Vanilla OS. I loved the idea of having access to so many packaging formats and package managers at my fingertips but maintaining the system, managing everything and keeping in mind all the things that I’m doing was just too much work for me when I just wanted a system that I can use without any hassle. I know immutable distros are quite the buzz these days but it just isn’t for me. That was also the time when I was trying to find an Ubuntu based vanilla GNOME distro
iirc the devs have added Disk Encryption support and it’ll ship in the next release (Orchid). I can imagine how confusing and frustrating that must’ve been!
Maybe I’ll give Vanilla OS another try when Orchid releases
The Linux Experiment covered Asahi (I believe it was Debian) and he said he’ll review the Fedora’s version too. It was a month or two ago and there were some things still in the works. But as a Fedora user and it being Asahi’s flagship which has been fine tuned according to them, I’d bet Nick will post a video soon. If you’re an early adopter, I’d say give Fedora a go now, otherwise just wait for Nick to cover it in his usual detail on his channel. Nick’s the man and will cover it very well. This will probably be the best conformation unless an early adopteradopter or Dev can chime in here.
If you’re interested in using flakes, this repo was helpful when learning how to get my first system configurations set up in an organized way github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs
Ubuntu’s package managers won’t stop fighting with each other so I can’t complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don’t feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don’t like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
openSUSE is great, but the package managers won’t stop fighting with each other and it’s lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
Debian’s packages are too old.
Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
The packages I want aren’t in Solus. Is this distro even still around?
And for distros I won’t consider trying:
Gentoo is too much work.
Qubes is too much work and I can’t play games on it.
I don’t like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.
The main package I was thinking of was the kernel. I saw the recent Linux Experiment video by Nick and they were using a kernel version (6.1?) that was no longer supported nor an LTS.
This is good to know. I’m more into rolling releases like Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE anyway, so the latest Ubuntu’s packages tend to be a bit old for me anyway.
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.
Hardly. I self-host a bunch of VMs on a home server. It would be a waste of resources having window managers running them just so I can click around once in a while. Also, it takes way more time to set up a container in Docker Desktop compared to just copying across a command to the terminal from a setup guide.
All of them except arch. It just strikes the perfect balance between being easy to pick up after a bit of reading and keeping its simplicity. Paired with vanilla gnome its uwu gang. I also looked at manjaro and stayed well clear of that, vanilla is so much simpler as I don’t have to worry about conflicts caused by man jar roe randomly holding back packages for no reason.
Great post, I especially enjoyed reading the comments on the different distros you’ve tried. I totally agree with the statement that (almost) everything can be done with Linux.
I am using Linux Mint because it was the first distro I’ve found that would get my weird WiFi on my old Laptop to work and so I ended up using it on my main machine as well. But I’ve recently looked around for something new. Not that I’m not happy with Mint, just out of curiosity. Been eying KDE Plasma for a while but not sure if I want to give up the convenience of knowing Mint quite well. And I had to switch distro cause Mint isn’t supporting KDE natively anymore. Or maybe I should just play around with some new themes for a fresh look :).
If it’s a case of hardware compatibility I would reccomend either sticking with the distribution that works or just hardwire your ethernet connection. KDE Plasma is a DE as far as I know but KDE Neon looks really good if that’s what you meant.
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