Help me choose a distro, please!

tal, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Help me choose a distro, please!

This is asking for trouble.

“Gentlemen, I am new to the country, and I was hoping that you could help me choose a political party.”

“I’m looking for a good text editor. What’s the best text editor to use?”

“I’ve heard that various religions have a lot of things going for them. Which religion do you suggest I join?”

Aside from very specialized distros (like, you probably don’t want Alpine Linux) most distros will work fine for what you want.

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel.

Firefox will run on everything. You can definitely take notes on anything, and there are tons of options. LibreOffice will be available for everything.

Steam,

Steam ships with its own set of libraries based on Ubuntu, and stuff targeting Steam will normally use them. It should be pretty distro-agnostic.

Discord

They apparently have a Linux app, which I’ve never used. The website should work fine anywhere. They have a “deb” or “tar.gz” and don’t specify any target distro for either. The deb probably is for Ubuntu, just because it’s the most-widely-used desktop distro that uses Debian packages, but I imagine that you’ve got good odds of it working on whatever. If you want to check, you could just throw a distro on a VM.

I don’t want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Everything outside of really specialized, oddball distros has package management.

All the major distros that I’ve used have options to do various forms of a stripped-down install. If you want to install a distro without anything graphical at all, you probably can.

You do have a differing release cycle; I’d probably tend towards a shorter one for desktop use. If you were setting up a ci server that you want minimal interaction with, you probably don’t care much about having newer software. But, again, distros tend to have at least options for a LTS release that just gets security updates, even if they have a pretty-frequent set of updates, like Ubuntu.

There aren’t going to be particularly “unstable” distros in the sense of crashing. Debian stable is aimed at being software that’s passed through multiple phases of experimental testing use and is considered well-tested; it’s just their normal distro. There’s no pixie dust that makes some distros less-crash-prone. If you’re really determined to have more testing, you can use an LTS release, which many distros do but I would not advise for a desktop, especially if you’re planning on playing commercial games, which you say you are.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

You can get open-source software on any distro. Debian is a bit more aggressive than some, turns off non-free repositories by default, but I think that most people turn them on anyway. They also have a separate non-free firmware repository, and I think that most people aren’t determined enough to refuse to use non-libre firmware for hardware that they have (though they might choose that hardware with libre firmware in mind). I don’t think that there’s any distro that is going to ram non-open-source stuff down your throat. Honestly, your largest source of non-open-source software is probably going to be Steam, which you said that you want to use.

I use Debian myself these days. I’m hesitant to argue in favor of distros, because my own take is that the differences (a) tend to change over time, (b) most work pretty well regardless, and (c) I think that few people have actually spent enough time on many other distros to be able to have expert knowledge in their failings (which is something that I’ve seen in vi-vs-emacs discussions, where I’ve seen enthusiasts often talk about amazing features while unaware that the other editor can also do the same thing; it takes decades to master either).

If I were picking a “first distro” for someone for desktop use, and disregarding your specific situation, my default is probably Ubuntu. I don’t use it myself these days, but it’s particularly-widely-used. It has a short release cycle on the non-LTS version (I know that you said you wanted low maintenance, but I’ve pretty consistently found that one winds up wanting to pull in newer software for desktop systems). It’s Debian-based. If one distro gets targeted by a proprietary software package (which I know you also said that you don’t care about) it’s probably going to be Ubuntu. Aside from past use of Upstart as an init system, it isn’t especially unusual. It doesn’t require some of the poking around (like enabling non-free repos) that Debian does. It may or may not be where someone wants to be long term, but it’s not going to bring a lot of complications. But it’s really not going to be drastically better than the other mainstream distros.

Whether that is what one chooses or not, I’d stick to one of the more mainstream distros for a first-time user. There are legitimate reasons to use oddball, young, and specialized distros (tiny, security-hardened, real-time oriented, scientific-computing oriented, music-production oriented) but many of them die out after a couple years or impose constraints that aren’t immediately apparent to a new user.

I’d suggest something that’s been around for at least ten, preferably fifteen years. A distro that’s accomplished that has enough of a track record that they aren’t just going to be a flash in the pan; they’ve been able to attract and maintain enough effort to keep up an ongoing release cycle, which is not easy and I think is often more effort than would-be distro maintainers realize. Most distros that have come out since I started using Linux in the 1990s have died off. If yours gets discontinued, then you gotta migrate off it, which is a pain. But again, if you choose something new and it never sees another release, migrating off it isn’t that bad. You’re gonna maybe have to learn a new package manager and some new ways of configuring things and new conventions, but most distros don’t vary that incredibly much.

