While I find that I agree with his takes like, 55% of the time, I do agree that Debian and Arch are basically the S-tier distros. So many of the other ones are basically just opinionated Debian or Arch, and while those can be useful when you’re getting started, I’ve found that for the long haul you’re better off just figuring out how to configure the base distribution with the elements of the opinionated ones that you like rather than use those distros themselves. Also, RIP CentOS. I would have put that in a high tier before the RHELmageddon (not top tier mind you, but it had a well defined use case and was great for that purpose).
I’ve been using Arch for years and can’t pull myself away because everything just works. Whats the difference between arch and whatever the derivatives are? I don’t even know what distros to arch are the Ubuntu / mint to debian
EndeavourOS is easy-mode Arch. You get a liveboot with XFCE and a graphical installer with quite some choices, from a wide selection of desktop environments and window managers to the init system and filesystem. You get pacman and yay, with the AUR preconfigured.
Manjaro is the easiest way to break Arch. It has its own repos which are just Arch but 2 weeks behind. This causes problems when (not saying if) you add the AUR, which is not 2 weeks behind but in sync with Arch main repos. Thus causing breakages due to migrations not happening at the same time.
Garuda is not as widely used as Endeavour and Manjaro, but from those who’ve used it, I’ve only heard good things.
I am using EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition. Was nice to have a starting point for my first pure WM and my first Arch install. The Sway Community Edition is looking for maintainers but I am a bit disappointed by some things in upstream Sway and am not sure I want to stick with it long-term yet. Might try Hyprland at some point.
Ah ok i gues si can understand it makes sense that if you really wanna learn linux you gotta be ready to get your hands dirty aka figuring out how to configure the distribution. Maybe its just very overwhelming because a beginner doesnt even know what you can / can’t configure. But probably everything
Yeah basically all a “distribution” is is a selection of software and configurations, and they distribute (hence the name) that software and configurations as a bundle. It definitely can be daunting to learn all of this at once as a newcomer, but on the other side of that coin I’ve seen many people begin their Linux journey on a “beginner friendly” distribution who come to see that distro’s configs as default and need to unlearn/relearn many habits as they progress through their journey. I think, too, that often people who are immersed in the Linux world don’t have a great perspective on what is/isn’t confusing for a new user and often end up obfuscating things with other things that are just as complicated, if not more.
The video is clickbait and a few of the distros are in categories just for dramatic effect. I personally share Chris’s criteria for “pointless” distros however, and I hope that his main “clickbait motive” was trying to stop people from hopping around from gimmick distro to gimmick distro when the real magic has always been with the Debian/Arch base underneath the hood. I don’t care to give Chris the attention he wants so I’d rather answer your questions instead of talk about the video directly:
I agree that Debian and Arch are “S-tier” distros. Not that they’re better than everything else for every usecase but they are very high quality community-run distros with large package bases, and they accomplish their mission statements with ease. If you’re a Linux power user for long enough you may eventually settle into one of these two distros because they give you a lot of room to mold your configuration without being opinionated by downstream distro maintainers.
Linux Mint is very good, and it’s probably the only “fork distro” that I recommend people use because it makes Debian/Ubuntu very simple and usable for new users, and it’s done so for many years with a great track record. I currently run Debian Stable but if you put a gun to my head and said “you can only run Linux Mint from now on” I’d be fine with it. Specifically, I prefer the LMDE edition but the normal version is good too.
You can run cutting-edge gaming stuff on Debian Stable and Linux Mint by using Flatpak Lutris/Steam, which uses its own cutting-edge Mesa package instead of the system’s, and you can also install a cutting-edge kernel on these stable distros by using Debian backports or e.g. XanMod. I prefer using stable distros like Debian Stable and pulling cutting-edge versions of your important packages through Flatpak or other means, which gives you a “stable base and rolling top”.
I think the general usecase for Arch has diminished from half a decade ago due to Flatpak’s popularity, and IMO a stable base setup makes more sense if you can get everything important that you need from Flatpaks. With Arch, not only are the programs you care about bleeding-edge, everything is bleeding-edge, and you may end up with annoying bugs from packages you didn’t even know existed.
If you want a more modern version of the Linux desktop without the bleeding-edge of Arch I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great cutting-edge distro. They have extensive automatic testing that ensures high system stability even while living near the edge of package freshness. The main downside is OpenSUSE’s smaller package base compared to Debian/Arch-based distros.
thanks for the explanations. I only used Ubuntu like 5 years ago and since then never again. From what i understand flatpak is a linux command to install applications. Ubuntu uses apt / apt-get (whatever the difference is there). Why does this guy shit on apt so much? I dont know whats wrong with it and why is flatpak so good?
Flatpak is like an alternative packaging system that exists outside of your distro’s normal packaging model, e.g. apt/dnf/pacman etc. The killer features are that Flatpaks work on any distro with a single universal package, and that the software versions will be cutting-edge without needing cutting-edge system dependencies. Flatpaks run in their own dependency network and generally don’t rely on anything from the host system - this means that you can have arbitrary software on your machine that your distro/repo maintainers don’t need to compile/quality-control/stability-test/etc. It also comes with an easy sandboxing framework out of the box as a bonus.
