I’ve never seen an infographic for “I use arch, btw.” until now.
oh come on. I don’t ever say it outside of meme contexts. I just personally enjoy rolling releases and don’t really like the corporate feeling of Fedora, so i’m left with only really Arch as a good option.
Just lighthearted poking, I don’t have anything bad to say about anyone’s choices. I didn’t mean any offense. Sorry if that was its tone.
No, no don’t worry, no offense taken 😅 I should have expected it lol
Or, as honourably mentioned, OpenSuSE, specifically tumbleweed.
Opensuse can also be rolling. And that is european!
Did you even try void?
No. I’ve never understood the point of it
well, if you were serious in your deduction, one point of it is that arch is not your only option.
Fair point, and Void is cool in its own right, but there are good reasons it mostly falls under “obscure” distro category.
First is, of course, the systemd-free nature of it. Linux world absolutely needs systemd-free distros, but your average Linux user simply doesn’t know how to handle them properly, and the learning curve is somewhat steep. Besides, everyone and everything comes with an assumption you run systemd, so often times, you’ll be on your own figuring out the correct fix.
Second is a relatively small userbase. Void, while not being completely unknown, is not by any means a mainstream distro. We have those - some people still run Slackware, for example - but they quickly fall outside the scope of most users due to a relatively underdeveloped community, which is crucial for a Linux project.
This is why Void is often not even seen as an option.
Runit is actually quite simple. If you want a service that your distro packages, you just have to install it and symlink it’s directory from (in void’s case) /etc/sv/app-or-service to /var/service/app-or-service. Inside that dir you’ll find a “run” script and, maybe, a “finish” script that the service manager (sv) will use to initiate and interrupt the service. This is helpful to know if you want to create custom services; i have some for things like brightness, manual tiling, and clipboard management.
I see! But there’s still much more than service management, not all of it packaged into the “init” part of systemd. And each of these things need to be learned. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s just one more big headache on top of what Linux already is.
Also, out of curiosity from someone who barely touched Void - how do you create a custom service? Is writing run and finish scripts sufficient?
Yeah, that’s all there is to it. The finish script is optional, and rememer to make your links. You can have user level services by making links for runsvdir-USERNAME. This creates a service that manages your services.
It could probably be more robustn but here’s my setup:
$ readlink {/etc/sv,/var/service}/runsvdir-$USER | sed "s:$USER:USERNAME:g" /home/USERNAME/.dotfiles/runsvdir-USERNAME /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME $ print -l /etc/sv/runsvdir-$USER/*(.) /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME/conf /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME/finish /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME/run $ print -l /etc/sv/runsvdir-$USER/*(.) | to -b -C '#' -A $'\n' cat | sed "s:$USER:USERNAME:g" # /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME/conf #!/bin/sh set -eu self="$(realpath "$0")" root="$(dirname "$self")" user="$(basename "$root" | sed 's:^runsvdir-::')" home="/home/$user" groups="$(id -Gn "$user" | tr ' ' ':')" svdir="$home/service" # # /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME/finish #!/usr/bin/env sh set -eu self="$(realpath "$0")" root="$(dirname "$self")" [ ! -e "$root/conf" ] || . "$root/conf" sv -w600 force-stop "$svdir/"\* # # /etc/sv/runsvdir-USERNAME/run #!/bin/sh # start up for user-level service configuration set -eu exec 2>&1 root="$(realpath "$0" | xargs -d '\n' dirname)" [ ! -e "$root/conf" ] || . "$root/conf" exec chpst -u "$user:$groups" runsvdir -P "$svdir" #For clarity, the
tocommand is an xargs alternative that’s not out, yet.I see, thanks!
Fedora is corporate? I nearly spat my coffee ;-)
I’m flashing back to working with suse on unitedlinux and the challenges we had. If you want a very Corporate distro, it’s right there.
Never again.
I mean… fedora is RHEL, which is very corporate
I’m getting tired of dispelling this myth, and I don’t even use either 🙄
Do people even read? RHEL is downstream from Fedora. They’re both forks of Red Hat, but Red Hat ≠ RHEL.
Does this need to be on a billboard or something?
Sorry. It’s still corporate, since it’s coming from red hat. Thanks for telling me though.
It’s not “coming from” Red Hat, Fedora is forked from it originally but is directly downstream from the linux kernel, there’s no Red Hat involved between the Linux Foundation and the Fedora devs.
In fact, there’s no more Red Hat at all, there’s only RHEL, which is downstream from Fedora.
Fedora is not downstream from Red Hat. I don’t know how to put that in any plainer terms…
I see. Have a nice day. I still won’t use Fedora.
