Hello Beautiful community!
I am a student/jr-level IT-guy who has used linux as a daily driver for 2 years now.
I chose Fedora because of it’s similarities to RHEL and RHEL-clone. It was also easy to set up with UEFI and LUKS/LVM, which I somewhat struggled to do on arch. Having wayland, GDM and XDG preconfigured also made starting configuration a lot easier.
When I used arch-based EOS, I usually took the “easy route” when configuring. Instead of using systemd, I just launched stuff on i3-config. Instead of compiling stuff myself I just installed it with aur. Instead of using LUKS or LVM I just had some encrypted directories.
Maybe it was because I was much more experienced when I started with fedora, or maybe it helped to have an already usable system when starting. Either way I feel I learned more using fedora than EOS, even if I heavily modified EOS as well.
However as I am now considering switching, I’d love to hear what experiences people have had with their distributions. Especially Nixos and Debian users, as those are what I’m considering myself.
How much configuration did it take to make the system usable? Are there some limitations with the repositories, distribution or OS in general? And importantly: have you learned something useful while working on your own system?
Did some distribution make you feel you were missing out on something important with your last distribution?
Have you had bad learning experiences with some distro? Have you switched away from distro for the same reason you installed it?
Would you suggest your distro for someone learning linux-admin skills? If you could go back, what distribution would you have used to 1) learning linux the first time 2) working in a jr-level position, still learning basic system administration, 3) when learning to code?
Thank you for your time and comments. I hope this post is general enough to be a worthwhile discussion.
NixOS tends to encourage “proper” solutions instead of hacky temporary solutions, so while doing stuff on NixOS takes more time, maintaining what you’ve done is much easier, and it’s much easier to reason about, so I learned much more on NixOS than I learned on Arch (hell, I wrote two Nix DSLs for nftables and Lua because my perfectionism told me I need to do that instead of manipulating config as strings in Nix). I have an initrd hook that configures GPU passthrough by picking a GRUB option, I have a system configuration for an Arm router SoC (BPI-R3), which is a painful piece of hardware to work with, much like other SoCs, I have the router config itself (which I wrote a Nix framework for) - and if I ever forget how that all works, I can read the config to remember it, instead of trying to figure out what Linux commands I ran “back then”. But if your goal is just learning about Linux, look elsewhere - that was just a bonus for me; Nix is an abstraction, and you can only start learning Linux after you understand that abstraction.
- Definitely Ubuntu, it’s the most user friendly for people coming from other OSes
- I’d say Ubuntu again, or maybe Debian. You built up skill and learnt the distro so you want to use something you know for work. On your personal computer, try other ones. I personally picked Arch at this time (around 2012), which helped me “understand” how the OS works, rather than simply use it. I reinstalled it quite a few times and broke the system a lot.
- Any distro with a simple package management system. My personal choice goes to crux, but it’s very barebones. NixOS or Gentoo would be fine too The point here is to learn how to build packages by building them yourself, and I feel like the “big” packages managers (apt, yum, dnf) are too complex for that. They also decorelate runtime libraries from headers files, which is a pain to work with as a développer IMO.
But it’s just my personal experience, many new distro popped up since then. Also for reference, I’ve been using Linux for 12 years now, and I run Crux on my desktop, Ubuntu at work, and OpenBSD on my servers.
I think at your age you’re supposed to distro-hop. Catch 'em all. Try another one every two to six weeks. I know several people who did it like this ;-) But your mileage may vary… I like debian.
I have tried both PopOs and Manjaro. I dont really like both of them.
For Manjaro, I used one of the community edition repacks and many of my peripherals failed to work on boot like Wifi and keyboard. Unfortunately, the week I installed Manjaro was also the week the forums went down so that made things way worse.
PopOs felt quite buggy. I used to postpone every kernel upgrade by at least 2 weeks as something would always break after.
Currently I’m using Linux Mint and everything just works. If I were to start over I would go with Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora. I have found the WM and workflow that I’m comfortable with and would like to just be on a distro that works.
