I’ve messed around with Linux before, mostly in VMs, but I’m looking to switch over from Windows permanently on my laptop because I think Linux is cool.
Most people in this community talk about pros and cons of this distro or this other distro, but I’d like to hear your opinions based on entirely subjective factors.
I think Arch is neat, I think Ubuntu isn’t as neat, why? Who knows. Tell me about how you chose a specific distro because you thought the name was cool or because it ships with some completely unknown utility no one uses.
NixOS has a cool logo.
There, I said it.
I installed it three nights ago.
It has a lot of neat
It has a lot of wtf
You start out, I want x, then you realize you want y, then you find out to get y, you need z. Then you put follow some instructions and defining unfree in one spot no longer works. Then you find out there are no safe facilities to deploy secrets and you’ll have to make that anyway.
I don’t hate it at all, but I’m slowly realizing it’s not what I thought it was.
Still cool though.
Yeah, it’s very much one of those “steep learning curve” distros, and requires a lot of background reading and perhaps a bit of functional programming knowledge.
For secrets storage, I’ve been using agenix, but you can probably get away with just putting the secrets as plain text files in /var/secrets or similar.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( https://packages.debian.org/ and https://sources.debian.org/ ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.
I like it too. And Debian has its own screenshots website, https://screenshots.debian.net/ how neat is that ?
OpenSUSE just feels all cool and enterprisey and I feel like I’m doing important things when I use my computer
If you want to create a Hannah Montana branded version of ublue kinoite plasma 6, that would be as neat as it gets.
Also there is Cosmic, I am just gonna say
Rust
I currently use pop-os which is an Ubuntu derivative. I use it because it works well, is easy, and it’s smoother than Ubuntu. My second choice would be Kubuntu if I wanted to commit to KDE. My reasons are that I’m doing important business on all my computers and I don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot things that don’t work. So I stick to the LTS releases nowadays.
A downside of my approach is that it’s less customizable, not as up to date and slightly constraining.
Over the years I have used a lot of different distributions. I’ve had many success and even more failures.
So many people have strong feelings about their favorite distros. The big differences are about ease of installation and configuration, stability, open source vs. proprietary code, community support and ability to customize. Other than that, they are all basically Linux.
Arch is not for the faint of heart but it is awesome if you can get it installed. And they have a great support community. There are a lot of Arch variants that are easier to install.