In my case I usually use Flatpaks to get more current versions of software without totally messing up Debian’s “Debian does not break” stability model - Debian is meticulously maintained so that its “Stable” branch only has ultra-stable versions of software, at the expense of those packages being older and frozen. If you use a distro with smaller package repos (e.g. OpenSUSE/Fedora/etc) you’ll probably appreciate finding Flatpak versions of software that you’d normally need to manually compile.
Flatpaks are cool, and they have a specific use. They’re not the end-all be-all of packaging and they’re (hopefully) not going to replace apt/dnf/pacman. As for why they hate apt I have no idea. apt is good, and you can even make it a little nicer by installing nala and using that instead of apt.
If the basis of this thread is that you’re digging for distro recommendations I’d personally steer you towards Linux Mint and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for their ease of use. Debian is a little more difficult to set up than Linux Mint but not tremendously so. Arch is more of an “intermediate” difficulty distro where the main challenge is that your system packages are fast-moving and can break/change in small ways from day-to-day. If you aren’t comfortable with Linux you might get frustrated with minor bugs that you don’t know how to troubleshoot. Conversely, if you want to learn Linux then dealing with Arch’s shenanigans will help expose you to various parts of the system naturally.
I’m actually using Ardour as my daily daw, very powerfull (check my profile if interested in libre music). Consider I made electronic music for many years with proprietary software.
Care to elaborate? Seagate is one of my favorite brand. And i read a lots of reviews and tech articles before purchasing any components. I am curious to learn about what i have missed about them. Thx
A lot of people have very strong opinions of brands based on a woefully inadequate sample size. Typically this comes from a higher than expected failure rate, possibly even much higher than expected. It could’ve been a bad model, a bad batch at manufacturing, improper handling from the retailer, or even an improper running environment. But even the greediest data hoarders only have a few dozen drives, often in just a couple of environments and use-cases.
Very few of these results are actually meaningful trends. For every person that swears by WD and will never touch a Seagate, there’s someone else that swears by Seagate and will never touch another WD. HGST and Toshiba seem to have a very slight edge on reliability, but it’s very small. And there are still people that refuse to touch them because of the “Death Star” drives many years ago.
It’s also very difficult to predict which models will have high failure rates. By the time it becomes clear one is a lemon, they’re already EoL.
I avoid buying WD new because of their (IMHO completely illegal) stance on warranty, but I’m comfortable buying their stuff used.
Don’t worry too much about brand. Instead go for specs and needs. Follow a good backup strategy and you’ll be fine
HGST is a part of WD and has been for quite a while.
But a big part of why the average consumer drive kind of sucks is that there is way more money in enterprise level drives so very little resources get put toward client drives.
Owned by, yes. Have their operations actually been integrated though? I haven’t checked in a long time, but it was still a separate division last time I did.
You would think ppl on Lemmy are somewhat more able to read, understand and interpret data like published by backblaze but it seems like they are just as everywhere blind because of a onetime experience 10 years ago (3tb constallation drivr by Seagate)
Hopefully they’ll build in support for disroot, fastmail, posteo, protonmail, tutanota, and other opensource encrypted mail agends that don’t provide a bridge.
Edit: so the summary of the video is “marketing”. Linux, KDE, and opensource projects in general need way better marketing. If Linux could rebrand itself as anything but “the geek thing”, I bet it would be much more successful.
Encrypted mail providers should require a bridge in order to be able to pull or send emails with. Protonmail has “Proton Bridge”, tutanota has nothing. I see now that disroot, fastmail and posteo have direct SMTP access 🤔 That leads me to question: what actually is encrypted? Direct SMTP and IMAP access probably means they can read your mail.
There is encryption at rest (storage encryption), transport encryption and end-to-end encryption. E.g. Posteo has transport encryption and optional storage encryption. With activated storage encryption, Posteo cannot read your mail because the encryption key on their server is only usable with your password (which they do not store). Proton Bridge adds end-to-end encryption to Protonmail
Part of the problem extended beyond software. Back when I got into recording, FireWire was necessary for the data bandwidth and it was standard on Macs. I had to install a card to work with my recording interface on Windows.
On a side note, been using Reaper for years and it has been great as a hobbyist option. I understand why any professional would use something like ProTools instead, though.
I personally like the fact that u-he, acmt and audio damage provide their plugins on linux. I know, not FOSS, but game changing when it comes to switching music production over to linux. Vital is also available on linux, as is bitwig as host.
It seems like a lot of the folk here could be pretty interested in the revival of the Fedora Audio Creation Special Interest Group, as it could become a real powerhouse when it comes to getting more people involved into music creation with Linux.
All my windows vst work great and with pretty much no configuration with yabridge. I think some heavy drm’ed vsts are a bit more problematic but most (all in my case) work.
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