One of the few things that differentiates the major distros is the package manager. I’ve been running void on my laptop for the last 3 years and love it. XBPS is super fast and easy to use. It has never left me with a broken system either. That said, I’ve got the itch to switch.
I am looking at rolling / up to date distros. I’m inclined to use CLI when available.
I’ve been considering Opensuse, but last time I used zypper it was painfully slow. Has it gotten any better?
I was thinking of trying Alpine, how is APK?
Not interested in *butu, but apt seemed okay.
What’s your favorite and how does it behave?
Stick to Void. Everything else will look slow. Haven’t moved since I started using it.
Void was a great experience last time I used it. A minimal set of tools/software were installed(for some reason, I dislike ISOs/distros that fill everything from Libre Office to an FTP client in it; I will just download them if I want it), the package manager seemed pacy enough and system was fast. It is definitely one of the better distros I have tried.
After I got over the beginner phase, yeah, I started liking minimalistic distros as well (basic set of tools, everything else is on repo or you can compile it through templates).
It’s definitely hard to beat: )
I run Void a netbook from 2012, I am always blown away when it resumes from sleep faster than I can open the lid. For the first day I thought maybe it wasn’t suspending and sleep was broken.
It’s soo good. It’s taught me most of what I know about Linux. And, without getting into a battle over inits, I just love the simplicity of runit.
Yep, runit is great, have to hand it to the guy, simple and elegant 👍.
Not a global opinion here as many hardcore linux users will stand by Arch or Mint, but I always have preferred Debian. It’s what Ubuntu is based on, so it uses apt(itude), yet it’s not prebloated Ubuntu and much more true to adaptation and unedited software than Ubuntu has become… But in the end it’s more personal choice and taste, so usually requires a bunch of failed attempts to get one that fits, as every linux can basically do the same things, yet on some or other slightly different way… 😜
I just want to add that for Debian with a rolling, up-to-date experience, Siduction does that nicely.
Forgot to mention that, but indeed, Sid works pretty well…
Thanks, Sid hasn’t been on my radar. Ill go have a look. I happen to have a ZFS box up in rsync.net running Debian, and it’d be nice to learn more about CLI in the deb world.
Just clarifying in case there’s a mix-up: Siduction is a desktop distro based on Debian Sid, not exactly the same distro. It’s my favorite take on Debian so far but honestly I always have something to grumble about in apt-world.
Gotcha. I looked at Seduction the bistro and I’m inclined to give it a trial alongside a few others.
I did kinda assume you meant Debian’s Sid, tbh. Hadn’t heard of Siduction as a Distro. Siduction being the actual long name of Debian Sid sounded very plausible. 😅
Apt and aptitude are both front-ends for apt-get (and related tools)
No. Debian package update status is annoying. And I am on testing…on top of that, apt is decent but I don’t see anything special about it.
If OP wants choice of a minimal init system, try Devuan
APK/Alpine is great! And the Edge repos are well stocked.
Chimera Linux seems to be using even newer apktools than Alpine, not sure what the deal with that is. But that distro is still in early stages with limited repos for now.
Pacman/makepkg/Arch is great too, and an obvious consideration for your usage, curiously omitted from your post.
Ah Chimera. I’ve been looking at that the last two days. I am really tempted to give it a shot. My laptop is mostly for playing around these days. Are you running it?
I forgot about Arch. I ran Manjaro for a year and didn’t have the best experience. 'Course I was pretty green on Linux then.
EndeavourOS is a better Arch experience. If you were to look back into it I would recommend it over Manjaro.
No unfortunately I haven’t tried Chimera yet, but its design is close to my ideal distro. I’d especially love to see its package repos fill up, but the selection is tight as it stands.
APK is really fast
I would recommend playing around with containers instead of doing a reinstall. Containers give a similar experience without so much work
LXC is killer. You can spin up containers that ‘feel’ exactly like a VM but with way less overhead.
Or you could just use distrobox and podman. It is way simpler and has even less overhead. There also is the benefit of having way more images as you have docker hub and fedora toolbox
Great suggestion. A few of the distro suggestions here are in the deep end of the Linux pool, so it’s probably best to build them virtually to see how I want things setup.
apk isn’t any more or less than using dpkg by itself, or opkg. As for what I use, I use Arch at home and Ubuntu on my virtual machines (because they’re officially supported by my hosting provider). They work for me. I like them.
Alpine is great! Apk is super fast. The package selection isn’t then best, but it’s on-par with dnf and apt. My one gripe is musl/openrc issues, but you’re already used to that if you use Void
I’ve been considering Opensuse, but last time I used zypper it was painfully slow. Has it gotten any better?
No, I am using TW for years and despise its package manager slowness. Apart from that though, TW is great. Have void on my laptop as well, sadly rarely use it currently.
Went with Arch and Fedora simply for the parallel downloading. I tried xbps , the only turn off for me was the fact that feature was missing otherwise void is best to stick with.
You know pacman has parallel download support right? I’m pretty sure it’s at 3 by default.
Interesting fact! If you’ve had an arch machine for a while, it’s possible you didn’t know that parallel download support is available, because it’s a config option hidden in
pacman conf.pacnew(I know I didn’t realize it until months after, lol).https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman#Enabling_parallel_downloads
I said for xbps does not have parallel download support.
OH wait I misread as to Fedora