throwawayish
So they’ve had a major release last year in December. And their official website seems to be up. Though, I only had luck connecting to it through Tor 😅. It’s still active according to Distrowatch. And, honestly, the reader reviews ain’t that bad. I’d say give it a spin and consider reporting back on us 🙂.
While I get why distrochooser.de is romanticized, in its current iteration it’s simply not very good and anyone that is somewhat well-versed in how different distros operate and how Distrochooser works, will tell you the same. At best, it provides some orientation into what some of the more common distros are. But it fails to answer some fundamental questions in the process; like:
- What is the relation between a distro and its derivative and (more importantly) how does that matter to a user?
- How exactly does a distribution’s chosen release model affect software and updates? And while we’re into that, what’s even the difference between the “stable” used when talking about point release distros that opt to freeze packages over longer periods of time vs the “stable” that’s brought up in conversations regarding update concerns and how they might break software (I’m honestly not even sure if the one(s) responsible for writing the parts of Distrochooser even know(s) themselves)[1].
There are a lot of other fundamental questions that are involved in the decision for picking a distro that would have made a lot more sense than the ones found on Distrochooser. E.g. Do you use an Nvidia GPU and want this to cause no issues in the process of installation and is this your biggest concern? If yes: then just use Pop!_OS. Otherwise, move on to the other questions etc. I think the fact that a flowchart isn’t used for some uses and that ultimately priorities aren’t brought up to finalize the decision are the two biggest issues that Distrochooser has in its current iteration.
And we haven’t even gone over the many distros that despite having little to no user base are still included in the results, while (more recent) ‘staples’ like Garuda and Nobara are clearly left out for reasons most likely related to the maintainers not being able to keep up with the Linux landscape. Which, to be fair, is quite hard; so I don’t blame them. I, in fact, applaud them for their continued contributions and hope that some day it will become something that we can proudly present to others for their first orientation.
Allow me to end this with a question to OP:
- Do you feel the same way about excellent websites like DistroWatch.com and DistroSea?[2]
- If yes; Why didn’t you make a similar post for either of the two instead?
- If no; Why not?
- Sure, there is some overlap in what they mean and how they’re used, but it’s a very important distinction; otherwise openSUSE’s stable rolling release designation for their Tumbleweed wouldn’t make any sense.
- If anything, I think these two actually make more sense to be included.
Notably openSUSE Tumbleweed is a distro that satisfies all requirements while not being named yet by others. Apart from it, only Arch and Fedora are worth mentioning as distros that also satisfy all requirements (as some others have already noted).
steamos is debian-based
This used to be the case until the launch of the Steam Deck, on which SteamOS (3) is actually based on Arch instead. However, SteamOS is a very special distro based on Arch due to ‘immutability’, how it achieves said ‘immutability’, the implications thereof, ‘freezing’ of packages, inability to install packages persistently without some hacking etc. So, SteamOS is not representative of how Arch works in general.
while popos is ubuntu-based
And Ubuntu is based on Debian.
is that the biggest part of how a distribution works, ie commands, etc.?
If we take your average (popular) distro, so the likes of Gentoo, NixOS etc are dismissed as they are very unique compared to the others, then arguably the most important differentiators would be: Model for updates, package manager and available packages. One might delve deeper into this and with the advent of stuff like Distrobox this becomes a lot more blurred, but traditionally speaking the aforementioned three things used to be the main differentiators. Beyond those, the end-user has the freedom to do whatever with their system. For example, Pop!_OS comes with GNOME + their own touches by default. However, the desktop mode of SteamOS comes with KDE. But you can install KDE on Pop!_OS and even customize it very closely to how it’s done over at SteamOS. This is not a special quality of Pop!_OS, but of Linux in general.
Good ui/ux is important for me so i should maybe use nitrux or deepin
It’s important to note that both of these are not unique in what they offer in terms of UI/UX. You can recreate 99% of it yourself, simply by installing the appropriate desktop environment; which constitutes most of the UI/UX. Nitrux has KDE as its desktop environment (with a touch of Maui), while deepin uses the Deepin desktop environment. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend any desktop environment beyond Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE and Xfce. Don’t be discouraged by this though, feel free to put Nitrux and deepin on a Live USB to get a feel for them. Regarding good UI/UX, your best bets are probs Kubuntu, Linux Mint, openSUSE and Pop!_OS. Honourable mention would be MX Linux, but I don’t recommend systemd-less distros to newer users.
that are debian-based
Sure, Nitrux is based on Debian. But it’s immutable, systemd-less and favors AppImages over Flatpak/Snap. It’s a cool project, but I find it hard to recommend to a newer user. While deepin is less unique by comparison, it’s far from a distro that’s known for its polish. I’d argue it’s mostly just eye-candy instead 😅.
or is it a bad idea to choose a less common distro for a amateur like me?
