Considering switching away from Fedora and to another distribution. Does anyone have any suggestions for distributions I should consider?

    •  Dandroid   ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) 
      1•1 year ago

      My steam deck uses arch btw, and the main reason I didn’t choose arch for my laptop was because I haven’t had good experience with pacman. But I’ll be honest that I haven’t given it much of a chance, so I’d like to learn more. What is it that you like about pacman?

        •  Dandroid   ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) 
          1•1 year ago

          Well on the steam deck, updates will always fail until I reboot the device then try to update again. I also really don’t like the syntax. It isn’t intuitive, and I can’t memorize it because of that. For example, I’m not sure why -S means install. I remember install because that’s the one I have used the most, but I can’t remember what is equivalent to apt update or apt upgrade, and I’m not sure why they can’t just use those terms. Why do I need to memorize arbitrary letters with captialization?

          •  CAPSLOCKFTW   ( @CAPSLOCKFTW@lemmy.ml ) 
            3•1 year ago

            I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what’s up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.

            Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners, S stands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done by pacman -Syu, where y tells pacman to synchronize the package lists first and u selects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for the S.

            You can easily learn all that by using fish (or zsh with a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enter pacman - and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.

  •  floofloof   ( @floofloof@lemmy.ca ) English
    26•1 year ago

    • Mint, because it works with a minimum of effort.

    • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it’s more up to date than Mint, it’s a rolling distro, it works, and in the rare event of a problem it’s easy to roll back to a snapshot.

  •  dallen   ( @dallen@programming.dev ) 
    15•1 year ago

    Unpopular choice here but Ubuntu LTS with ubuntu-debullshit (vanilla gnome, replace snap with flatpak).

    My main factors:

    • stability of the LTS
    • drivers and HW support
    • tons of resources online
    • already use Ubuntu for servers and Raspian on my Pi

    I’ve had my fun distro hopping in the past but I just want a low maintenance system nowadays.

  •  1984   ( @1984@lemmy.today ) 
    12•1 year ago

    I only use Arch, it’s really stable and easy to fix if something goes wrong thanks to the excellent arch wiki.

    But I recommend PopOS for anyone who just wants something good looking and stable and who doesn’t need the latest packages all the time.

  •  Laser   ( @Laser@feddit.de ) 
    11•1 year ago

    Depends on what you’re looking for.

    I cannot recommend NixOS enough, it’s such a good distribution but on the other hand it’s quite tough to learn as it deviates a lot on how distributions do things. It still uses a standard stack (glibc, systemd, GNU tools and all) but the nix tools which include the package manager are totally different from what other distributions offer. It’s very solid, yet flexible. It offers a lot of packages by default. I’ve switched my machines to it because of the advantages.

    Arch is great as a rolling release distribution with solid repositories (lots of packages and quite up to date) and it’s very close to upstream with a more traditional approach to the distribution tools. In fact there aren’t really any apart from the package manager by default. I feel this is one of the most comfortable distributions if you want to learn how a classic Linux system is structured. I ran Arch for about 15 years and didn’t really have anything to complain about and I learned more about Linux there than with Ubuntu and Debian.

    Please note that neither of these are what one would consider beginner-friendly distributions.

  •  dark_stang   ( @dark_stang@beehaw.org ) 
    11•1 year ago

    Pop_os for my laptop and desktop. I use these machines for dev work and gaming. I want to spend as little time as possible doing maintenance. Debian for all servers and containers. Very stable, maintenance doesn’t take much effort.

    If I was running a pure gaming system I’d probably go with Arch.

    •  Dandroid   ( @dandroid@dandroid.app ) 
      3•1 year ago

      Tried it for the first time last week. I was hesitant because I’m forced into SLES for work, and I fucking hate it. But thats because all of the default configs for all packages are overly secure. Like, installing apache required a ton of extra steps to allow HTTP traffic. But I needed to test both HTTP and HTTPS for the feature I was working on, so I needed HTTP.

      But overall I have been very happy with Tumbleweed. I like that the packages are more up to date than Ubuntu LTS (what I was using previously), and I haven’t had as many driver issues either. Oh, and snapshots are amazing. It already saved me once when I accidentally deleted the wrong config file, I just cp’d it from my last snapshot.

  •  rodbiren   ( @rodbiren@midwest.social ) English
    9•1 year ago

    I try so dang hard not to use Linux Mint because I have been using off and on since 2008 but always come crawling back to it when I run into some esoteric issue on another distro. It just hits the sweet spot of what I understand computing to be. I have desperately tried to use various forms of arch. OpenSUSE, fedora, debian, and a whole host of others and eventually get frustrated for some probably solvable reason and go back to my sweet, my love, my wart covered X11 using, 5.15 running, stale boring life mate Mint.

  •  ProtonBadger   ( @ProtonBadger@kbin.social ) 
    8•1 year ago

    Everyone immediately want you to use their distribution of choice. However no-one can really answer this unless you include more information about yourself and your Linux experience, objectives, what kind of tinkering you’re comfortable with, what you expectations are, etc.