Does anyone really recommend Ubuntu these days? I think Mint has reigned supreme for years, at least for beginners.
Since bookworm, I find little need to push them past Debian. It’s clean and runs all the things.
I recommended Mint to my partner and she wasn’t too enthusiastic about it after trying, I have Ubuntu on one of my laptops where she has a guest account and she actually prefers it even after hours of use so her new laptop is getting 24.04. I did do the diligence of explaining that Ubuntu is to Canonical as Firefox is to Mozilla, and why some Linux heads aren’t a fan.
I barely see people recommend mint anymore. It like every other Ubuntu family distro keeps having too many issues and poor gaming support compared to the steamOS styled distros.
Everyone is going to bazzite or cachyOS as the new “noob” distros cause they just work and play steam games and have steam deck isos.
It’s funny to see so many different echochambers at play. 🤭 No offense of course.
Mint is still by far the most popular distro, I even saw Goodwill selling computers with it now. Ubuntu is also widely used, apparently it’s really popular in India(?). Meanwhile in hackspaces NixOS and Arch are super popular. Personally I like OpenSuse, therefore hear a lot about that family of distros. We’re existing in a super diverse ecosystem.
It’s just annoying when people recommend stuff not because they think it’s the best pick for the person who’s asking, but because they like it best (I swear on my grave, I god damn saw people recommending NixOS for elders and Arch Linux for productivity environments that must be 100% stable). Therefore I made a meme about it.
How does mint have “poor gaming support”?
How does mint have “poor gaming support”?
- The last time they tried it was ages ago, or they followed some old instructions.
- They’re trying to play a game that has serious anticheat aspirations and doesn’t run well on linux
- They want to play roblox.
“Arch” they just need to read the newsletter before updating.
alias yay=“yay -Pw; yay”
Today I learned, thanks.
Before upgrading, users are expected to visit the Arch Linux home page to check the latest news, or alternatively subscribe to the RSS feed or the arch-announce mailing list. When updates require out-of-the-ordinary user intervention (more than what can be handled simply by following the instructions given by pacman), an appropriate news post will be made.
“Gentoo” because fuck you personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_From_Scratch
Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a type of a Linux installation and the name of a book written by Gerard Beekmans, and as of May 2021, mainly maintained by Bruce Dubbs. The book gives readers instructions on how to build a Linux system from source. The book is available freely from the Linux From Scratch site.
LWN.net reviewed LFS in 2004:[19]
Linux From Scratch is a wonderful project. It should become a compulsory reading material for all Linux training courses, and something that every Linux enthusiast should complete at least once. This would also create another interesting side effect: people who tend to be quick in expressing dissatisfaction on the distributions’ mailing lists and forums would probably show a lot more respect for the developers. Installing a ready-made distribution is a trivial task. Building up a set of 4 CDs containing a stable, secure and reliable operating system, plus thousands of applications, is most definitely not.
I did this once. I got to a command line installation and I think I either borked installing a usable desktop environment, or I was just sick of it all and decided I wouln’t be getting working hibernation or Wi-Fi this way anyway and the slightly lower resources used wasn’t worth it.
I think I had tried Gentoo before that and must have decided I didn’t like myself for some reason.
“Some DIY is fun, some is stuff we do by mistake because ‘well how hard can it be anyway?’ and it teaches us a lot for the next project. The rest we do purely to spite ourselves, because we should be able to do it, damnit!”
-thing I said to a friend who asked why I was putting so much effort on myself when I could just buy a flat-pack for the same cost and 99% less effort.
Which distro should I pick?
@tal@lemmy.today: NoThis just reminds me of my first experience with Linux in the late 90’s. Yes they had installers that got the base system working, but then you had to compile so much.
I use arch btw
At least they aren’t trying to get Steam to work on Kali.
That’s surprisingly easy.
Big nix fan here, I love being able to define my system from a couple configuration files and not scrounging around the file system for the right dot file
Definitely solves more problems than it creates! /s
And also it let’s you do crazy things that would be impossible in other imperative distros tho.
I am thinking about root-on-tmpfs, conditional configuration and doing all sorts of crazy things with packages while remaining manageable.
It is simply another whole tier.
I really love this image for this, that expression combo is perfection.
definetly! do you know what anime that is?