Lodra, 8 months ago

If it wasn’t already known, I currently have no real opinions on various distros. But within a day or so, there will be one correct answer and all other distros will be simply evil! :)

Lodra, 8 months ago

Well this is much more commentary than my post deserved :)

Thanks for all the input! If only I could give more than one upvote. Much appreciated!

ultra, 7 months ago

Alpine feels surprisingly normal, actually

glasgitarrewelt, 8 months ago

I like the video by Chris Titus Tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyADkmRVe0U

He puts about 40 Distros into a tier list and I completly agree with him. Spoiler:

Supreme: Debian, Arch

Amazing for new users: Kubuntu, Mint, Zorin, Nobara

Devil: RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS

But it is a nice short introduction to the goal of each distro.

samsy, 8 months ago

What makes fedora to the devil?

glasgitarrewelt, 8 months ago

I think it is summarized by “because it is backed by a big company”, like Ubuntu. Compared to Debian or Arch, which are community based distros, many people think (me included) that it is a bad thing, that one company has so much control over one distro. They tend to make decisions that benefit them, not the user.

samsy, 8 months ago

In theory that’s correct. But if you look at the list of progressive changes and contribution. RHEL created a lot of common standards. And we don’t talk about stuff like snap here, we talk about systemd, pipewire etc.

glasgitarrewelt, 8 months ago

You are right of course, the advantages of big money and great engineers are obviously there. But using a system means also supporting the system and I want to support the debian devs more than Redhat. And it has no downside, Debian is awesome.

Common standards can be devolped by big companys, they also can be developed by communities. GNU utils and the Linux kernel came out of a community. I like this way much more. And if companies decide to back those projects, it is fine by me. As long as they don’t overtake the project and become too dominant.

samsy, 8 months ago

Don’t get me wrong I support Debian, too. I decide to use it at work and we have actually more than 40 systems running on Debian.

Fedora is mostly my choose for client desktop. And I prefer to advice new people to it, just because installing fedora is easier than Debian.

glasgitarrewelt, 8 months ago

I understand Fedora user completely, it is a great distro and great for beginner. But so is Mint, especially now that there is a Debian based version. So for me it comes down to the question, who do I want to support, RedHat or the community? So I go with Mint most of the time. But no hate for Fedora or Fedora-recommendations.

pascal, 8 months ago

“highly configurable” and “very little effort to start using” don’t blend together in car mechanics, and they don’t in Linux either.

I was going to suggest Gentoo or Arch because they’re the standard for “highly configurable” but they really demand some effort to start using them.

Also, so far, only Debian really, really, cares about open source, most distros don’t mind copyrighted video codecs or proprietary GPU drivers if they make the user’s life easier.

worsedoughnut, 8 months ago

“highly configurable” and “very little effort to start using” don’t blend together […] Arch because they’re the standard for “highly configurable” but they really demand some effort to start using them.

Then they should just use Endeavour, it’s literally just arch with some nice QOL packages to start.

pascal, 8 months ago

Endeavour

Oh, nice choice!

supert, 8 months ago

Void fits the bill. Debian if you don’t want rolling.

LoveSausage, 8 months ago

Peppermint , Debian based , important stuff there but still slim , shit just works

Wrongleverkrunk, 8 months ago

Pop os or mint

hiddengoat, 8 months ago

Fucking any of them. Seriously. It doesn't really matter. Eventually you'll come to the realization that until you're talking about oddball shit designed for one douchebag's personal proclivities it's all the same shit under the hood. They just have fourteen incompatible package managers because, again, douchebag personal proclivities.

Noctechnical, 8 months ago

True, honestly, I have used a lot of Linux distros in the past 3 years and landed in Debian after realizing that many things done on others, can be done on anyone of them.

Jumuta, 8 months ago

but just don’t choose Manjaro

Discover5164, 8 months ago

already chose it a couple years ago… i will replace it with endeavour soner or later, maybe later because i’m lazy

snowcatridge10, 8 months ago

Linux Mint

possiblylinux127, 8 months ago

Linux mint

Astaroth, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I would recommend Arch and derivatives (supposedly EndeavourOS is Arch but better for beginners, I’ve never used it though) or NixOS, they’re highly configurable & have good package managers.

I would not recommend debian or it’s derivatives because apt package manager is way worse than pacman.

Also while Arch is a rolling release OS, it’s not really unstable, it’s not like it constantly breaks with updates.

I’ve used Linux Mint a bit at a relative’s house so they can have an easier & more “stable” GUI experience, but there weren’t all the packages I needed on the GUI software manager, and even some packages that existed didn’t want to install until I used the terminal anyway.

And as I mentioned earlier apt is just a worse package manager than pacman so it’s a pain to use.

