What is the very best Linux Distro? - best to make a poll about that

Best Distro

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    151
Grin Machine said:
I really can't fathom why someone would say this other than to shill Arch. I use both on different systems, and they're both better than any of the other package managers for Linux. In my experience, apt has a more coherent syntax and has broken my configuration much less than pacman, but pacman is a bit faster. Apt is the default in Ubuntu/Pop!/Mint for a reason. You really have to be LinusTechTips levels of retarded to fuck your system up using apt.

Also don't use 'apt-get' use 'apt'. They are similar - but distinct - executables, and apt is better in current year.
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Cool, I settled on Debian XFCE, so we'll see. Still torn on Debian Stable vs Testing though.
 
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davids877 said:
Personally I run Testing if I have new hardware that Stable doesn't like. Then usually I let that system eventually become Stable.
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Cool, I looked it up a bit more, turns out Testing has problems that stable and even SID don't have. That being said, Testing isn't bad for the reason you mentionned, but Debian Stable XFCE it is for me (if it works well). If I need anything newer than Stable, Flatpaks should do the trick. Thank You.
 
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Anyone heard of Ultramarine? It's supposed to be a very good Fedore-based distro, and the Flagship edition has a tailored budgie desktop
Also they got a script for migrating your existing fedora installation.
bash <(curl -s https://ultramarine-linux.org/migrate.sh)

ZDNet has a glowing review for it
 
Distros are just a package manager around a repository of software and default configurations. There's usually a philosophy to them, which frankly is probably the most distinctive thing about distributions. The vast majority of distros just do slight, and often quite pointless, changes to whatever major distro they fork from. Then there's the linux kernel, which also can have a plethora of configurations but is the same for every distrbution let alone for the few that apply their own patches to it. This is all stuff you could do yourself in parts under whatever distro you run and it isn't even hard. Learning the ability to configure your own kernel and understanding how to do it and the options available would probably solve 90% of any given linux problem you have.

In general, distros can/could heavily patch the software their distribute as binaries, but as far as I am aware only very few if any do. tl;dr it's all the same shit and if you have strong feelings about distros and say things like "Distro X doesn't work well, but Distro Y is the best ever" all that tells me is that you don't know anything about Linux userland and it's software and pretty much rely blindly on what some distro jannies decide for you. Again, they're just a collection of freely available software. They're not "operating systems" even though distro jannies love to play up their importance by giving them names implying just that.

I'd be careful with more exotic distributions because they're basically just setups by some randos that managed to figure out how to make a website. You have absolutely no idea what comes in these binaries and considering how many basically unknown distros are out there, I'd be very surprised if not at least a hand full of them is compromised/backdoored/malware infected in some way. Same with private "add-on" repositories of major distros, especially if the person(s) running them are completely anonymous unknowns. At that point you're basically downloading random executables off the internet. People are way too trusting with this stuff.

Betonhaus said:
bash <(curl -s https://ultramarine-linux.org/migrate.sh)
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This trend of running random internet scripts pulled via curl is probably the most retarded linux thing of the last few years.

I'll take my tophats and puzzle pieces now.
 
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  • Agree
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AmpleApricots said:
Distros are just a package manager around a repository of software and default configurations. There's usually a philosophy to them, which frankly is probably the most distinctive thing about distributions. The vast majority of distros just do slight, and often quite pointless, changes to whatever major distro they fork from.
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Exactly. Nine out of ten distros really should just be github scripts. If you want "blabla's tuned version of Ubuntu", then just install Ubuntu and curl the script from blabla's github. I feel the same way about the two dozen distros that are literally just "Arch with an installer". Arch has a built-in installer now, but even before that happened these distros really should have just been scripts you curl from the internet, the same way archiso-zfs means there's no justification for "Arch but with ZFS" distros.
 
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sudo zfs rollback mypool/home@zfsautosnapshot-five-minutes-ago
 
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I have my editor configured to not make backup files. If I want to save a copy of the file, I'll tell the fucking editor. I hate programs "being helpful" and writing garbage to disk for no reason.
 