Fedora is the most corporate not-actually-corporate distro
Alma
OpenSUSE got me onto Linux and was such a great option for a first distro. I still think about changing back sometimes. I’m surprised it doesn’t get recommended more often.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is my daily driver. I recommend it to most people. It’s a nice balance of leading edge and stability. Plus, snapper makes it easy to rollback if an update borks something.
Started with Debian and still use it on servers. Moved to Arch but recently put Tumbleweed on my old laptop to try it out. Fast becoming a favourite. Like you said, rolling release with automatic snapshots is the best of both worlds.
Same. It is really nice.
Slowroll is my daily. I like it because most distros preach some kind of extreme philosophy, like Arch is ultra bare, Ubuntu et al are super easy, others are bleeding edge or slow and stable. openSUSE is (mostly) absolutely middle-of-the-road with a get-the-job-done kind of attitude I guess it makes it somewhat forgettable but I need the OS to just get out of the way and let me use my computer.
SUSE has always kind of been of an also ran in the eyes of a lot of users. I have tried the stable versions before Tumbleweed and I have even used Tumbleweed for a while. It’s a solid choice and the user base is awesome.
I really, really, wanted to love SUSE, but there is just something about it that I just don’t vibe with. It’s a good distro and offers a lot. But it’s just a bit uncomfortable like a suit jacket that doesn’t quite fit right through the shoulders.
arch btw
Ubuntu -> Mint.
I don’t know why I’d change, Mint just works. That’s all I ever wanted.
All I ever wanted. All I ever needed. Heeeere , in my arms.
Words are very unnecessary
I always come back to Mint. Far from just a “beginner distro”, it’s a practical and solid choice for anyone devoted to something other than tweaking, perfecting, and personalizing an OS. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if it’s your passion and you have the time. Personally, I wouldn’t mind making my perfect Arch or NixOS setup, but my free time is limited and there is always something I’m interested in working on more.
Same, really. I keep trying other distros, and have Kubuntu on my laptop right now, but it’s still just a tiny bit too buggy compared to Mint.
Nice meme! Its interesting that you’ve tried more than one distro. Personally, I prefer to pick the best one right away and stick with that. I think one of Zote’s precepts mentions this. I use mint btw.
/jerk
I think I may have a favorite.
I ditched slackware in 98 after the validation issue became starkly problematic.
SLSA.dev .
Slackware was my first distro
I might have slipped up on my way here, but I’m happy with how it turned out.
image
wow… and what DE do you use with Slackware? I assume you just use pure CLI though
Sawfish WM and a few fbpanel instances
Well that a blast from the past
That CLI music player looks nice, I can’t find it though. Looks like you made it, did you share it somewhere?
Ahh yeah, that’s the music player I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year called Aika. It’s still pretty early on, but it’s mostly usable so far, depending on your needs. I mostly use it as my daily player right now, except for a few odd cases (like Opus files).
Aika is a spiritual successor to my other music player, Benben, which looks very similar, but not exact. Aika has some different features and goals, is much easier to build, and is lighter on system resources. But Benben is much more mature and featured complete. My goal is to release Benben v1.0 by years end, put it in maintenance mode, then focus on Aika.
What’s up with the text in the wallpaper? I’d think it’s slop, but it looks as if someone deliberately made it look borked.
I have no idea. I don’t necessarily think it’s slop (though it could still be)… I think someone just didn’t know how to read Japanese. 'Cause like the sign that’s advertising coffee and breakfast stuff is correct, and the sign further back labeled “Collisto” and “ブティッ” (rest is cut off, I suspect it’s ブティック) is correct, but the rest are upside down. Though that doesn’t explain the upside-down bottle with “Grape Boutique” or whatever on it.
So yeah, fuck if I know, I just found it and kinda liked it for the mood lol
The coffee one is not correct, vertical katakana should have vertical ー, the same mistake is across the rest of the ad, it also says バン instead of パン.
寿司屋 is technically correct, but you’d never see that on a sign, it sounds more like a description of a place rather than an ad sign, if you know what I mean.
中古 is written like 古中 for some reason? The text under (above) it is barely legible, whatever I can make out of it is just random characters somewhat related to 中古, like 品 or 料, but I can’t string it together into something that’d make sense.
…
Did what I probably should have done from the very beginning, looks like this is the source and it came to be before slop became common. The person who made this has clearly used something to generate it, the sheer quantity for the timeline is kind of insane, but they were probably using the old tools.
Very nice find!
Do you have dotfiles available somewhere? I do quite like the window decorations and the rest of what I assume to be of the gtk theme.
Not for everything… but I can point you in some directions:
- GTK theme: orthogonal2, I think I’m using the “darkCold” one with the “dark-darkCold” color scheme. Read through the docs, it’s an interesting customization system.
