this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
49 points (85.5% liked)
Linux
48677 readers
357 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you're into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you've been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro's probably easier than you think.
I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster... and I'm still running that install to this day. I'm typing this from it!
In practice I've found Arch's always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there's containers for the few stubborn "only works on this exact version of Ubuntu" cases but it's pretty rare.
I've been mostly happy with Bazzite (Fedora based) but sometimes the immutability aspect can be frustrating. I might say any old distro with a regular Timeshift backup is good enough. OP already said they tried Mint, which works well with Timeshift, and I don't know if it's improved with it's update frequency.
Bazzite drive me nuts. It's pretty good out of the box but I had to do some crazy shit to make stuff work for my friend that's just starting on Linux.
I measured it, I was able to install like 2GB worth of Arch updates in the time it took to
rpm-ostree kargs --append. Waiting 5 minutes to install a tiny <1MB utility package gets annoying fast. It's nice to be able to just tell my friend to boot the last generation though. Tradeoffs.It runs great otherwise though, I see the appeal especially for new users and fixed hardware like the handhelds. Just works.
Not sure I've seen the same latency with installing things but I've also layered very little. Doing things the immutable way is definitely more challenging but I don't mind the challenge. I think I have more fun configuring than actually using my system.