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

    • A Mouse@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      I live on the more unstable side, I like Debian Unstable/Sid. I also recommend Siduction as it’s based on Debian Unstable.

        • mfn@mfn.pub
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          1 year ago

          Debian not recommends testing for everyday using. You definetely have to look at the site. Afaik it is basically a bad version of unstable that gets slow updates and it is only for testing purposes.

          • transistor@lemdro.id
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            1 year ago

            Packages from debian unstable trickle down to testing in 8-10 days usually if all the other criteria are met. But I have also heard that important security updates go straight from unstable to stable and then come to testing at a later time. When is that later date I have no idea.

  • Laser@feddit.de
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    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.

  • CAPSLOCKFTW@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Arch Linux

    Reasons:

    • Pacman
    • the AUR
    • community driven
    • bleeding edge
    • pragmatic stance regarding closed source software
    • sane defaults
    • minimalism, build your own without too much compiling
    • the wiki
    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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      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?

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        What bad experience have you had with pacman? My favourite thing about it is that it is pretty much the only package manager that has never failed me.

        • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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          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@lemmy.ml
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            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.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
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    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.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        I use Arch default. Stay away from Manjaro… If you want to try arch with a good installer, try https://endeavouros.com/.

        Its really just arch with a nice installer and a friendly community where you can ask questions. It’s specifically designed for that purpose.

        • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I’ve used Manjaro a few times and Arch I installed once from their wiki which is a huge pain.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    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.

    • jack@monero.town
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      1 year ago

      I wanted to like Guix very much, but eventually found it extremely inflexible. You will miss a lot of packages that are not trivial to create in Scheme yourself. Also a lot of packages have issues that no one wants to fix, or it takes half a year (e.g. being able to use NetworkManager for an eduroam/university wifi connection).

      It’s also not possible to just compile a package yourself because the directory structure is totally different.

      I don’t think Guix will ever become more flexible, I’ve given up on it

  • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Arch.

    People think it’s really challenging and brittle, but everything seems to always work no matter how often I update (or don’t) and the wiki is top notch.

    I actually chose arch initially because when you go to forums to troubleshoot problems there is always an ubuntu answer and an arch answer, and the arch answer is almost always shorter.

  • Mx Phibb@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Linux Mint: Debian Edition. After watching a YouTube review I decided to take a break from Arch and give it a try, I’d always like Cinnamon, and I really like this.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Cinnamon, last I tried it, has a bug which causes it to run games with compositing enabled. The setting that’s supposed to disable it for games, only works until the next boot.

  • barusu@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I’m considering to switch from Fedora to Debian stable with Flatpaks for the available apps (more up-to-date and more isolated).

    But I’m also considering NixOS atm

  • Nia [she/her]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’m using Debian 12 stable and I do everything on it, even gaming. I use flatpaks to keep certain apps that benefit from being up to date, and I install backported kernel and mesa when they release for more performance (amd gpu).

    I’ve been on and off with vanilla Debian for years while distrohopping, but I tried out Debian 11 testing and everything just worked for me, am still using that same install but I’m sticking to stable branch now.

    Also, proprietary drivers are now officially supported by Debian as of Debian 12, and are available to install out of the box without needing to search for them or add the non-free repositories now, which was a pretty big roadblock for a lot of people.

  • fox@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Been using PopOS for the last 2 years (ish) with zero issues. It’s been a delight!