Chatlotte (2015)
Imo a just works, deb based kde distro with nvidia drivers, flatpaks and no snaps is what we need to bring forth the year of the linux desktop.
I dunno, we live in the age of ChatGPT. Between my generic but sufficient computer skills and ChatGPT’s hallucinatory ramblings, I’ve been smooth sailing on EndeavourOS for a few weeks now.
The EndeavourOS forums are also a really good help source if you wanna ditch the LLM, users there are pretty friendly and it’s probably where it sources most of it’s relevant info anyway.
Noted, thank you!
Fedora KDE is not deb based, but dnf is better than apt anyway fight me
I don’t disagree but I still wanna fight, where do you wanna meet?
And one that you can get pre-installed on devices you can purchase. The “just buy and be happy” aspect is important for a lot of people as well, not to mention the valuable customer support. People with dispensable income who wish for this are usually furthest away from hackerspace culture though, so a lot of Linux enthusiasts seemingly overlook it. Or, when it comes to far-left people around, want to overlook it.
If I remember correctly TuxedoOS checks all those boxes. And I think if you want “same but Gnome” that would be SlimbookOS. 🤔
I have an old MacBook for 2012, can barely open terminal, installed Pop!_OS, and I love it!
Am I a terrible person?
I have MacBook pro from 2011 and it runs Plasma fine. It has 16GB of memory, though.
I’ve got an old Dell XPS system from 2010 with a Core i7 970 in it that runs Mint perfectly well.
Pop!_OS has been my go to for years now. Always been so reliable and easy to use. This was the distro which kept me from going back to Windows
same here. always had issues getting nvidia drivers working on other distros, but pop os got me going out of the box.
Not at all. Pop OS was my Windows to Linux distro of choice, of which I stayed on for almost 3 years. It’s a great way to get familiar with Linux.
I only got out because I wanted to be closer to the edge, not because it was bad.
Nah, you’re killing it.
sips coffee from Alpine land
@Natanox Seems like NixOS replaced Arch as both a local extremist cult and the most effective newbie repellent.
What’s funny to me here is that, as a long time Arch user, I have been considering switching to NixOS. One of the most terrifying thoughts to me is that after using the same Arch install for 2 years I will spend ages trying to recreate it if I ever have to. Oh, that and Nix letting you test packages seems like a cool feature.
I’ve been on arch around a year now and also considered the jump to NixOS. I was actually dual booting it with arch for awhile and I found pretty quickly that the shit documentation was a huge turn off for me. I ended up nuking the nix partition and reclaiming it for arch.
That and the need to learn a bespoke, weird programming language that will only ever be useful for this one thing have really turned me off of that distro.
Definitely. Why not use something off the shelf! That by itself would make it much more approachable
This is my biggest issue. I am utterly spoiled to the exquisiteness that is Arch’s Wiki…
Arch wiki is the documentation gold standard
I mean the Arch wiki mostly works on NixOS too. The problem with NixOS documentation is that there aren’t many examples for the Nix language itself.
What is the Nix language like?
Terrible. Unless you like Haskell, DSLs, and the like.
If Haskell and json had a baby
Hmm, that sounds more like dhall
I’ve found that the Arch wiki works for most distros if you know how to translate it. There have been multiple times I’ve searched how to do something or how to fix something in Linux and the only useful result is an arch forum or wiki. All I had to do is translate the steps for debian/ubuntu/opensuse/fedora/rpiOS, etc.
The process was usually “search this error” > “this part” isn’t working, search “this part error” > arch forum showing steps to fix. Search “where the fuck is this file in <distro>”. Get “it’s usually here, here, or over here”, then do arch steps.
Then there’s opensuse, and there’s fucking camelcase capitals in their packages (NetworkManager? Seriously?) so I have to Google “opensuse <command/application> package” like a fucking rube.
Yeah one nice thing about nixos is that their package search website is really good. You can also search for config options with examples.
I am about to switch away from arch that I installed 5 years ago. It’s a daunting thought isn’t it?
The nice thing is that NixOS will keep your setup and all your tweaks if you ever need to reinstall. It’s designed to solve that exact problem.
One way of switching over would be to carry over your homedir and just starting with migrating packages and config as a first step.
I was in the same boat two years ago.
What I did is that I’ve setup a VM with NixOS in it to play with, learn the language and tweak the configuration file.
