled my GNU sensibilities, but musl is rock steady and all my apps feel stable and hackable.
Void. Boots in 2 seconds to Xfce if not for udev. Maybe i’ll try mdev.
