If you had to pick one distro to use for the next five years, what would it be? Bleeding edge / stable? Rolling / periodic?
What would you prioritise and why?
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idk bro I’ve been running the same arch install for the last 6 years and I will run it for the next 5 as well.
I’m a newbie, just put Mint on an old laptop and I’m blown away; it really does just work!
I have been thinking about trying Arch next because it’s so well documented. I don’t know maybe put together a little home server or something.
Do you think it’s appropriate for a relative newcomer? I’m excited by the documentation but also a little intimidated by it! I suspect I’ll need to ask for help but would worry about not having read everything there is to read first.
Arch was definitely tricky to get right for me at yhe beginning.
You often have a choise between multiple similar tools for each job and you only know the pros and cons or what works and what doesn’t after trying.
I did 3-4 fresh installs before getting it right for my needs and hardware. (for example, btrfs with buttermanager requires a completely different fs layout than btrfs with snapper, I picked buttermanager first, didn’t like it after 2 weeks and had to do a fresh install)
For that it’s handy to have a good backup of your important data, ideally outside of your pc, just so there is no risk of fucking it up somehow.
I definitely recommend using btrfs and using it’s snapsotting feature through snapper or timeshift or something else, again, multiple tools for the same job, different pros and cons.
That way you can roll back after fucking something up. But make sure to try it out a couple of times before the case comes where you have to rely on it, so you’re sure that it does work and you know how to properly do it.
I prefer arch cause I was able to customize it more and I love the up to date packages and the AUR. But there is some additional maintenance you have to do like once or twice a year and you have to pay attention to news for manual interventions when there is a breaking update. So it is way more involved than other distros. Yet it has been rock solid for me and should be very reliable once you know your way around.
But tbh. as long as you are completely happy with mint, there is no reason to change anything.
I am very happy with mint. I can imagine making arch more of a project and having a lot of fun with it, and as I said, the wiki really seems like a big draw! I probably wouldn’t swap my daily driver from mint for a while, but I’m gonna put together a desktop to maybe run 24/7 and run a little plex server or whatever. I am interested in the possibility of even running it headless…maybe even streaming games from it to a laptop (I don’t have a very good space for a desktop set up in my home right now…too snug!).
Anyway thanks for your thoughts. Arch does seem really cool but maybe I should stick with something a bit more beginner friendly for a little longer, and come to arch when I’m more “ready,” or when my new little obsession with linux has solidified into a habit or whatever!
e: anyone have experience with manjaro as a user-friendly version of arch?
manjaro is no good. It breaks more often than arch and then you still need the whole arch knowledge to fix it.
EndevourOS or CachyOS are somewhat better options.
Yeah i heard that after posting this! I’ve also heard that archinstall is pretty user-friendly, really! Do you have any thoughts about that?
I remember you saying it might be easier to stick with Mint, which may very well be what i do!
Thanks for the reply
NixOS. I came a long way and it combines the best of modular, customizable and immutable.
Depends on what I’m doing.
Workstation or server will be Debian. Personal devices are either Debian or Arch.
I’d prioritize Debian if I could only pick one for all options.
Don’t forget debian on phones (mobian), debian on embedded devices (armbian or even pure debian), debian on gaming machines and debian on vms running on debian hosts
If I had to limit myself to one distro for all tasks, can’t go wrong with Debian.
I once waited a whole year for debian to ship the next version to get an update for an app that had a bug, that was already fixed upstream.
Every day I would open the app and experience the bug.
Anger, frustration, shaking the mouse.
Every.
Fucking.
Day.
I asked myself this exact question back in 2020 and chose Arch. At the time I had been using Fedora since 2017. What I ultimately wanted was a system I could install once and continually evolve rather than replace. Several years on, I’m still running that same installation and it has never given me a reason to reconsider…
For a headless server: Ubuntu. Solid, reliable and stable for many years.
For gaming: Pop OS looks promising now that cosmic has been released, however I’d probably stick with Fedora as it’s leading edge and has served me well so far.
debian is better for a headless server in my experience, it has less issues than ubuntu server on bare metal
No Tumbleweed fans? :/
They (openSUSE) make a lot of default decisions for you, but it’s really close to 0 maintenance if you lack the time (or just cannot even for months at a time) & still a rolling release, zypper, etc.
(°▽°)/
Been using Debian stable since Hans reiser got locked up.
It’s fine and it will continue to be fine.
I’ve been daily driving Debian Stable for the past 5 years and I am more than happy to continue for the next five. It’s also on nearly all of my machines and the majority of my VMs.
I’m honestly not very keen on the latest features or hardware, but I am very keen on my software being predictable and consistent, so the Debian release cycle is perfect for me.
Arch. Been 13 years on it. Aur and Wiki are the best resources any Linux distro have.
Debian is kind of too big to fail. Maybe NixOS if you want something that will almost certainly gain popularity in the future.
Don’t think though that distros are the layer which you want to look at. Lots of stuff happens at the level of DEs, drivers and individual apps, which sure is preconditioned by the distro you choose but at the same time not that strict of a thing. You can get anything working provided you have the time.
x11 is still in its last round before retirement it seems, using Wayland is going to future proof what you’ve got majorly.
My 2c. Feel free to critique.
I would go with (semi)rolling, either openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll or Fedora. I prioritize fast updating distros because they are better for security (many vulnerabilities go unnoticed because the full scope isnt understood and they are deemed normal bugs), and (unlike Windows) updates on Linux are a good thing, bring new features, crash/bug fixes, and optimizations.
Fedora is very popular, has wide software support, and is very stable. openSUSE is also still pretty popular, (even its rolling edition) is quite stable as well, has good software support, and YaST allows you to do graphical administration on your system. Both take security seriously and use SELinux for security policies.
If you care about security, use Brace for automatic system hardening. It has been developed for years by the former DivestOS dev Tavi, supporting many distros.
Well, I’ve been using Ubuntu for the last 20 years (god, it hurts to say that) and only started playing with NixOS, 3 years ago.
Between the two I like NixOS better, but if I had to choose only one it would probably be Ubuntu. When things break, I know how to fix it. Usually without having to spend 2 hours of reading and trying to understand the documentation.
The one I’ve been using for the last 17 years, Gentoo
If I had to pick one, Arch. I already use it a lot, so it’s familiar. I know my way around the package manager and how to create packages, so even when things aren’t available for Arch out of the box, I can make it work.
It’d be kind of a hassle trying to keep anywhere close to 100% server uptime, but for my own personal stuff that shouldn’t be that big of an issue, as I can fix it when I have the time.
For desktop, I basically can’t do stable release. I frequently mess with new projects requiring the latest versions of everything, which is a near impossible task on stable-release distros.