Bullseye! This isn’t a hard rule though. I started venturing into Linux through a somewhat obscure distro as well 😅. But, at the time, I researched for about a week which distro to install and why. Afterwards I spent another week on how I should install it and what should be considered for install. And then I installed it, after which I spent almost two weeks getting the system to a working state. It still wasn’t quite there yet, but after spending a month on it from start to finish I wanted to move on to something else 😅. I kept the install, don’t get me wrong. And it became my daily-driver. After some time I even ‘fell in love with it’. But like, I know that I can be stubborn about things like this and persevere where others might have preferred to hit their heads to the wall instead. So your mileage may vary…
Do you have any advice for me?
As you’ve correctly assessed, you are indeed lost 😅 . That’s fine, I think almost all of us have been lost at some point in time. Uhmm…, but honestly, I think you’re conflating two very distinct things. Pop!_OS is a general-use distro on which you can do whatever. And most distros that people talk about and engage with are similarly general-use distros. SteamOS, on the other hand, isn’t quite like that. Sure, you may hack your way and achieve some things with it. But it’s false to believe that you can find any distro that qualifies as SteamOS but on your laptop. Before giving you any recommendations, would you be so kind to answer the following:
- Your post is written in a way that implies that you want to forego Pop!_OS for another distro that’s more like SteamOS. Therefore my question would be:
- What things from SteamOS did you prefer over Pop!_OS? Please be specific and elaborate*.
If one can afford to pay the higher price, then Star Labs’ (or System76’ etc) laptops will offer far superior Linux support. Modern hardware from non-‘Linux-first’ vendors have shown causing troubles with ‘deep sleep’. Issues like these can and have been resolved on Star Labs’ (or System76’ etc) devices. Furthermore, they don’t only sell ‘Linux-laptops’, but they also contribute to the upstream of coreboot and other Linux projects. Thus, by buying their laptops, one is actively contributing to that cause.
Hard-reboots are no longer required on Silverblue when installing or upgrading packages (besides kernel) through rpm-ostree. Arguably one should only sparingly rely on rpm-ostree for installing packages. But it’s great to have access to soft-reboot when setting up a new system.
As others have already (somewhat) alluded to; it’s best to buy a laptop from a company that offers devices on which Linux users are first-class citizens. Therefore, any device that specifically fits your needs (hardware-wise) from either NovaCustom, Star Labs, System76, Tuxedo etc should fit the bill. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Nvidia GPUs have a known bad track record on Linux. The possibility exists that you won’t even notice it on any of the devices sold by any of the aforementioned vendors. However, I’d argue it’s still mindful to be cautious.
Should I better buy all of AMD (if yes, which CPI, GPU) or Intel/Nvidia? Or Intel CPU and AMD GPU? Which combination is the right one with best performance for a casual gamer? I prefer FPS games, if that’s important…
AMD has been doing very good for some time and the fact that the Steam Deck is powered by AMD is very telling of what the current status quo is. However, I don’t think it’s a hard requirement. Sure, going full-AMD has it’s merits, but you should be fine regardless.
While technically not a Linux distro, Qubes OS is the gold standard. With the primary cons being that it’s kinda hard on system requirements and it doesn’t play nice with dedicated GPUs and thus software that would require it.
Honorable mentions would be Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea, Kicksecure, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa and Vanilla OS. Of course, regular Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed are still good even without being immutable. The aforementioned distros all have varying levels of hardening out of the box. While the offerings of Fedora and openSUSE have better defaults than most other distros, Kicksecure -which is made by the same team behind Whonix- is almost completely hardened from the get-go. Vanilla OS is in a major overhaul, so I refrain from making any strong judgements on it yet.
For whatever it’s worth, a couple of years ago the (infamous) Madaidan (AKA security researcher on Kicksecure and Whonix) did recommend running minimalist distros like Alpine, Artix, Gentoo and Void for the sake of security. However, he did that recommendation on the basis of minimalism and zero-trust. However, that would require the system administrator (read: you) to actually know their shit. Which, unfortunately, is often times not the case as not everyone that’s sensitive of their digital security proceeds to study cybersecurity. That’s where the “honorable mentions” in the previous paragraph come into play; all of the distros that were mentioned within actually have shown to take security very seriously and acknowledge with the amount of heavy-lifting they do that they hold a sense of responsibility in that regard.
Im most interested in blendOS, because its based.
I once had an interaction with its primary developer and the dude was oblivious on which MAC was configured on his distro; spoiler-alert: none. It does a bunch of cool stuff, but I wouldn’t call it secure (by default) by any stretch of the imagination.
On the software-side of things; Kodi is cool. As for remote control, consider referring to Kodi’s Wiki-page on the matter for options.
Btw, honestly your query is way too vague. If possible, please provide us with more info so that we can better help you 😉.
