I daily drive Fedora, but I’ve used Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, and more. Once you get used to how Linux works, distro doesn’t really matter that much aside from edge case distros that operate totally differently like Nix. I chose Fedora because I like the dnf package manager.
The only distro I don’t like is Ubuntu. I had to setup a Linux VM at work so I figured Ubuntu would be a good choice for that. Firefox is painfully slow to open because of Snap, so I uninstall it and run “apt install firefox” which Ubuntu overrides and installs the Snap again.
Fuck. That. Deleted the VM and installed Debian instead.
Yeah, over the years they’ve all become largely the same except for package management and the locations of some config files and system binaries (/bin,/sbin,/usr/local/sbin, etc…). Some attempt to be a one size fits all model and contain everything that you’d want, while others give you the bare minimum.
I think it's just because some things have country-specific formats. For example, if you want to prefill credit card details, you have to figure out how the credit card fields are labelled.
The first time I installed Debian on my desktop I didn’t do my homework properly. This was a long time ago. It didn’t take long for me to realize just how out of date many packages were and that was a deal breaker. I have since used Debian successfully in different contexts, because I knew what to expect. I still wouldn’t install Debian stable on my desktop because I prefer to have a more up to date environment. Might try Debian sid one of these days though. But yeah, Debian, great distro, but you need to know what you’re getting in to.
The great thing about Debian is; it has a gear-shifter.
Whether stable or sid, it’s still debian but you can go from “rock solid, reliable” to “most recent with several updates per day” in the same ecosystem and just by changing the repositories, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, done.
Alpine. It’s powerful and fills a need in a specific use case. Just not my need, nor my use case, and that’s OK.
My docker usage is mostly testing and validation that when I run the code on the actual hardware, it will work as expected. I tend to want the container to match the target environment.
its easy for you because you been playing around with Linux, I tried to install SSH on zorin os. But after installing SSH , it needs to be restarted, when tried to do that , it won’t saying the ash server did not start, A simple thing like this is have me stumped in Linux where as in windows it was just installing putty and done.
I mean for most Linux derivatives, getting SSH setup for outgoing connections is usually install the openssh package from your distros repos, though I imagine many preinstall it, no reboot should be necessary, and you just type ssh user@hostname into a terminal to connect to the remote ssh server to access stuff on that computer. There shouldn’t be a need to reboot for installing app that’s not a service.
Wanting to enable ssh access to the computer you are using so a remote client can connect to it? Well the same openssh package should have come with sshd which acts as the server to allow remote ssh client to connect. It’d probably need enabling (so it’s run automatically on boot) and starting (so you don’t have to reboot to have it going), on distributions using systemd that’s usually just systemctl enable sshd.service (which makes sure the sshd daemon will be started on next boot) followed by systemctl start sshd.service to start it immediately so it’s running straight away, (or systemctl enable sshd.service --now to roll both steps into one).
Out of your price range listed, but I’ll list it for others. Sennheiser Momentum 4. Bluetooth tested on four different Linux devices and all have worked perfectly so far.
Super comfortable, great quality. Headphones I plan on having for a decade or more, I would highly recommend them.
these are my choice as well, and they work pretty flawlessly with Linux over Bluetooth; I use Momentum 4s for many hours each day to do meetings and they’ve been highly reliable. however they are not perfect:
ear pads are non-standard and have a built in plastic backing; I’m worried about long-term availability of replacements
can’t do audio+mic over 3.5mm headphone jack, just audio. makes them useless for gaming when you don’t want Bluetooth latency
they have USB audio support which I hoped could be used in place of that 3.5mm connection, but the quality is so poor that everything sounds like you’re on a Skype call from 2003
so they are good but don’t solve all problems, still looking for that perfect set of headphones, but these are excellent as work headphones where I’m just doing meetings and listening to music.
One that might be controversial: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I still have a lot of respect for this distro and I really wanted to like it but it’s just not for me. It’s the fact that major updates could occur any day of the week, which could be time-consuming to install or they could change the features of the OS. It always presented a dilemma of whether to hold back updates which might include holding back critical updates.
So rolling distros aren’t for me, everyone expects to run in to some occasional issues with Arch, but TW puts a lot of emphasis on testing and reliability, so I thought it might be for me. But the reality is I much prefer the release cycle and philosophy of Fedora, I think that strikes the best balance.
Like SD cards suddenly being read only, then, as mysteriously as it started, they’re read/write again (sometimes while mid-operation)? Yeah. I have that.
I don’t currently use it as a daily driver, but I tried. The basic, core experience is fine. Depending on what you need, it could be great. In the end I went back to using macOS (though I did ask myself what was working so well for me with GNOME that I wanted to try the experiment to begin with, and that has resulted in a leaner, simpler macOS setup).
The stoppers for me were webcam support (it kind of worked, but with bad image quality issues), and a number of Flatpaks quietly failing at launch. Non-stoppers but papercuts included that you can find ARM packages for some things but they’re direct downloads instead of dnf sources you can set up (e.g. 1Password, Sublime Text), and there are a few weird glitches with some fonts that work fine on x86 setups.
It’s trivial to set up dual-boot, and pretty easy to back out if it doesn’t work for you, provided you read a few paragraphs of documentation. I’ve done it twice on two different machines.
I think the teams that are responsible for bringing proper HDR support are moving slow and waiting for HDR to get its shit together, as right now it’s a poorly standardized dumpster fire of various protocols and definitions and implementations. It’s still a bit of a pain in windows and macos despite the fact that official support exists already.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed–coming from Arch, it just felt so refined and ready to go right out of the box. Then I started installing programs and ran into dependency hell–now on EndeavourOS with the AUR which is great
Additionally, the combination of terminal + GUI to do things just felt wrong
One program that comes to mind is Protonmail Bridge. I first tried installing the RPM via Discover, and it silently failed every time. Next, installed it from the terminal and got an error about missing DejaVu fonts–no problem, I’ll just install them from here, but unfortunately I was getting the same error. I tried to “install anyway” ignoring dependencies–failed again!
Another issue trying to install the linux-surface kernel. The GUI package failed to install (again, silently), and command line packages kept failing since the linux-surface kernel was on 6.6.6 and the rolling release kernel was on 6.6.7–eventually I chrooted in from a live USB, removed the kernel, and replaced it with the linux-surface kernel, but the fact that it kept failing with a “success” message was confusing! Then I had to compile iptsd–on Arch I’d ‘pacman -S git meson ninja gcc etc.’, and searching and selecting package groups via YAST (and hoping my compilation worked) just felt clunky.
I did manage to get everything up and running eventually (save Protonmail), but at that point I’d messed up my installation to the point where I had to start over, and I just loaded up EndeavourOS instead.
I’m sure a lot of these issues stem from a lack of understanding of Tumbleweed itself, and when I get another desktop I’ll be happy to try again. I did love the setup process though–super polished KDE Plasma, and everything that was possible with the stock kernel (even autorotate!) worked out of the box!
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