- Sawfish theme (the window decorations): customized version of the built-in “StyleTab” theme. I just picked some colors for the buttons, really. It’s StyleTab’s “Default” frame and button style, and the “Reduced” color proposals. I believe StyleTab is specific to Sawfish WM.
- Font: Orbitron Medium for the window titles, Avenir LT Std Roman elsewhere.
- Icons: Sours, the Full-Color variant.
- Mouse cursor: Hatsune Miku
- Aika’s theme: the “dark-neon-alt” theme that’s in my repo, it gets installed with
rake installso just choose it in the config file. - Wallpaper: I dunno, I found it while searching for cyberpunk wallpapers. And yes, half the signs are upside-down XD Here’s a copy.
As for the dotfiles I can share, I don’t have them in a repo, but I’ll put them here:
- ~/.sawfishrc
- ~/.sawfish/custom (you don’t edit this by hand normally!)
- Top fbpanel bar config
- Buttom fbpanel bar config
- That amigaos-line.sh script referenced in the top fbpanel config
I think that’s everything…
Thank you! ❤️
Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn’t. Just a great overall balance.
My first was actually DSL: “Damn Small Linux”, contained entirely on a CD to remove a TERRIBLY resistant malware from my Windows XP machine. (It was awesome for that! Had no idea what I was doing lol.)
Tried Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Studio, but they didn’t like my Wi-Fi devices back in those days, so I didn’t get to do much with them!
Used Mint seriously on my aging laptop and loved it. It’s such an excellent on-ramp and you can hang out with it as long as you like.
Later tried Manjaro for a while but…it started having some controversial project decisions and just didn’t feel like home.
Using EndeavourOS on my gaming laptop and it works great! Considering migrating though: Arch is an excellent teacher, but I’ve had to spend unexpected weekends fixing weird hitches after updates.
Honorable Mention: Puppy Linux! I used to be able to boot it to any laptop from my Android phone, and that was a really neat trick for public computers and stuff.
Hey I resemble that journey. Very few people metion DSL and Puppy. Those lived on a multiboot flash drive I carry around “JIC” (these days I just bring Mint and Tails).
I just commented elsewhere how Mint became home - that “long as you like” is still going (jeez 8y at this point lol).
Cool! Yeah, they don’t seem to be referenced as much anymore, but they were seriously impressive and had their use cases. :D
that “long as you like” is still going (jeez 8y at this point lol).
Yeah, Mint is often referred to by folks as a “beginner distro” implying you’ll somehow inevitably skill up and distro hop, and sure, plenty do, but it really doesn’t have to be that way!
(Heck, Eliot the super hacker in Mr. Robot used it as his home distro! Lol 😉)
I mean, it’s stable, you can still get newer stuff and gaming via FlatPak, and it’s just overall friendlier. The community is super helpful and nice too!
I personally jumped to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because I like having new features sooner. (I blame Blender haha!), and honestly, I didn’t expect to fall in love with KDE as much as I did. I really like KDE. :p
I’d always encourage people to try other distros just to see if they do something that fits them better or something, but yeah, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to “graduate” from Mint. It’s lovely. :D
Favorite is OpenSuse Tumbleweed. It’s stable mostly, and quite fixable when it isn’t. Just a great overall balance.
I am actually thinking that a stable-stable distro like Debian or OpenSuse Leap as a base system, and on top either GNU Guix or a VM with Tumbleweed or Suse Slowroll is a great option. Very stable for productivity, and at the same time very current for programming and exploring new stuff.
I currently use Debian stable, and both Gnu Guix and an Arch VM on top.
Kubuntu FTW !
Debian is where greybeards go to retire things just work once you configured them and you don’t need the helping hand of the AUR as you can just build your own packages with aptbuild.
Hey! My beard isn’t that… oh, fuck, I guess it is. Where does the time go?
I hear you brother 1998 was just yesterday right?
I sure am excited for gaming this year. I saw some adverts in a magazine for Half-Life, Ocarina of Time, and Resident Evil 2 and I can’t decide.
I’m not a greybeard (yet) but
xbps-srcwould like to have a word.Also, Debian is bad for cognitive abilities since if you use it long enough you forget how to configure things. /j
Shit. I’ve been on Debian for decades now. Maybe I’m just an old soul… Or I’m just lazy. I don’t even configure my DE anymore. The OS install of today will be wiped in no time, so it’s not worth being too attached.
Debian is for my homelab, where things randomly breaking would ruin the day of multiple family members. Arch is for my personal machines, where things randomly breaking is an excuse to learn more about my hobby
As a youngblood I have heard of the iron stability of Debian, but simply find it difficult to adopt for gaming-related reasons (both hosting and as a game client).