Especially since I was using plain Bash without good tab completion unlike Fish or Zsh, which makes the much longer apt commands that much more annoying to type in compared to just -Syu -S -Ss -Qs -Rns.

And it’s not just that the commands and package names are better and shorter on pacman compared to apt, but there’s more packages (and I’m not even counting AUR).

For example, on Linux Mint I were going to install wine-mono and wine-gecko, which you’re going to want if you plan to play windows games outside steam proton, but they didn’t exist and I had to follow the wiki.winehq.org/Mono and wiki.winehq.org/Gecko installation guides instead of just downloading 2 binaries through pacman.

And tbh I eventually gave up on wine-mono and just got the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

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If you’re really supper worried and paranoid then instead of Arch you can use NixOS, it’s whole shtick is that you can have multiple versions and always roll back to before anything broke.

yum13241, 8 months ago

Most based post here.

ultrasquid, 8 months ago

As others are saying, Debian is nice and stable. Its also pretty barebones, which gives you a lot of control. However, it uses older packages, meaning you’ll need to rely on flatpaks to get new features.

If you’re willing to lose a bit of stability in exchange for newer features and more control, you may also want to look into arch or endeavorOS. Arch uses a command-line installation whereas endeavor uses a graphical installer, but otherwise they’re pretty similar.

hemko, 8 months ago

Your post screams of Debian.

qwool, 8 months ago

I’d say mint or debian, and NixOS is neat if you’re willing to spend weeks on it. It allows you to make reproducible and declarative systems as well as declaring sets of packages for the current thing you have to do

Ayhem, 8 months ago

Opensuse tumblweed

JoeyJoeJoeJr, 8 months ago

When you install, whatever you install, partition your drive so that /home is it’s own partition. Then if/when you reinstall, distrohop, whatever, you don’t have to worry about copying over your data. Just use the same /home partition, and format the others. You can actually use this to try multiple distros at the same time - you can install them in different partitions, but have every install use the same /home partition. This is a nice way to test new distros without blowing away your stable install.

Now, for my distro recommendation - Ubuntu gets a lot of hate, but honestly, after 15+ years of Linux, and having tried Mint, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and many others, I always end up back on Ubuntu. It’s easy, it’s stable, and it stays out of my way.

The defaults are good, but you can customize as much as you want, and they offer a minimal install (as of 23.10, it is the default) which comes with very few applications, so you can start clean and choose all the applications you want.

Unless you are excited to tinker, I’d really recommend starting simple. Personality, I just want the OS to facilitate my other activities, and I otherwise want to forget about it. Ubuntu is pretty good for that.

Lodra, 8 months ago

Ooohhhh I like that idea for testing! Thanks for the tip and the recommendation!

chris, 8 months ago

I used to do this when on Windows too: C was for the OS and apps, D was for user data. The same principle here - separating OS from data is a game changer - and even easier on Linux I think. Makes it so easy to wipe a partition and try something new.

MonkCanatella, 8 months ago

When you share your /home, won’t you have to be pretty mindful/retest stuff just to make sure there’s no compatibility issues?

JoeyJoeJoeJr, 8 months ago

You mean with config files stored in your home directory? Or something else?

MonkCanatella, 8 months ago

Right, I’d have to check to make sure there’s no incompatibility among versions or installed programs wouldn’t I? idk maybe it’s not that complex

JoeyJoeJoeJr, 8 months ago

It’s possible to hit issues, especially if different distros are using different major versions of desktop environments or applications, but in practice, I don’t think it’s something that really needs to be worried about.

If you were to upgrade/fresh install, and copy your home folder over, you’d have the same experience - it’s not much safer than sharing the home partition, except that you’re (hopefully) doing that less. You could still easily go from distro A using version 2 of something, to distro B using version 3, and then decide you don’t like it and try to roll back to distro A. If in the process your config was upgraded in place (as opposed to a new, versioned config being made*), you could have problems rolling back.

With configs, you can usually just delete them (or, less destructively, rename them, in case you decide you want them back), and let the application make a new default one for you. With other files (e.g. databases), you might be in more trouble. But a good application will tell you before doing an upgrade like that, and give you a chance to backup the original before upgrading in place. When asked, it’s probably a good idea to take a backup (and not just for this distro hoping case).

*For any developers reading this, this is the correct way to upgrade a config. Don’t be destructive. Don’t upgrade in place. Make a copy, upgrade the copy, and include a version in the file name. You can always tell the user, so they can remove the file if they want, but let them make the choice. If you can’t (e.g. the database scenario, which could be large), tell the user before doing anything, so they can choose whether or not to backup.