I have been tossing around the idea of a little distro hopping. I’m an avid mint fan. It was my first jump from windows. I became quite familiar with mint but felt the want to branch out and went down the rabbit hole (oh my lanta). I like stability and cleanliness. Security by default. Least mental load possible long-term.
I’m currently testing out NIXos. Next will be VanillaOS, 3rd will be Fedora Silverblue. Anyone have good recommendations? Easy backups, stability, security first posture, least maintenance and memory load. I hate getting scattered in symlinks, scripts, and filesystem placing.
I’ve tried going full custom Linux mint. But app armour and Firejail constantly conflict or require manual updating and tweaking to keep up to date with app installs, or general life cycle updates.
The most intriguing aspect if NIXos was that basically the entire configurable system was confined to two files. Infinitely reproducable. I tend to swap laptops or hardware relatively often being on the go or getting good tech deals. Having your entire system in two files essentially is awesome.
What are some pros and cons of different distros? What do you daily drive as a power user? Give me your thoughts and recommendations! Thanks.
Fedora’s Anaconda system makes UEFI secure boot easy and ships with SELinux integrated but set to permissive by default. Their built in network filtering tools are pretty easy but I still just use OpenWRT on a separate device. Silverblue was nice for a few years but I switched to Workstation for a machine with Nvidia hw.
I’ve heard good things about work-station. I’ve really been distro shopping and that’s the great thing about the Linux and open source community. Having all the options! That being said I think it’s a big part of the lack of cohesive expansion too. Going too wide instead of deep. So projects don’t last unless their big. Like Ubuntu or Debian etc
They all have a purpose. The key is knowing and understanding their primary purposes. Fedora is like the beta of Red Hat. Red Hat is the old paid pro server version. The main sell of RHEL is the zero down time kernel updates, and lots of custom tools. Fedora is the distro to get the Linux Bible (book) and learn SysAdmin for an IT path.
Debian is where hardware support is built and has tons of custom tools to bootstrap new or undocumented hardware.
Ubuntu is built on Debian, but is primarily a smaller scale server option like RHEL. Their main objective is LTS kernels. LTS is usually poorly understood by many users. It means most packages included in the distro are outdated and frozen in time. There are updating exceptions for packages that never break backwards compatibility. The whole point here is that I can write a script in bash, Python or whatever high level language, and build a custom server that can be online and left unattended while getting security updates to remain online while the LTS remains supported.
Gentoo can build everything from source and can reconfigure or modify anything. It is like Arch Linux with tutorial information documented fully and a responsible package manager that does not do regular rsync hardening pop quizzes on the only distro you’ll ever actually boot from backups regularly (Arch).
Nix is for deprecated dependency hell.
Kali or Parrot are for getting your own FBI agent.
Deepin is Chinese, but Tails is for Chinese abroad.
OpenWRT is for embedded Linux, mostly routers, but anything really.
Linux From Scratch is for base chad god bod and Hannah Montana Linux is for memes.
Debian is so old it doesn’t work on very modern hardware… So what your talking about?
Also Ubuntu is not a “server” option. They do have a server option yes. It is the most used desktop or at least was.
Also I used arch for ca 2 years not once needed to use a backup. Even though I abused the hell out of it.
Why is it running on my new MSI Katana?
Old kernel = old drivers. Its that simple… Things might work on a basic level sure. Drivers baked in to the kernel and when you use a damn old version of it you get old drivers and old hardware support.
Everything works. Even the Nvidia drivers work.
I play Final Fantasy XIV on this laptop with no problems.
Are you insane? Debian is a base distro like any other and runs more hardware than any other. It has all of the bootstrapping tools to get hardware working.
Canonical is a server company and Ubuntu server is literally the product.
Arch is absolute garbage for most users unless you have a CS degree or you have entirely too much time on your hands and don’t mind an OS as your life project. Arch abhors tutorial content in all documentation and therefore dumps users into a rabbit hole regularly. Pacman is the worst package manager as it will actively break a system and present the user with the dumbest of choices at random because the maintainers are ultimately sadistic and lackadaisical. Arch is nearly identical to Gentoo with Arch binaries often based on Gentoo builds, yet Gentoo provides relevant instruction and documentation with any changes that require user intervention and does so at a responsible and ethical level that shows kindness, respect, and consideration completely absent from Arch. Arch is a troll by trolls for trolls. I’m more than capable of running it now, but I would never bother with such inconsiderate behavior.