I do wish to one day study the greybeards’ work for a future project box, however. That knowledge needs to be part of my generation as well, for at least a few of us.
Nethack runs fine on my Debian computer.
I really think Ubuntu is the most common first distro people try. A common reoccurrence here is the inability to see what an average person, in terms of tech literacy, knows and are willing to put time and effort into. Ubuntu has been the face of Linux for a long time (obviously not based on people who know and use linux). I wish Mint took that place as it’s so much better.
I was gonna say that “and put effort into” is important.
I admin various Linux Servers, been through most distros at work and at home. I’m an experienced Linux admin/user. I’m settled on Mint at home for the foreseeable future.
After a long day/week/career doing IT, the last thing I want is for my primary PC to be a project-home. Mint Cinnamon ended up being the home I fell in love with - honestly was expecting it to be another kitchy distro that I would maybe reccommend for noobs (I mean it is also that). I couldn’t be happier - LMDE is the only thing that makes me wonder about greener grass.
I haven’t gotten to 95% perfect since Ubuntu pre-unity, and that one very long Arch build I did that one time. Even Debian, the home I grew up in, wasn’t the home I wanted to live in forever.
No shade on any other Distros/DEs out there. Everyone has different homes and it’s their home and I love that people have them and that they’re all different, and I want many options to keep existing. Past me would not understand present me’s choices.
Similar situation, experienced professional user but I’m running kubuntu at home. I just posted to another user about not wanting a project pc. I want to use my computer, not fix it or tweak it. It’s not other distributions are bad, it’s that this one is fine for me right now and it’s not windows.
Favorite: MX Linux
First Distro Used: Ubuntu 6.06
Distro You Want to Use in the Future: CachyOS
Honorable Mention: Pardus
Distro You Liked the Least: Mandriva
Distro You Currently Use: Bazzite
The Distro You Used for the Longest Time: Opensuse
I love Ubuntu currently but I’m planning on switching. I just love the feel of it.
I feel it. As a distro itself I’m not a huge fan of how it does things, but I really do like their theming, colors, font, aesthetic, logo, all that.
Thankfully easy enough to make any distro look like anything, with a little effort. :)
First? Redhat.
Used? Gentoo, Debian, Mepis, sidux, peppermint, mint, fedora, cachyos, puppy, damnsmall, evil entity, suse, opensuse, Slackware, arch, and who knows how many more.
Using right now: Debian, fedora, cachyos, opensuse, Slackware. Different distro depending on need and device.
Favorite? Real soft spot for mepis, it made it easy back in the day. Fedora right now: it always just works, there is nothing to do just update and move on. Also Debian. Because Debian.
Worst: Ubuntu. Such a piece of crap, always breaking since first release.
TBH I have trouble telling why so many people in this thread complain about Ubuntu breaking, it always Just Works™ for me. Did they form their opinion around 2010, or are they using the six-monthly releases? I always used Ubuntu LTS (and never the default desktop).
Started with their first release. So broken compared to everything else at that time.
Now on new releases to this day it still throws weird errors or doesnt work as expected AT INSTALL. Usually reboots will fix some of those issues, sometimes I don’t even know if they are real issues, but it just shows Canonical doesnt make a very good product.
Then sooner or later, with Canonical not able to keep an idea longer than 6 months, something else will break. Its just the Ubuntu way.
Seems like their server version is better, I can’t really complain about it. I don’t have to interact with it much, but it behaves a lot better.
Also, Xbuntu and Kbuntu somehow fared better than Ubuntu, much less problems.
People are/were actually using the default Ubuntu desktop, and modern Gnome in general? In a fediverse linuxmemes community?
Granted, it still doesn’t speak well for them if their default desktop has so many issues that don’t exist on the flavors.
lol.
All my complaining about Ubuntu and yet I kind of liked Unity. I had it on a guest computer and a laptop for awhile.
I actually liked the orange colors. I liked the fonts. I even liked early unity as an alternative to gnome back then.
But it just kept changing!
It did have some design wins, I still use Ubuntu mono as my standard terminal font (this includes my Debian systems).
Favorite: Fedora First Distro Used: Not entirely sure. We had a couple Linux computers growing up that my dad set up and he distro hopped a bit. I used Ubuntu(or variants, e.g. xubuntu) during high school and a bit of college. Distro You Want to Use in the Future: Bazzite or another immutable distro Honorable Mention: Manjaro Distro You Liked the Least: Debian Distro You Currently Use: Fedora with hyprland(ML4W) The Distro You Used for the Longest Time: Probably Fedora