The great thing about NixOS is that once I was feeling confident enough to switch I installed NixOS on bare metal, loaded the configuration file I prepared in the VM and I instantly had everything installed and running. (Except for the NVidia drivers, fuck nvidia)
Since then I’ve stayed in nixos and I’m not looking back.
This would likely be the plan. This is solid advice really for anyone swapping distros really.
Throw Mint Cinnamon or the latest version on the computer, solved. Ubuntu can… be speshy sometimes on my older spare laptop, but it is not really their fault, more my computer is a bit cooked. Some puppy linux distros are cool, but also a tiny bit complicated for beginners.
That was the reason I decided to install Mint Cinnamon.
It’s been impossible to install for a week now. And I’m not even 100% IT illiterate. After ~3 days of struggling, I decided to do the walk of shame and post on the Mint forum, admitting my failure. It’s been unsolved for about a week now. >100 fails and errors, crashes, freezes.
I can’t even imagine where I would (not) be had I chosen Kali or Arch.
Tbh you might have failing RAM or something. Have you run Memtest?
Yes, I have done a few things already, including memtest. I’ll copy from the forum:
The things I have tried:
- Updating my BIOS.
- The ISO I downloaded has been md5 checked, all fine. I have also tried 2 other ISO files from 2 other mirrors - same.
- Three (3) USB drives to install Mint, ranging from 8 GB to 24GB.
- Installing with or without multimedia codecs.
- Turning on secure boot before install (I was desperate, found a forum post with a similar error message, later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Turning off secure boot before install (I found a different forum post where the exact opposite was recommended - later I found out that it was for a different reason).
- Installing in compatibility mode.
- Offering a sacrifice to Xebeth’Qlu, tormentor of souls.
- Running gparted before install, deleting the previously half-installed partition, formatting it myself to ext4, then running the installer.
- Splitting the aforementioned partition into a 16GB swap partition (I have 16GB RAM) and leaving the rest of it as ext4 (mounted at “/”).
- Running chkdsk -f on the SSD containing the MBR+Win10, then rebooting the PC twice, according to one of the error messages in my post below (then trying to install again).
Might sound like a dumb Q but have you tried testing any of the live environments or are you jumping straight to the install, and if you have played in the env. for a bit, have you tried installing any other distro? (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc)
If by live environment you mean the one running from the USB (before I start the actual install) then yes, the install itself starts from a live Mint, running from the USB already. Sorry, I’m not sure if that’s what you meant.
Yup thats exactly what I meant. If you play with it on the USB for a while, do you notice any problems at all or is it only after install?
I have played around before trying to install a few times, but I’m not sure if that exhausts the question: I brought up two terminal windows to ssh into my Raspberry Pi and to manage logs on the other, while I had a browser up to look up netcat usage examples. It didn’t freeze or crash during regular activity, if we’re looking for that.
I swear, I’ve only recommended it to one newbie, and they were an engineer! I had a reason!
Hilarious that this is the new norm, though. NixOS is so not typical at all. Arch is more normal at this point.
I’ve had some people here tell me about POP_OS as it’s the most friendly to NVIDIA hardware and also is configured for gaming.
What are your thoughts?
It being good for Nvidia hardware isn’t wrong, but it being the best or especially good for gaming isn’t exactly true. It mostly boils down to the proprietary Nvidia driver being preinstalled and a lot of media attention why Pop!_OS became so popular for gaming.
Other distros that are just as good or better for gaming with Nvidia are, for example:
- Bazzite (Immutable)
- Nobara
- TuxedoOS
The first two are really going the extra mile for patches and gaming support. Bazzite can be a little bit frustrating though given it requires some additional knowledge to work with immutable file systems if you ever need to edit system files. Otherwise you should have a solid experience on any of them.
Ubuntu was so good. Too bad my brother simply shut off my VM when I was using it
No don’t use Nix they’re evil. Use Lix or Auxolotl or Tvix or Tangram or Brioche or Guix
Why is Nix evil? This is the first I heard
NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.
(There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)
deleted by creator
There was some politically charged drama… I think. There was some drama, anyway. I’m not clear on the details.
It was probably a Twitter-tier disagreement that was blown way out of proportion by a small group of people. If others have details, please don’t enlighten me, I value my ignorance.
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nixos_Woke_Invasion. The user wiki is quite helpful now. Or if you want the direct source of the article, https://srid.ca/nixos-woke
