Yeah I installed that one you’re thinking of.

  • slothrop@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I dual boot Arch and Arch, and I run an Arch hypervisor as well as an Arch vm in each Arch instance.

  • galaxy_nova@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Fedora for sure, generally pretty up to date, lots of users so you can find articles pretty easily, and it’s a lot more stable than Arch BTW

  • Broadfern@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    The one that makes you happy.

    ^Or at least overrides the desire to grab a sledgehammer when troubleshooting^

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      1·
      1 month ago

      “I like to rebuild my kit sports car every time I want to take it out for a drive. Anyone who does otherwise is a pleb.”

    • slothrop@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I started my first Gentoo install in 2002.
      It’s almost finished compiling.

    • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I used this for a few months but I just don’t really see the upside in compiling my own code lol

    • Ooops@feddit.org
      1·
      1 month ago

      rolling release (for gaming)

      Seriously… after all these years without some pesky version upgrade screwing things up I couldn’t bring myself to install a non-rolling distro on any device I actively use.

  • rodneylives@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    If you’re new to Linux: Mint. Use Mint, with Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you’re hardware is older. It works just how you’d expect.

    There’s many other distros for other purposes. Bazzite has a lot of people who like it for games. If you really want to control EVERYTHING about your machine there’s Arch. If you want bleeding edge software and don’t mind/can fix the occasional problem caused by rolling releases then I suggest Manjaro.

    But most Windows refugees will be looking for something familiar that works and stays out of their face, and for that the simple answer is Mint.

      • reddit_sux@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        The hardest thing to installing linux is booting from usb. Windows makes you jump through hoops just to boot from usb. Rest is just clicking few buttons and waiting for few minutes.

      • rodneylives@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 days ago

        Ah, I just noticed your reply now! I’d say Mint’s about as easy to install as the other major installations. If you don’t care about dual booting, you can just let the installer use the entire hard disk, and that greatly simplifies everything. If you decide to go back to Windows you’ll have to go through that process, of course, but usually you make recovery media early on in your system’s life, and you could boot from that to get back to a factory state.

      • aloofPenguin@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        From experience (this was a few years ago, but still holds up even today), yes. The GUI installer is very easy to use (there’s lots of visual stuff to). The one thing that the installer does better that the Debian installer, in my opinion, is partitioning (there’s more visual aids (a slider you can move around, I believe) (a disclaimer: this is basedoff of materials that i read online, not any personal experience)).

        If you want images and stuff, you can always look up ‘Calamares installer’ (which I believe is the installer Mint uses)

        Wish you the best of luck on your linux journey!

        E: disclaimer

  • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Unless its like arch or gentoo does the distro matter that much? Like its mostly just the default settings which you can tweak. I feel like 90% of distrohopping is just wanting to try a new UI which can you just install yourself.

    The main difference is package management so rolling release vs LTS vs 6 month cycle.

    In practice we really need to stop using dynamic dependencies/package managers for most applications, for desktop usecase its just not a good pattern anymore, honestly I feel its like 99% of the reason the linux desktop never took off, app dev is just a pain. Thankfully stuff like flatpak and appimage exist now

      • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Arch is harder so install to as a recommendation its harder than the others. Though I think the last time I installed it was years ago ik theirs like a graphical installer now??? How the mighty have fallen

        But yeah Gentoo is like in a league of its own

        • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          There’s no graphical installer officially, no. There are many Arch derivatives with installers though, like CachyOS.

          Installing Arch is literally running like 10 commands, and it’s all very well documented.

          1. Put your Archiso USB stick in and reboot
          2. Format your disks if needed, mkfs
          3. Mount root and boot partitions
          4. Run pacstrap to install base system
          5. Generate fstab
          6. In chroot, set time and locale(s), set password, install bootloader
          7. Choose/install a network manager, like systemd-networkd
          8. Reboot

          Now you’re running Arch. Make a user and install a DE, optionally.

          • Kristell@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol
            1·
            1 month ago

            It’s even simpler now: Plug in stick, reboot

            Select the stick as the boot media

            “archinstall”

            Configure

            Done.

            I don’t recommend it to first timers, because the install process does get you a good feel of what you’ll be expected to know, but I’ve been running arch for years I’m not doing that manually anymore xD

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 month ago

      Distro can alter how it behaves on your hardware. I tried every Debian derivative out there on a 2010 laptop. They would fail install or fail boot due to some hardware error, but fedora or opensuse were fine, and weirdly nixos. All those acknowledged the error and worked around it.

      Also, not sure if other distros are this easy (because I didn’t experiment) but opensuse let’s you install as many DEs as you like with their pattern selections, and you can flipflop between them at the login screen.

      I thought that was a good tool for a beginner just wanting to try out each DE without reinstalling as you change your mind.

      • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Pretty much all the distros I use if I install like kde or hyprland it appears as an option in the login screen. Its a little cluttered since you have overlapping gnome and kde apps but I feel like people distrohop alot when they could just install a new DE

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I can’t express how much I disagree with you and further I can not fucking stand flatpacks and the like. Unless I’m running a server, I don’t want that crap on my box at all.

      • evol@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Why would you want flatpak on a server, server feels like ideal for dynamic dependencies as you have some highly used, static build (Debian 13 or Ubuntu LTS) where problems can be easily tested and fixes distributed out. The dependencies don’t change too much aswell as the usecase for the server stays static. Security features can then be patched in when needed. Desktop usecase all people want is an up to date latest app that works, security rarely matters, and the dependency graph is highly volatile as people constantly update and add new software

        • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          So keep the different server processes somewhat isolated without going full VM. If I was admining production boxes for a company, I’d go with VMs. I’m talking about home servers running a couple services, and about desktops at home. Being retired, I haven’t had to really do real sysadmin work for years.

          I haven’t had any issues, that I can think of at least, updating my desktop install which is going on about 10 years now. I’ve not been stuck in some type of dependency hell for even longer than that. To each their own, if they work for you, great. I can’t stand the extra layer that flatpaks bring to me. Seems like back in the day they would have been really useful…but thinking about past hard drive space, processor speeds, and internet speeds, maybe not.

          • bus_factor@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 month ago

            Are you confusing flatpaks and other containerization solutions like docker? Flatpaks are specifically for UI applications, and that doesn’t make much sense on a server.