In my opinion what hes saying is true, but has to be taken with a grain of salt. The choice of the word “pointless” is a little harsh but i understand what he means. They are only derivatives that dont accomplish anything that the distro they forked cant accomplish, ergo they are useless because you could make Ubuntu on debian.
As for why debian and arch are the best, they are the two most well established community maintained distros. That means they have the most people working on them, the most support out there on the internet when you encounter issues, they tend to be the most stable, AND they have no corporate backing which can be seen as “evil” by some people (like Chris in this video).
One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.
You can have any desktop you want on any distro. But some customizations are redone in some distros. In terms of programs you want to run, they pretty much all work on any distro. If a distro is “better for gaming” it usually just means the programs are pre-installed.
People talk about arch and Debian as the best because they have the least customizations, allowing you to install and customize as you wish.
Linux users are mostly tinkerers, they like their customizations their way. I’m in that boat. The less I have to remove to get my customization working, the better. Just give me a black screen and a white blinking cursor, I know how to do the rest from there.
One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.
This is true for the traditional model in which the package manager is the main differentiator between distros. Therefore Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE etc and their derivatives (which make up about 90% of the distros found on DistroWatch) are indeed mostly the same.
But the likes of Gentoo and NixOS etc don’t quite fit the bill. Granted, a new user should only very rarely (if ever) start their Linux journeys on any of these advanced distros.
Yeah, you look at how there are a handful of package managers, and hundreds of distros, they’re pretty much all the “same”
But yes gentoo and NixOS do things the most differently. But even on those you can game on them.
I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.
I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.
Thank you for being thoughtful! I just wanted to add some nuance with my previous comment.
Don’t like that he called some distros pointless. I would have found a better word. Lots on there that I have never used, obviously, because I am not a sadist. I couldn’t tell you what would be good for gaming or not, but flatpaks have made some things easier (or so I’ve heard, don’t quote me on that). And Fedora is a “Devil?”
Anyway. While I don’t watch this channel ever, I am aware of it as a reputable channel for things like this, so it might be trustworthy.
Why are Debian and Arch at the top? Debian is one of the grandaddies. Many distros are built on Debian—MX, Mint, Ubunu, Pop, Zorin, Neon, etc.—and there are many packages in the repos, which are divided into stable, and testing, and unstable sections. So, a Debian base can be stable or extremely up to date. The Debian community and maintainers are another reason the distro is so well-liked. Arch also has a large selection of packages, an excellent wiki, and the AUR to have access to anything missing from regular repos. Manjaro and dozens of others are based on Arch as well, meaning the community is rather large.
No need to follow rules and conventions though. There are many people, myself included, that use Alpine for their desktop because the packages are very up to date.
Interesting that you said Arch has a good wiki. Maybe its just because its not common for beginners to start with Arch but when i read through the installation guide i noticed that there is no explanation on how to create a bootable usb in windows, at least the part for how to verify the signature wasnt explained for a windows user. For Linux Mint it was pretty much at the top, how to create a bootable usb in windows. I was very suprised that this guy called fedora and ubuntu the “devil” when i saw many people here use fedora.
One question though, you talked about packages and how they are sometimes different. How much had the amount of options for packages an effect on you, or anyone, while choosing your distro?
How much had the amount of options for packages an effect on you, or anyone, while choosing your distro?
The number of packages was not something I looked at. I checked the availability of the packages I wanted, and whether or not they we’re up to date.
When I switched to the current distribution I’m using, I did not plan on using it for more than a few days. I just wanted a quick and easy way to try out an up-to-date version of a DE on a low-powered device and have the newest version of the browser I use. It worked so I put it on my main laptop and it still works
If I were going for numbers, Nix has the most I think. The AUR is up there as well. Debian is in 3rd place. But, like I said, I didn’t really think about that.
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.
As an addition to other responses, think that most apps (specially smaller ones) are developed using some framework or set of libraries that might or might not support those protocols.
So let’s pretend that I have an app buit using Electron and that framework does not support Wayland. There’s nothing I can do on the app side until Electron supports Wayland in this fake example.
So it actually takes time for the libraries to support the new protocol and then app developers to update their apps to support it aswell.
That’s why you see that the Wayland migration is incremental and not all at once.
Gamescope is a microcompositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:
-Spoofing resolutions -turning off VSync on Wayland desktops -using HDR -Upscaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling -Limiting framerates
In particular, gamescope is rendered seperately to your entire desktop, meaning that certain problem games that may have issues when rendered by your normal compositor (wayland or X11) may work fine under gamescope. For instance: certain games may have jerky mouse input or frequent crashes when running under wayland, but those issue may disappear when running within gamescope.
(this is also why we call gamescope a micro-compositor, as it runs seperately to your main compositor that handles your desktop e.g. Wayland or X11)
To give the org credit, they found and fixed the problem – a typo in a script, apparently – but as a result, the sequencing of the demos was disrupted and the result was a little confusing.
I’m gonna quote this, the next time my boss asks why we need a thorough testing culture.
Edit: Also: language servers and static code checkers safe money, so don’t hassle me about why I need to config neovim while clocked in.
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