  • Agree
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jeff7989 said:
Why not point it to /tmp which will be flushed on power cycle?
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I make /tmp symlinks every now and then for this reason, but editor backups seem to be dumped in the same directory as the file being edited. I just don't need it.
 
snov said:
sudo zfs rollback mypool/home@zfsautosnapshot-five-minutes-ago
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/usr in dataset called home? Weird.
In all seriousness, are you running zfs on root? How is the experience, I'm thinking about converting my Arch installation to it, mostly to get benefits of all cool features is provides, without dealing with lvm and btrfs. I do have a 6 bay das running zfs with two raidz1 vdevs.
 
jeff7989 said:
/usr in dataset called home? Weird.
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I use NixOS, the concept of anything not easily replaceable outside /home is alien to me.
jeff7989 said:
In all seriousness, are you running zfs on root? How is the experience, I'm thinking about converting my Arch installation to it, mostly to get benefits of all cool features is provides, without dealing with lvm and btrfs. I do have a 6 bay das running zfs with two raidz1 vdevs.
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Yep!
It works great. I've got it taking automatic snapshots, it saves four snapshots at 15 minute intervals, and uses syncoid to send them incrementally to my NAS over wireguard. It's absolutely superb.
Performance on NVMEs isn't great, it's optimised for HDDs, but it's not bad still, and it's improved every update.
 
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Betonhaus said:
Anyone heard of Ultramarine? It's supposed to be a very good Fedore-based distro, and the Flagship edition has a tailored budgie desktop
Also they got a script for migrating your existing fedora installation.
bash <(curl -s https://ultramarine-linux.org/migrate.sh)

ZDNet has a glowing review for it
Click to expand...


The freewheeling cognitive miser in me tells me it looks like some Fedora tards dream project of cooking up a 'Mint' in the Red Hat space.

Anything linux designed to "stay out of your way" is going to fuck you somehow some day when it shits the bed. If you are using an unpopular or new variant you can forget about finding a solution on google or a help forum. You'll get to be a trailblazer figuring out whatever autistic bullshit some semi-pro group of hobbyists decided was in your best interest.

I'm of the mind that eventually Fedora is going to be tainted or scuttled by IBM. CentOS's ignoble end should have Red Hat ecosystem tards abandoning it faster than a big blue ink handler with 5 years to retirement. Some even say its even time to abandon XFS because the clock is ticking.
 
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Matter of taste really. For me personally it's Debian. Barebones and usually just werks right out of the gate, although depending on your hardware you may need a tweak or two but they're usually simple. Also a big fan of Linux Mint and EndeavourOS. The former the same reason as Debian but with extra goodies, while EndeavourOS ships with what you need along with video drivers and uses yay/pacman, which are excellent package managers and my favorites.
 
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std::string said:
Even if not intentionally malicious they can fuck your shit up.
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Thing is, the person originally doesn't have to be malicious, neither do repo maintainers, or a distro project. Some malware injected into packages or a script is just a disgruntled tranny janny with the right access/server-who hosts-the-stuff exploit away. To be entirely fair though, this can happen with any project, even the big ones. It's just more likely that somebody notices there in a timely manner.

Personally, I used gentoo for a long time. Using gentoo in the early-to-mid-00s taught me a lot. A year or two ago I got tired of fighting the package maintainers on increasingly annoying decisions that showed that they don't understand the packages they maintain. While it is cool gentoo lets you do that, and I loved the ease in how you can introduce patches to builds, it also got tiring and needlessly complicated to revert random useless cruft introduced into my system via updates. Nowadays I use Alpine. Everything's optional, I can stick to a stable version for a reasonable amount of time and I have absolute oversight what's installed and a package manager that doesn't try to meddle with my configuration files all the time why still enjoying the advantages of a binary distribution. Musl is rarely a problem, if ever. YMMV.
 
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